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Tom's Tech Tips

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Don’t Repeat My Near Catastrophe

Every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant knows a laptop is not really a laptop. But sometimes a laptop isn’t even a laptop – it’s just a boat anchor. My new super-spiffy, NSA-grade, Cray UltraPricy came with two built-in hard drives. An SSD (solid state drive) and a regular spindle hard drive. The installation guru imaged Windows® 7 from the spindle drive and put that image on the SSD drive and left the spindle drive alone. He then built the new computer (software-wise) on the SSD drive.

For one month life was good. The SSD was faster than anything I’ve ever experienced on a computer. I was completing work before I even began it. Then one day my laptop started freezing up. Then it wouldn’t boot. Suddenly everything went south and the laptop became a boat anchor.

Apparently you can’t force a spindle image onto an SSD drive. They have different attributes, settings, requirements and diets (and all my data). The result of that mistake? The laptop crashed and it crashed hard, courtesy of an installation guru who was trying to save time by not-installing Windows “fresh.”

The first lesson for CLNC® consultants? Always have a good back-up of your data. The second lesson? Keep a list of your installed software, the installation disks and some way to access your software keys. The third lesson, there’s no shortcuts in software so don’t take the easy way out – build your software installation from scratch.

Lucky for me, we were able to reinstall enough of the software and all my data onto the spindle drive to get me working (at least until Windows Update started downloading and installing 164 “critical” updates). But now we’ve got time to rebuild the SSD drive from scratch and get me back to my “dream machine.”

I will tell you, my CLNC® amigos, all my software customizations were lost, but at least I still have my data. So make sure you’re properly backed up. Sometimes computers will exhibit some warning signs of imminent failure and sometimes they’ll just fail. Be prepared. Your legal nurse consulting business’s survival may depend on it.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

P.S. Comment and share your experiences with computer failures.

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*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.

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