computer horror story

Okay, now gather around people and let me tell you a little story about how trying to tinker with your PC before making a back-up disk can go horribly wrong. Several years back, around the dawn of the new millennium, I had myself a Gateway PC with Pentium II and a whopping 10 Gigabytes of storage space, which was considered a large amount until a little thing called Napster came around. After several years of using this machine, I had pretty much filled the hard drive to the brim with semi legal music and needed more space. Lo and behold, a former roommate of mine just happened to have a 40 GB Western Digital internal hard drive that was still in its original box that he was willing to sell to me for a pretty decent price. Since I did not want to erase any of my ill gotten Mp3 files, I bought it with plans to figure out how to install it on my own.

When I tried to install it, the Gateway’s BIOS system refused to recognize the new Hard Drive, and I ended up accidentally formatting my original hard drive instead. I pretty much ended up erasing everything in my hard drive, and had no way to get it all back since I had not even thought about making a backup disk. To make matters worse, I had some misplaced my Windows 98 installation CD, so I ended up having to buy the full version of Windows ME in order to get my PC running again.  The good news was, that my squeaky clean computer now ran better then ever, but I had to start my Mp3 collection from scratch.

How to backup your data

There are several different ways to back up your data: You can create a back up CD, you can save a back up version to an external hard drive or you can create a safety check point right on your Hard Drive. A back up CD is a good way to transfer your profile from one computer to another, and having a boot from CD back up is a good thing if you are deciding to mess around with your hard drive like I did. You can find the tools to make a backup CD/DVD in your Window’s system tool bar.   If you have an external Hard Drive where you like to store all your legally obtained media, you should also be able to save a snapshot of your computer to it (Sometimes, with just a push of a button). This is also a good option if you plan to open up your PC and tinker with it

Windows also has a system checkpoint option that is a good way to reverse any undesirable changes that you have made while trying to tweak your PC’s speed ( like accidentally disabling your sound card). If you do want to reverse the changes you made, simply go into your Window’s System Tools menu and click on the System restore option. One thing that you should know about the Windows system checkpoint option is that it might not have a current system checkpoint available unless you took the time to create one before you started to make any changes. Created a system checkpoint is pretty easy, and it should be done every time you decide that you want to tweak with your system.