Lord Herbert wrote on Jun 17
th, 2014 at 8:05am:
Whoaa! Sorry! My damn Firefox auto-spellcheck's out of order again!
Haha, good one
Lord Herbert wrote on Jun 17
th, 2014 at 8:05am:
'Live' CD? Croikey, I've never heard of it.
I'm not surprised - unless you're a techie kinda guy, you're unlikely to really think about such things. Basically, a "live" cd loads an operating system (OS) from the cd instead of the hard drive. That way, if you've lost windows on your hard drive, you can still still get into your computer. AFIK, computer shops and the like use live cds (souped up ones) when doing data recovery. And they charge for it

Steps are basically:
1. Download the ISO
2. Burn to cd
3. Put cd in drive
4. Restart computer
5. Watch in awe as it boots from the cd and lets you get to your stuff
Lord Herbert wrote on Jun 17
th, 2014 at 8:05am:
I'm not confident I can restore my stuff back onto my cleaned hard drive from my new external hdd. I've had lousy experiences with Backup programs. The best I ever had was Acronis ~ but then something went wrong with it and it wouldn't work any more.
As for backup software, one of the best I've encountered is called FreeFileSync. It runs on everything, is super fast and accurate, and I reckon even a luddite could use it

It won't help with data recovery (which I think is what you want), but as for backing your stuff up, it's great. Set it up, then run every couple of days. It lets me mirror work between my laptop, backup hdd and usb, keeping the most recent version of a document and copying it between the three. Just great.
Here's a link.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/Oh, as for restoring from your external hdd, if it's just documents, it's generally as simple as:
1. Open up hdd, find where your stuff is
2. Right click, click "copy".
3. Go find where you want your stuff to go
4. Right click, click "paste".
5. Voila.
Lord Herbert wrote on Jun 17
th, 2014 at 7:35am:
freediver wrote Yesterday at 10:27pm:
Quote:
but I'm not techno-savvy
Don't go anywhere near Linux. It is a nightmare.
As for this chap, I'd be interested to know how long ago his experience was, and which "distro" it was. I doubt it was Mint - any of the recent ones, say from 14 upwards - which was made with non-tach people in mind.
Lord Herbert wrote on Jun 17
th, 2014 at 7:35am:
I'm told that Mac is virtually fool-proof against viruses.
This is true. It's built from the same "stuff" as linux generally, but it's locked down to be idiot-proof.
Good luck!