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PC World August 21, 2007
by Steve Bass Original article at PC World web site
Four Steps to a Trouble-Free PC
Use a safety OS, download security updates, keep your drivers fresh, and–please–back up!I've been fixing Windows annoyances for more years than I care to remember. Now I'm going to fess up: Dumb, in-a-hurry, and just plain careless users--like me--often bring PC problems upon ourselves. Here's the good news: Four simple tricks can help keep your PC humming despite all your inadvertent efforts to destroy it.
Catch the Backup HabitI know you've heard this, but the smartest thing you can do is back up every day. Don't roll your eyes. It's not that big a deal, and I have a few easy ways you can do it. The strategy that works for me is to start with a full-image backup, do an incremental backup every day (as well as following any major product installation), and create a new full-image backup once a week. I use Acronis True Image 10 Home ($49.99) to back up my system's hard drive onto a 400GB Seagate Barracuda internal SATA drive ($112) that slides into a Addonics Snap-In SATA Mobile Rack ($26). Backing up to and restoring from an internal drive is considerably faster than doing the same things with an external USB drive. Once my full-image backup is in place, I click Operations, Schedule, Task To set a time to automatically back up just the files that change afterward. Unless I create lots of big files in a 24-hour period, the incremental backup doesn't take long. Since I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, I also do weekly backups to an external USB drive that I store at a neighbor's. Hard-drive expert Jon L. Jacobi prefers to back up all of the PCs on his LAN to a NAS box.
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