A few technical thoughts...

I ran across a rather revealing article on the Geek Squad that seems worthy of sharing - a lengthy and educational tale of a good organization going bad with the best of intentions, and a cautionary tale to any who value their privacy, their identity, and their finances.

What happens when you take your broken PC down to the nice PC shop for a fix? Just wondering, mind you... You sign a nice piece of paper releasing the nice shop from any/all liability (most especially for data lost, corrupted, or leaked), you leave your PC, and you come back a few days later.

Or...on a house call, a tech comes out, you leave them alone for a bit with your PC so as not to distract them as they put the magic smoke back in - they charge by the hour, after all. Ever hear of a "thumb drive"?

One of the fundamental tools of a techno-geeks trade, the thumb-sized devices can launch a complete operating system, a wide variety of software recovery and repair tools, references, private files, music, pictures, whatever you can put on a hard drive.

The thumb drive, like a good .45, is a tool for both good and evil - it depends on the use, intent, and the viewpoint of the observer. The nice man searching your HDD for your credit card and tax data (or anything else you might want to keep private) will be horribly saddened when that data he seeks just isn't there - conversely, you may be simply delighted that those pics of that drunken night in Bangkok won't be gracing the local town square...or the sad absence of your banking data on the better class of scam websites.

It may be boring, but watching while your PC is repaired has some benefits - that same thumb drive that rescues your hard disk can, in the hands of any competent tech, scarf up all kinds of interesting material.

Most tech are good folk...but prudence never hurt. 'Nuff said?

And when you care enough to give the very best - an external Hard Drive isn't such a bad thing either. A bit clunkier, but OH the capacity...my preferred strategy is to keep all my applications and the operating system on the disk that's in the machine - and all my data on the external, to the extent that I can...and then, back up regularly to non-volatile (CD/DVD) media.

Techno-rant ended.