It s a horrible feeling made up of equal parts fear, helplessness, and despair. I ve been there, as have most people with any computer experience, and I want to do everything possible to help you get past that feeling and salvage what you can.
System failures come in a variety of forms, with a variety of consequences.
The failure can be caused by anything, from a program unexpectedly closing to a complete system crash from which it takes days to recover. But they do happen. In this chapter, I ll try to share some of my experiences and show you some general techniques to minimize the risk of computer crashes, how to get your computer back on if they occur, and how to recover data you might have lost in the crash. I can t anticipate every problem that might occur, and this book isn t big enough for every fix you might need, so I ve included details about how to contact technical support services for any problems that I don t address here. You can take some preventative measures, such as regular cleaning, to keep your hardware functioning as well as possible.