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I’ve never had a hard disk crash (and I’m knocking on all the wood I can find as I say this). This is serious stuff. It can ruin a business, and at the very least cost a lot of money and time.

We’ve talked before about making backups and about the use of mirrored systems. There are other things you can do that warn of approaching disaster and/or help you easily recover from bad situations.

THE HARDWARE APPROACH

HDD Sheriff (www.jungsoftusa.com) comes in several configurations for Windows, each costing around $50 to $60. In operation it has the appearance of magic.

My favorite is the HDD Sheriff USB. This is a little memory stick that plugs into a USB port on Windows 98-and-up computers. Load the software into the computer, and from then on it stores the essential information needed to restore your computer to its pre-crash or freeze-up operating condition. You simply turn the computer off and then on again, and the Sheriff boots it up as if nothing has happened. You can also designate a key sequence as a “reset” and that will restore the computer to the status quo ante.

This is such a common problem that there ought to be a warning sticker on every computer sold. Because every programmer believes that his program is the only one worth running, and that certainly you will never want to dump it, little care is given to conflicts with other programs. Yet these conflicts are so common that one of my technical sources in Florida confesses that he has to wipe his hard drive clean about every six months and start over.

HDD Sheriff also comes as a small circuit card that plugs into the computer’s mother board, and a slightly more expensive version that also plugs into the mother board but protects a network from corruption. Sheriff uses about 5 percent of your hard drive to keep track of changes and the routines needed to eliminate those changes.

Using the reset or restart functions to take a system back to its more pristine condition has a built-in problem: namely that you might have wanted that new program in there. The Sheriff software permits a manual override by the user, to keep the new program in place.

THE SOFTWARE APPROACH

The new DiskAlert (www.diskalert.com) for Windows 2000 and NT takes a software approach, monitoring drives for the telltale signs of approaching failure. Before a drive fails it typically starts giving read failures to queries and has a slowing response time. At that point you can gut it out and hope for the best, but it’s really better to backup everything and get a new main drive.

DiskAlert costs $50 to cover one computer, $25 per machine for up to 20 computers.

A COUPLE OF TROUBLE-PREVENTING TIPS

Here are two easy tips to keep your system from hanging up when it needn’t and to make it run cleaner and faster:

The first is “defrag.” That’s short for defragmentation and is a built-in PC routine for pulling together fragments of programs and files so they are more readily accessible when called for. It not only speeds operation, but also cuts down the wear and tear on your hard drive. I know a corporate systems guy who comes in early and defrags all the company’s computers every morning. Check your system’s Help files for directions.

The second system saver is patience. Let the entire system load before you start typing. Sure it will take a minute extra, but leave it alone! Entering keyboard commands in the middle of a startup can cause problems.

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