well - you have to bear in mind that hard drives are a mechanical item with fancy electronic parts. At the end of the day, all mechanical parts fail eventually. That's not considering less frequent occurences like power surges which can kill electronics (eg the board on the hard drive). If you have no backup then you are taking a
big risk if the data on the drive is valuable!
Ideally you should back up the entire PC to a seperate hard drive - external drives are cheap enough nowadays, you could back up your entire drive to one of those and disconnect it when not in use.
A virus can't infect a disk that's not connected ...
Failing that, just back up the important data, you might even want to back that up to (decent quality) DVDs as well to make sure.
And as TheBoy said - and many years working on PCs for a living a few years ago confirmed - forget upgrading something as fundamental as an operating system. The phrase in this case being "
Feet of clay" - when you've been running a PC for a while it's had software installed and removed, files updated, all sorts of settings changed from standard - so an upgrade can work on one system but be very unstable on another - essentially there's no real way of knowing what condition the system was in before the upgrade. A clean installation (ie, back up all files and data, wipe hard drive and start all over again) is the only way to be certain as then you are going from a known good starting point ... it's a pain to do, but unfortunately experience (unless you get lucky) tends to show it's the only way.
It's a bit like using pattern cam cover gaskets on the omega instead of genuine Vx - as you said, live & learn
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Topic: PC issue Help!! (Read 3286 times)