The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Last week my desktop computer started acting funny. Over a few nights, games that my kids have been playing began to freeze up, and I noticed the same thing with a game I've been playing. I'd been stuck in one place for several months (I admit, I like to play video games, but I'm not very good), and last week I finally managed to finish the piece I had been stuck on. But I no sooner started a new level then the computer froze. I was not very impressed, especially when the same thing happened repeatedly. Trouble was obviously up somewhere. Digging high and low through the machine, the only thing I could find was a funny noise coming from my hard drive. The main hard drive on my machine is one I salvaged from a Dell computer I bought about five years ago. When I built the machine I have now, I simply salvaged this hard drive and installed it in the new machine. Luckily I also have a second hard drive, so after looking everywhere for the problem, I decided that I was simply going to have to delete everything from the second hard drive, install Windows on it, and start again. I hate doing things like this. It takes hours, and seems like a waste of an entire evening. I have an uncle who plays a lot of games and installs a lot of demo software and he insists on doing this about every six or seven months. His point is that Windows, over time, tends to get "bloated" as the registry files build up. It's a good point and these growing files will slow your machine down, so if you really want to speed things back up again, it's not a bad idea. Here are a few things to think about if you are interested in cleaning your hard drive off, or to protect yourself from a data loss. 1) Back up your important files and folders occasionally. If your hard drive happens to die, at least if it's backed up occasionally, you won't lose everything. With CD burners, you can store a lot of files in one place and CDs only cost around $1 each. 2) Make sure you have all of the CDs that you will need to re-install everything on your machine. CDs for your operating system, major software suites (like Office), CDs that contain your driver and program files for things like your video card, CD burner, scanner, printer, modem, webcam, etc. You will need it all. Make sure you have it before you begin. 3) Consider what you want to save and what you just want to dump from your hard drive. Music, ebooks, photos, videos, etc. all take up huge amounts of computer landscape and should be burnt off occasionally. Do they really need to go back on? 4) Make certain if you are installing a new hard drive that your old one has been wiped clean. Even then, I recently read an article about a guy who has made a hobby out of buying cheap used hard drives off of ebay and unerasing them using a simple, cheap piece of software. Apparently he has found over 5,000 credit card numbers and anything else you can think of. To me, it's not really worth the few dollars you'll make selling it. Take a hammer to it instead. Planning is all you can do. It's tough to remember to back up your data, but doing it occasionally is better than losing it all.
