A close call

I just went to switch on my desktop PC earlier this evening and was confronted with a nasty surprise - all my programs were crashing about 30 seconds - 1 minute after launching. I restarted several times but the same thing kept happening.

My first thought was 'virus' and a quick Google search (on the laptop) seemed to confirm my suspicions.

However, when I called my brother - the tech guru! - for advice, he thought it might be the memory and suggested I simply remove the memory modules and replace them again and see if that fixed it.

Which, I'm relieved to say, did fix it! Phew! I really didn't want to have to face a Christmas sorting out an infected hard drive!

But it does prove that sometimes the good old "give it a kick / drop it" technique for fixing things works for even the most advanced of modern technology!!

Network hard drive

While Dropbox is a nice simple solution for syncing files over the internet, I'm not sure it's really what I need. The biggest requirement I have is for files to be accessible from both our home computers. The need to access files over the internet is fairly minimal really.

So on this basis I'm now thinking that a network hard drive is the answer. In the price bracket I'm looking at (as cheap as possible really!), Freecom do a nice one which seems to be rated pretty highly. Apart from the operating systems and software, everything else - photos, music, documents, etc. could be stored on here and then simply accessed from either computer. And you can also configure it for internet access which would make Dropbox redundant anyway.