Progress... and minor technical issues

Hello, wise and gentle reader folk.

You'll be glad to know that things are moving along nicely on the current chapter; I found a way to jump-start things past the part I didn't like (no matter how many times I wrote that scene it ended up feeling flat, so I just went for 'Dawn does something crazy' for the opening bit, then backed up a few hours and started filling in the backstory and it all suddenly seemed a lot more interesting.
I'm always a tiny bit worried I'll lose people when I shift between time frames in a chapter, but I've done it several times before and you all seem fine with it, so I'll try to relax and just trust you.

There HAS been a thing where I hit a weird technical issue last night, as I tried to work on things. My venerable and beloved D630 laptop was flaking out in an odd way. Not sure if it was actually the computer's fault, or if it's coming from OpenWriter (a program that serves the purpose well enough, and is free (YAY!), but has certain nagging, glitchy things that bug me a little.)
Basically, last night I simply could not open any of my story files. They were there, I could see them, but clicking on them yielded nothing, and none of the menu-driven routes would do anything either.
That, obviously, is a pretty scary thing to have happen, though I do back things up to an external drive every couple of weeks.

And then, today, after the third reboot of the laptop, the files were suddenly right there, and everything was fine.
(Other than losing one full writing session, which is annoying)

So. Pondering my options, here.
One thing I'll definitely do is go back to my old, paranoid system of having all the story and notes files live on a pair of thumbdrives, which I'll swap back and forth frequently, so as to always have a very recent copy of the stories on something that is basically immune to hardware failure (mostly, since yes, thumbdrives can die too, but that's why there are two).

Other than that... I might go ahead and buy a word processor program.
I hate Microsoft Word, but I kind of love the old Works program. If I can find a version that will work on my machines, I'd love to go that route, though of course it'll sting a bit price-wise.
Still, something a little more reliable than Openoffice would be nice (There was a really maddening glitch during the Harmony chapter, and it's not the first time I've encountered it).

All right, just wanted to post an update on what's happening.
Hope to have something posted in the next couple of weeks.