Computer Illiteracy

This weekend was interesting as far as crises and challenges go. l thought I was going to get a rare day to putter around at home. It started out that way, but around 4:00 Saturday, Terry called me. He was on the way home, and he had a problem. He had both sermons for Sunday, plus his Sunday School lesson almost completely finished before Saturday. He was out and busy all day, but late in the afternoon he settled back into his office at the church in order to tweak his sermons and do some final studying.

His computer wouldn't work.

Windows wouldn't open at all, and he kept getting a "corrupt" message. He was nearly frantic. So he brought the thing home for me to work on, and he borrowed Matt's laptop. He had to reconstruct both sermons and his Sunday School lesson that night. No easy task, I can tell you.

Now, I'm not much of a tech person, but I do try to keep up with a few things when it comes to maintaining the equipment. I regularly run anti-virus scans and spyware scans. At least, I did it on my desktop. (That was before I got the incorruptible imac!) I also loaded anti-virus protection on Terry's laptop, but he never remembered to run it. If I got hold of the machine for a while, I'd run it, but it went with him almost everywhere, so I didn't get the chance often.

In truth, we don't know that a virus caused this malfunction. We just know it has some sort of a hard drive problem. I researched stuff on the internet and then I tried everything I could think of, but no success. Sunday afternoon we got several tech-minded men to try and help, but nothing worked. Finally, after church, one man got it running. But he refused to tell anyone what he did. He simply said that it was running for now, but there was no guarantee it would start up again the next time it was turned off. With that in mind, I sat in Terry's office after church Sunday night, downloading all of his files onto flash drives and CD's. Thankfully, we were able to get just about everything he has saved (but not back up) on his computer.

Of course this happened about sixteen months after we bought the laptop. Equally of course, the warranty ran out in March. Not sure what we're going to do, but it's obvious there are still some problems with it.

So I'm turning to you, dear friends. How good are you at maintaining the efficiency and life of your computer? Are you up on all the latest or do you flounder and hope you might be doing some good? What recommendations do you have for helping this not to happen again?