Dear Web Guy,
I just repaired my 2005 Dell 6400 computer instead of buying a new one to save money. It had crashed and I thought I would lose all my information but I took it to a Staples and they saved everything for about $250.
To backup and fix the old model, I went online and bought a new hard drive, a Toshiba, 1 TB for $65. I bought a new cord for $114 and a new 9-hour battery for $153, both from Dell.
Then, for travel, I got a new HP mini 210 from Verizon. I pay $40 a month for 5 GB of broadband to have Internet access wherever I go and a backup computer at a low fee.
I had to buy Microsoft Office for $120, and renewed my Norton Anti-Virus 360 Premier adding several computers to it.
I bought cloud space with HP and backed everything up on Flash Drives, AND on DVDs.
Round 2: The new hard drive broke with a lot of my new memory on it (I didn’t back up). The computer got another virus and the HP mini has all sorts of e-mail problems with prompts that say error.
How do I keep viruses from costing me time and money?
– PO’d in Detroit
Dear PO’d,
Buy a Mac. They cost less than what you spent and they don’t get viruses. But spend time on backup and maintenance to keep your computer for the long run.
Macs also have Time Machine, a built-in backup and a great part of the Mac OS X. This gives quite a bit of peace of mind. I have restored a computer via Time Machine after a serious water incident and can tell you that other than the gap from the last back up it was complete in its restorability.
Think of the time and money you’ll save not worrying or dealing with this if you have a Mac. You can buy a refurbished one from Apple at a good price.
Meanwhile, back up your work daily or at least weekly on Norton Anti-Virus 360 Premier. There’s 27 GB of free space. (Staples has a sale right now, $45 for one year, but there’s a $30 Rebate. $15 a year for laptop security is unheard of. Buy it through tomorrow at any Staples). Include all your laptops’ content on it and it will at least grab it for you regularly.
Then, back up on your own on flash drives, cloud storage Drop Box, a Seagate Hard Drive and DVDs. Have backups to the backups to the backups to the backups.
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