Sadly, my 6-year-old HP Pavilion laptop, which has been a reliable and helpful tool, has bitten the dust. A black screen, and single flashes from lights near the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys meant CPU failure. I’m writing this post on a borrowed computer.

On Monday I’ll get acquainted with the new machine, and (of course) Windows 10. Why Monday? Because part of the setup process will be data recovery from the corpse.

One lesson learned:  back everything up. Even though I have copies of my really important documents in “the cloud,” a whole lot of stuff that didn’t seem all that important (but is) exists only on the now inaccessible hard drive. Hopefully recoverable.

So get an external hard drive, set up a cloud account, and do regular backups. Especially when your machine is getting on — 3 years and older, I would think.