A funny thing happened to me on my way to part two of Gifts and Gadgets for 2007. I crashed my computer. See, it isn’t always you.

I’m neither surprised nor shocked that it happened. I have a machine on which I test all sorts of new and not yet ready for public release software. That way I get experience with new products and can let you know something about them when they are released. The trouble is after a while all those alpha and beta released and prototype hardware drivers introduce enough instability to require a fresh clean operating system install.

What did surprise me is that the system could not find any of the recovery check points it should have been keeping. Those let you “roll back” system changes to a prior and, hopefully, more stable point in time. That can often solve problems short of a full reload. I’m not sure why this happened. My computer was a new Dell, shipped last spring with the system pre-loaded. It’s hard to believe Dell would have turned the feature off. Which means I did it by mistake or something else happened.

Anyway, my thought is to advise you to check, if you have a Windows XP or Vista system, and make sure your automatic restore points option is turned on. I don’t know if Macintosh OS systems have something similar but they probably do. Better let the system take a little time and disk space to record these restore points, and do full backups unless you have another back-up strategy. That way you won’t find yourself working late into the night reloading all the software you need to record the screen images you need for Gifts and Gadgets part two!