I took the machine apart this morning, got rid of some dust, jiggled a few wires--and now it starts up.
First thing I'm going to do is get an external hard drive for backups. For a couple years I was pretty diligent about backing important files up to dvd-rw's, but it's a pain and I got lazy. Connecting a USB hard drive isn't such a pain.
I've been considering getting a new computer anyway; that bullet I just avoided might be what gets me over the hump.
But I'm still getting an external hard drive.
I use a 400 GB external drive for the monthly backup. The education files are the ones that change most often and these are all in one folder that gets synchronized with my thumbdrive (taken with me every day).
ReplyDeleteSo I have a daily (or two, if I leave the drive at work) backup of the files most likely to change and then a monthly backup of all files. Seems to work well.