Computer advice request - hard drive backer-uppers
About a month ago, my parents' computer crashed. They turned it on in the morning and it just didn't work. The tech people came and looked at it, and they said the hard drive was fried. The data recovery company is still working on salvaging it.
Our computer is the same model, bought on the same day from the same store. We basically purchased two identical computers, except that theirs used Windows XP and ours was XP Pro so that Twotone could use the Japanese language option.
This morning, I started to run World of Warcraft for a quick before-leaving-for-work elemental-slaying session...and the screen went black. The computer started to reboot, then said there was a hard drive error.
Panic time.
The computer rebooted, but it was slow. Not slo-o-o-ow, but sufficiently laggy to be noticeable. WoW was suddenly choppy. Not good.
We've been having intermittent errors ever since, though the computer is thankfully still running, with all content seemingly intact. I think it's time to get some kind of back-up device for the hard drive, in case a) the whole thing crashes in the next while, or b) we end up needing to get a new system to fix the problem.
I've got no experience with the things, so I'm hoping you folks might! If anyone has any advice for backer-upper-thingies, we'd appreciate it muchly. There's a new Best Buy near the office that I'm leaning toward stopping by on the way home, so if you've got input, the sooner the better - please!
(More people read the missus' journal, so she'll probably update with a similar plea for advice in the near future.)
Our computer is the same model, bought on the same day from the same store. We basically purchased two identical computers, except that theirs used Windows XP and ours was XP Pro so that Twotone could use the Japanese language option.
This morning, I started to run World of Warcraft for a quick before-leaving-for-work elemental-slaying session...and the screen went black. The computer started to reboot, then said there was a hard drive error.
Panic time.
The computer rebooted, but it was slow. Not slo-o-o-ow, but sufficiently laggy to be noticeable. WoW was suddenly choppy. Not good.
We've been having intermittent errors ever since, though the computer is thankfully still running, with all content seemingly intact. I think it's time to get some kind of back-up device for the hard drive, in case a) the whole thing crashes in the next while, or b) we end up needing to get a new system to fix the problem.
I've got no experience with the things, so I'm hoping you folks might! If anyone has any advice for backer-upper-thingies, we'd appreciate it muchly. There's a new Best Buy near the office that I'm leaning toward stopping by on the way home, so if you've got input, the sooner the better - please!
(More people read the missus' journal, so she'll probably update with a similar plea for advice in the near future.)