Earlier this month I had the misfortune of having one of my hard drives pack up on me. Actually it didn’t fail, but I had negligently allowed it to get full up. I first noticed a problem when my files started appearing in reverse alphabetical order in Explorer. Having been working with computers for the last twenty or thirty years I was able to remedy the situation myself, but it involved deleting a lot of programs that I didn’t need (oh how we accumulate useless programs!), repairing my operating system and then finding my address book and Outlook Express folders, all of which had gone missing.

Why am I telling this story? Just to illustrate how, even someone who has been working with computers for so long can become complacent. Check your hard drives regularly and if necessary get rid of some of the accumulated and never-used programs that are there.