I don’t know about the end of the world - though my son keeps pointing out CERN won’t get round to colliding things for a while (in fact they are ahead of schedule and may even start today!) - but I had a more serious worry myself.

I few nasty beeps like a disk in pain, windows “hard error” messages and I had to power off the PC yesterday. Today it tried to boot from the CD as there weren’t any hard disks

I took the PC apart waggled some wires and I’m typing on it now.

Maybe we should all take it as a hint to BACK UP. The trouble is removable media is always so far behind fixed disks. Just when CD’s seemed a good option HDD’s leaped up to the 10’s of GB. Even with a DVD writer how am I supposed to back up 40G?

I actually have some removable drives - biggest spare I’ve got is about 10G though. I guess it’s time for a usb hard drive. I noticed when doing the weekly shop that Tesco (can you remember when the thought of a supermarket selling hard disks was insane?)  had a 150G USB drive for about £50. Be cheaper still on ebay I guess - but harder to return if it’s faulty.

Can you remember when buying a spare hard disk for backup would have seemed insane?

I’ve just checked out PC World online. What’s the difference between Desktop External Hard Drives and Portable External Hard Drives - apart from one gets 500GB & the other only 150 for abou the same cash?