No matter what, there comes a time when your system messes up…whether due to user issues, viruses, malware, hardware, or even a power surge.  Whatever the cause, it creates a frustrating situation that can often snowball into an even larger problem if you aren’t careful in your handling of the inital problem.

After nearly 20 years of troubleshooting, I’ve seen just about everything…until tomorrow, when something completely new will show up.  Anyone claiming to have all the answers is a bit on the naive side when it comes to technology.  As technology advances, the problems change, morph, multiply.  That is why God made the Internet…to find solutions to the problems if your system messes up.  Even with all my experience, the best advice I can give you is ‘Google It!’.  Someone, somewhere probably had the same problem you are experiencing and found a solution.  The problem is, sometimes their solution is to format your hard drive and start over…I don’t call that a solution…I call that a last ditch option.  Maybe it is due to my Swedish heritage that makes me so stubborn, but I want to figure out WHY something isn’t working.  This is probably the reason I can’t make a living off my consulting business…I hyper-focus on solving a problem, spend way too much time on it, and can’t charge my client the actual time spent…oh, well…at least I beat the busted system!

Here’s some basic pre-requisites to make your system screw-ups not so life threatening:

• Have an external USB hard drive to backup your system
• ALWAYS have the UBCD4W…
• Use DIXML to make an image of your hard drive
• Use and run an anti-virus and anti-malware program (Microsoft Security Essentials & MalwareBytes)
• Install Recuva on your computer BEFORE you need it…

When you need to troubleshoot, make sure you have a backup of your system.  If not, boot using the UBCD4W and copy your important files off onto your external hard drive.  Murphy’s Law says that if you don’t, you will lose your files…no matter what the inital problem was!