It’s amazing how quickly we get spoiled by improvements in our computing. I’m in the process of downloading ZoneAlarm’s free firewall over a dialup connection - 48 minutes at 3 KB/sec. - which would take roughly 25 seconds at home. Some of you remember the days of processors with clock speeds measured in KHz. My first “modern” computer was an IBM Aptiva with a 60 MHz Pentium, 500 KB of RAM, and a 500 MB hard drive. I thought I was hot stuff, let me tell you! Now I have RAM that would hold the entire contents of that hard drive - twice - my P-4 is fifty-three times as fast as that Pentium, and I’ve been thinking about adding a larger hard drive; this one’s only 240 times the size of the old one. I would probably go insane composing one Word document (v.3.1) on that old Aptiva, which only a few years ago I thought amazing.

My point is, we get spoiled quickly - and sometimes we get careless, as well. Spoiled is OK, but careless will always bite you on the butt eventually. Today I walked into my office, sat down, plugged my USB drive into the port, clicked on the icon, and Windows XP told me the drive wasn’t formatted. Well, it was yesterday. I have programs to help me investigate things like that, but guess where they are? And of course the pertinent CD isn’t here. Why would I need it at my day job? So when I get home this evening I’ll have to try to diagnose the malady, if I can’t use the drive on the home box. (It’s always possible that there’s a driver problem on the computer at work.)

The worst thing would be if somehow the drive got scrambled, which can happen if you unplug it improperly. I don’t think I did it without Windows telling me it was OK first, but sometimes we do things without thinking. If that happens, I’ll just re-format it and move on because everything on the drive was backed up day-before-yesterday. *Grin.*

How much are you trusting that new toy - whatever it may be - and when was your last backup?