The Passing of a PC

How sad it is to lose someone or something you love. Your Mom. Your spouse. The kids. The dog. Your business. That just happened to a friend of mine. At least figuratively.

She brought me her laptop because she kept getting "the blue screen of death" and her computer would reboot. Seems the hard drive had been making this clicking noise for a while. She planned to have me look at it, but hey - it's her business computer. She needs it every day to keep her books, manage her schedule and basically keep her life moving along smoothly. She couldn't afford to be without it for a day.

On Monday it started giving her the BSOD every couple of hours. Yesterday it started happening more frequently. Last night it gave one final BSOD and the computer went silent. No reboot. No blue screen. Nothing. She brought it to me this morning in a box with some cables and an external hard drive and said "can you save any of my stuff?"

Like an idiot I asked her why, if she has this external hard drive, doesn't she have a backup. She told me she had tried to create a backup, but it slowed her computer down too much. I asked her why she just didn't set it up to run at night. She said she didn't know how. Now her precious laptop is laying unresponsive on me work table.

OK, I know the backup program provided with Windows isn't exactly intuitive. Unless, of course, you have XP Home which doesn't come with a backup program. But certainly you know someone who can provide some assistance. There are simple backup programs available for $50 or less (I recommend Acronis True Image Home 10). You can even do a simple drag and drop to a flash drive (also called a memory stick or ump drive), and external hard drive, or - if you have it - another computer on your home or office network.

The biggest hurdle Windows throws at you is that you don't always know where to find these files. Some of the most important files, like your Outlook calendar, contacts, and email, is actually hidden! So you have to find the right and save it. (our FAQ archive has an article on how to do this - check it out).

Other important programs like QuickBooks, TurboTax and others keep their files in unique locations. So it's critical to know where these files are located. Some programs allow you to save their data files in locations of your choosing when you install the program. Some will also offer you the "save as..." option for the data file. One caveat: if you save files in locations other than the program's default, make sure you and anyone else using these data files knows the location of the coffect file.

So how do you back up your critical data?