Backing Up

Backing up your important data on a DVD on a regular basis

means you can walk into any electronics store, walk out with a

cheap new notebook, and be up and running again within a

couple hours. If you run a business, are in the process of writing

a novel, or have other information that you need to back up

every time you use the computer, there are two more choices.

One is to buy a cheap JumpDrive (a USB memory stick with four

or eight GB of storage) and copy your most frequently used data

onto it whenever you’ve made substantial additions. The trick, of

course, is to keep the JumpDrive in your pocket when you aren’t

using it and not the USB port, where it could walk off with the

whole laptop. 

The other option is to sign up with a remote

backup service that uses the Internet combined with software on

your computer to incrementally backup every change you make.

Of course, it means another password to remember and another

monthly bill. The poor man’s version of online backup is to

simply create a free account at Yahoo!, Google Gmail or MSN

Hotmail, and e-mail yourself attachments on a regular basis.

Moving beyond the hardware, the most frequently

encountered laptop problems are due to software. This situation

isn’t unique to laptops, as a profusion of software is equally as

bad for desktop PCs. A huge number of laptops are replaced

because they’ve slowed down so much they’re barely usable.

Laptops don’t get slower with age, the clock that ticks along a

billion or so times a second to drive the digital brain of the

laptop never changes speed. Laptops get slower when they are

overloaded with software or attacked by malicious programs.

The new and often unwanted software gives the laptop more and

more to do until it can barely finish anything.

If your laptop came with a factory rescue DVD or CD, and

it hasn’t gotten scratched up, you can always run the recovery

software to restore the laptop to the exact state it was in when it

was new out of the box. Of course, it didn’t have any of your data

or software on it when it was new out of the box, so you better

have a perfect backup before taking what technicians call the

“nuke and pave” approach.