If you have an old laptop that starts making ominous, clicking noises, don't wait for it to get better. It won't. And don't put off making backup copies of your important files, even if your computer isn't complaining.
My cousin in Florida learned these lessons the hard way last week. And if I had done the smart thing and insisted that she fix or replace her old machine the day she first mentioned the problem, I could have spent my last afternoon of vacation sitting on the beach instead of replacing a crashed computer - a pastime that long ago lost its charm.
First, a word about failing computers. Almost every computer will expire some day. I have a colleague who flogged an XT clone from the mid-1980s right up to the millennium, and retired it only when he realized it couldn't do the World Wide Web - but that's the exception.
Sometimes failures happen without warning. Over the years, I've had a few motherboards (the computer's main circuit board) snuff themselves without so much as a bleep. But with older machines, the most common cause of failure is the hard drive - which not only stores all your data but also has to be working in order to load the operating system when you turn the computer on.
If you have a machine that's four years old or more and you get strange error messages when you start the machine - or, like my cousin, you hear the hard drive clicking repeatedly before the computer loads the operating system - it's time for a new drive or, if your PC is old enough, a new computer.
Should you be lucky enough to get a balky computer running, don't shut it off till you've backed up your important data. You can always reinstall software, but if you lose important documents, financial records, music, photos - or, in my cousin's case, a massive recipe file - you could be facing disaster.
There are a variety of ways to back up your hard drive, but the easiest by far is to buy an external hard drive that plugs into a USB or FireWire port. Starting at $100 or so for 150 gigabytes of storage or more, these devices are about the size of a paperback book and represent an incredible bargain.
If you really want to be secure, buy two portable units and keep one backup in a safe-deposit box, or just store it in a safe place somewhere away from your main PC so it won't get stolen, flooded out or burned up in a disaster.
