Uh-oh. In that case, I think I may have made a terrible mistake. The following will be my attempt to accurately illustrate my actions since purchasing my first few BTC earlier this year.

After buying about 5 BTC from localbitcoin.com, I borrowed a laptop in order to make my own wallet and store it on a flash drive, since I don't own a computer. The bitcoin-qt client was downloaded to the laptop, synced, and I sent my BTC to that wallet. Then I copied the qt client to my flash drive,  'backed up' the wallet.dat file - saved it in another folder on the same flash drive and named it "CHEESE.dat" (don't ask why). Please note that I didn't know about any info stored inside of %appdata% - or that it even existed (which is stupid of me if you look at my post history). I haven't made any transactions since that time. That laptop I borrowed has since been returned and wiped.

In summary, I have the bitcoin-qt client along with my CHEESE.dat file on a flash drive, and I have synced the qt client on other computers and tried replacing the wallet in %appdata% with my CHEESE.dat file (I renamed it wallet.dat once I moved it into %appdata%) - still 0 BTC. Is there any hope to recover the lost BTC?

Thank you for your help in advance.
P.S. I am planning on buying a laptop in the near future to avoid this problem.