RIP hard drive: a cautionary tale

It's been almost a year since I switched from PC to Mac. My Mac friends thought they were successful in their peer pressure, but really it was for one reason alone - fear of viruses.

My PC was slowly rendered inoperable over a period of about a month early last year. At first it just ran more slowly. Then I started getting so many pop-ups that I could not start new emails without interruption. I had the latest Norton antivirus software which updated daily; I had spyware, adware, and geeky friends.

After about 3 weeks a virus disabled the cd burner. Weird! Then, my USB ports were disabled, meaning my mouse no longer worked. After a day of trying to save files just using my keyboard, which is like getting dressed in the dark at someone else's house, I borrowed a serial port mouse from a friend and tried to email my most important files elswhere. Then, my ISP shut me down. I was a risk to other users!!!

When it was way too late, I got advice like "don't use IE" - use Netscape, etc. I had said geeky friend come over and try to retrieve what info he could from the hard drive - such as 10 complete web sites, many many digital images, resume, etc. The last time I had that upset, churning feeling in my stomach was when I arrived at work at a dot com and the doors were locked...

After several hours of trying and failing, geeky friend said, "Let's go to the Apple store". I was rendered helpless by the churning feeling and agreed. In less than 20 minutes I had a brand new Mac mini. Since then I have been pretty much in a state of bliss. AND virus-free. I'm not saying Mac is the only answer. I'm just saying, you don't need a geek score of 60% to know you should back up your stuff. I was lucky - last week another friend got the data off the drive and put it on DVD's for me - it had something like 247 different viruses. Unfortunately, the drive died - shorted out or met a similar end - while he was finishing up.

RIP, my little hard drive.