Fortunately the fiancé borrowed me his spare portable, while some similar event in the past taught me about keeping frequent backups of my works. Except the major part of these are locked in the firewire external disk, and on this computer the firewire connection doesn't work for some reason. I can't use the W2K-box as a gate because the external disk is formatted in HFSplus filesystem.
And guess where are many of the things I need?
*kermitface*
Next step: keep backups that could be actually retrieved in a sensible way ¬_¬
Anyway, fortunately this portable has Photoshop on it, and I was able to finish some of the works in progress I saved in haste on the USB key when I had a clue of the impending doom.
--JK