Sunday, May 5, 2013

PC Breakdown: The 2 Basic What To Do's for Non-Techies

 Not a computer geek or you're just a plain house buddy?

Computers breaking down such as hardware failures are a real serious threatening experience if you're not a PC-drenched individual. In the Philippine setting where most people consider PC trouble shooting as a skilled endeavor, one has also to set some personal attributes to consider to enable basic of the basics so you'll know what to do when your PC breaks down. Afterall, when a PC breaks down, the major question that arises is "will I get to retrieve my files again?". For most who just sit and facebook all day, that is not the main issue but rather, the question of  "how do I get to make my PC work again without the hassles?" Well, it would also be a big plus to consider both "retrieving your files" and "making the PC work again" without the hassles. 

From a non-techy idea from yours truly, who only knew how to 'troubleshoot my own ware from the basic point of view' which is software based and backing up. The best thought that comes is not really being able to repair your pc as a non-certified pc builder but rather getting ready for the worst--from the basic thought of what to do's. So, what are these steps? The following below are the basics:

Back-Up Your Files

Considering if you only bought your pc today, since most people are already using Windows 7, the very first thing to do is back up your drive with a system image. To get ready for backup, you must make sure that your system drive has the a good free space to allocate for the size of the back up. You can either save your 'system back up image' to your local drive, which is not the safest thing to do if hard drive failure is concerned, or save it to an external drive like a flash disk or a blank DVD disk. For DVD disks, you would have to choose the 'dual layer' variants which have bigger space at 8 GB than the normal single layers at 4.7 GB space. Why dual layer DVD? If you don't have blue-ray drive on your system yet, then you might have a DVD drive. CD-rom drives are out of the question since most writable CDs can only accommodate 700mb of space. Windows backup images would most likely be sized at 4GB above depending on the point of when you did your back because installed software and other space chugging driver installations would take up also the space. If you have an external drive then you don't have to look for DVDs anymore. There are also 8 GB to 64 GB flash disks on sale at your nearest tech store if you dont have an external hard drive on hand.

For details on Windows back up, you can see it all here on this page here. 

Saving Your Files on the Cloud

There are many free cloud drive services on the net today. First of those is Google Drive which offers 5 GB of free space for you to use. It even makes you use of a client software that makes you save your file on your local drive and at the same time being saved on the cloud. Dropbox, Google Drives nemesis for this kind of service has the same drive capacity with Google Drive at 5 GB while Windows with the recent release of its Windows 8 platform has offered its own cloud service, Skydrive, which offers 7 GB of free cloud space. It has the same client based system that makes you save on the local drive and back it up on the cloud. Whichever you may choose, you have a safe haven for your documents and files which are very vulnerable even with today's external drives and flash disks.

In my experience, I have different Google drive accounts according to what type of files I saved. I have a particular account for my music files, another account for my personal documents, and another account for my computer games. Just to make sure that I no longer have to carry big chunks of cds along if I transfer from one place to another.

With an internet connection, you can just have your files locally to a drive with the need to carry a bunch of load with your files in it. Plus, you don't have to worry about losing your files in case of power surges and other accidents that may destroy your PC.

I hope you find this article helpful for your daily computing as it makes use of some easy steps on how "not to lose your files".




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