Re: About Windows XP Home

Whohohooo, amusing stories about other people's computer misery.. hehehe.

A few simple steps:
- When you buy a new computer, ASK those recovery discs, or, create them from the manufacturer's pre-installed proggies. Ask the guy in the computer retailer to help you with it.
- First thing to do with your new computer... wipe ALL of the harddisk. And after that, restore it from the recovery discs. If that does not work, you WILL be able to claim warranty. The manufacturer should provide you with a working product. If he provides recovery discs or a way to order or create them, that should work, too.
So now you have a new working computer with a working set of restore discs. Don't forget to copy those restore discs to new fresh media after two years. A few extra media are not expensive, so, why not make an extra copy, right now.

Okay... this is the perfect world... Let's say, you got a computer from a techie friend.. There's only that computer, nothing more.

Get an external harddisk (USB) immediately. Get harddisk imaging software immediately. Most of such progams come with a bootable CD which will let you restore your harddisk from backup. THAT'S important. To be able to restore a backup when your XP trashed itself. All programs can backup, but... will you be able to restore?
- if you can, replace your computer's hard disk drive with an empty one, and test it. if the test fails, just put back the original hard disk drive.
Now discipline yourself. Make backups regularly, for example once a month, and, just before you install new software. Retain some history. Don't use that USB disk for anything else. Keep it in a safe place, away from your computer. And don't forget to make a spare copy of the bootable CD which you use for restoring.

Okay... again, a perfect world... I'm sorry for that. Let's say, you got a computer for free, from someone who used this one for years, and got another one.

You accept a computer for free... It means, you accept another's trash. That could be a good solution, for you... Even if you don't wanna spend anything on a computer, you can still do some things to safeguard your data and make image backups of that hard disk drive, and the necessary tooling is always available somewhere in the internet.
First: if your harddisk is in one partition, split it in two partitions with partition resizing software.
Use a boot CD (which can be downloaded here) or floppy to boot your machine. Then use a harddisk imaging tool to backup your first system partition onto the second partition. If you can, create chained backup files which would fit on a cdr or dvdr. You can burn the images on DVD, in case your hard disk drive itself would fail.

Okay... again, a perfect world. Hahaha..... Let's say, you didn't do ANY of what's stated above....

That's STUPID. I'm sure that comp was very important to you, and that life as you knew it has ceased to exist, because your computer has crashed.

Why people regularly refresh the oil in their car's engines?

...and if they can't do that by themselves, why do they pay someone else to do it for them?

I'm off, reading the next forum of sorry crash stories.
hahahaha lmao