Some tips for utilizing your external hard drive as a back-up drive include:

1. Always store your back-up drive in a separate location from your laptop. If you keep the drive in your laptop case, and your laptop is stolen, your external hard drive will go along with it. This can be especially bad if you have private information stored on the external drive, as it is usually the first place criminals will look!

2. When purchasing your drive, keep in mind what you will want to store on it. If you have a large amount of documents, and no media or photographs, then a smaller drive will probably suit your needs. However, if you plan on storing your music library, photographs, and videos, then you should consider purchasing a larger drive. If you cram up your external hard drive to its fullest potential, you will risk it crashing. Remember, and external hard drive is still a hard drive, so it can crash just like a computer!

3. Update your drive regularly! It is pretty useless to buy an external drive and then find that you are too lazy to backup your computer on a regular basis. You won’t need to update your external every time you make a change on the internal drive (unless the change is very important). To be safe, it’s beneficial to update your drive on a specific day of the week on a regular basis.

4. If you have tons of media, you may want to consider splitting your stuff up onto various hard drives. You can have one for video, photos, documents, music, etc. This way, you can keep well organized even though you have a ton of files. Additionally, most computers are able to accept multiple USB drives simultaneously, so you can essentially hook up your entire world all at once!

Start Windows In Safe Mode In Versions 95, 98, Me, And Xp

In Safe mode or safe, only minimum drivers are loaded to start the operating system, including a Standard VGA driver in 16 colors instead of the default graphics card. Not only serves to diagnose computer problems, but also lets you install and uninstall programs, edit the registry and delete files, viruses or spyware that the normal mode for some reason we can not. You see the look of the desktop has changed, this is due to the low resolution.

The most common way of accessing the Safe mode is using the F8 key. To do this restart your computer (if we wanted to remove a virus or spyware is better off, wait about 30 seconds and then back on), when you start Windows must press the F8 key repeatedly until we see a menu. We may not go to the first, but do not despair for it, with a little practice you get. On some computers that does not work and instead we must press F8 and hold down the control key. while turning the computer is rebooted or until you exit the menu, in which the arrows on your keyboard will select, depending on the operating system: Safe Mode, Safe Mode, Safe Mode.
In Windows 2000 and XP, we are able to start Safe Mode with network, allowing us to use online tools to scan the PC.
98/ME/XP operating systems allow us to enter the Safe Mode using the System Configuration Utility (in Windows 2000 may be initiated only if you have previously installed the utility of any previous operating systems.), for which we will follow the following steps:

Windows 98/Me
On the Start menu, select Run, type msconfig and click OK.
On the General tab put pressure on the Advanced option.
On the next screen, as shown in the picture, we enable Enable Startup Menu, after which press OK. Leave a message asking if you want to reboot, pressing on Yes, and the computer will start in Safe mode.
We must not forget to perform the inverse operation to restart in normal mode.

Windows XP
On the Start menu, select Run, type msconfig and click OK.
Select the BOOT.INI tab.
As the image, enable / SAFEBOOT. If we are to enable your Internet connection is also the option of the arrow, Red
After OK, we get a message asking if you want to reboot. Then press OK.
We must not forget uncheck the above when we want to start in normal mode.