make a back up disc for your important stuff.

We had a crash a couple of years ago...my powerpack burned up, literally,
and it fried all my circuits including my harddrive. It was not retreivable.

Luckily that computer was new, only 4 months old, and I hadn't saved much on it... I still had my old Sony Viao which held my important things. I did lose emails however, and some photos.

So with this Dell, I was doing CD back ups on my files. But we just bought a
back-up hard-drive on sale at CompUSA and are now using that. It does more, and has 250 gig capacity and gives a more complete save. We have everything on it, incase of some catastrophe here on this unit. You only need one big crash to teach that painful lesson! Since I store alot of data to help people with, I have to be this way now. And the new digital photos, are safer with this back up. If you download them off the camera and not print them,
then they can all be lost forever--if you don't have a good back up.
It is not hard to run the back up... we managed it okay. (we are not that swift with computers). The router software for the DSL was much harder to install.