How to Cope with the Sudden Death of Your PC
From the Random Coincidences File: one of my desktop PCs died the same day as Osama bin Laden. Good riddance to the latter; a moment of silence, please, for the former.
Both deaths were outta-the-blue shockers. But the demise of my PC was definitely more mysterious. I'd like to share the circumstances with you, and some lessons learned, in the hopes that you'll be prepared in the event of your own shocker.
This particular PC runs 24/7. When I attempted to access it Sunday, I found myself staring at a black screen. The system was on and running, but non-responsive. When I rebooted, it failed to get past the BIOS splash-screen. I couldn't even get into the BIOS; the system wasn't recognizing any keyboard input. Uh-oh.
I'll spare you the gory details of what happened next. Suffice it to say, the system is toast, and I've yet to figure out what's wrong or how to fix it. Short-term, I need to rescue my data and get back to work.
This situation offers plenty of teachable moments:
1. Before you do anything else, Google it. Weird error message? Outlook won't open hyperlinks? System stuck at the BIOS splash-screen? Whatever problem you're experiencing, there's a 98% chance someone else has encountered the same thing. Make your Google searches as specific as possible -- "HP s5360f stuck at splash screen," for example -- and there's an excellent chance you'll find a discussion -- and perhaps even a fix -- somewhere online.
2. Take a deep, deep breath. I had moments of real panic when I realized my PC was done for. It contained some mission-critical data, along with some personal stuff that would be painful to lose. It's easy to descend into madness, tears, bargaining, and other stages of grief -- but take time for a little perspective. It's just a computer. It's just data. It may take time and money, but data can almost always be recovered, even when the hard drive is seriously trashed. So my advice is to walk away, find a way to relax, and then come back to face the problem with a clear head.
3. For heaven's sake, make backups! I know: "Duh!" But stop and ask yourself what would happen if, say, Navy SEALS killed your hard drive tomorrow. Or made off with your laptop. Or fire-bombed your office. Would you be sufficiently prepared? Unless you're combining full local backups with online backups of your critical data, the answer is no. Don't put this off until it's too late. Once you have a foolproof backup strategy, a dead PC is little more than an inconvenience. Need help? Here's how to learn the basics of PC backups.
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