I have never had my own personal hard drive fail.  However, this past year both my roommate and girlfriend had hard drive failures.  In fact, my girlfriend’s hard drive has failed twice in the past year.  In both scenarios, every file was lost.  Pictures, school documents, and more were gone forever.  And because hard drives are not indestructible, this failure could happen to you.  Because of this everyone should prepare for this potential incident with three simple steps.

1. Back up your files regularly

If there are files that you just can’t live without, you should make sure they are backed up.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  You could buy an external hard drive and schedule daily/weekly backups.  You could also burn your files to CDs (or rewriteable CDs). 

My favorite solution, however, is online backups.  Using a program called Mozy (only available for windows currently), my computer backs up my files whenever I am idle.  It’s a free or pay service, depending on how many gigs of files you want backed up.  All you have to do is configure it once, and it becomes automated thereafter.

2. Monitor the status of your hard drive

I was reading the latest issue of Time Magazine, which had a nice feature on the state of the American K-12 education system.  One point struck me: many students today are still being asked to focus on memorizing, rather than manipulating, information.  In other words, teachers are asking students to memorize facts such as names and dates that are easily available on Google or other internet search engines.

Why are students being taught this way?  Standardized testing is one key reason.  Teachers are held accountable by means of standardized tests, and these standardized tests are mostly fact-regurgitation.

Some facts are very worthwhile to memorize.  However, Time points out that dates and isolated concepts are not easily retained.  Furthermore, when these facts are easily available on the internet, and there seems to be a computer within fifty feet of anywhere in the US today, it doesn’t seem very useful to make memorizing these dates and isolated concepts a requirement to pass a test required to graduate from high school.  I would argue it is much more important to teach students how to understand these facts rather than retain them.  Understanding is what the workforce and our country as a whole needs today, not retention.

I anticipated great things from Microsoft in their upcoming operating system: Windows Vista.  I had heard rumors of great features, a beautiful looking interface, and increased reliability.  Plus, Microsoft was building on Windows XP, which in my opinion, is an excellent operating system.  Furthermore, with increasing competition from the Mac OS and various distributions of Linux, Microsoft had a huge incentive to try to hit a home run with Vista.

Yet from the looks of it, Microsoft is dropping the ball.  Rather than improve upon XP, Microsoft has made Vista into something completely different.  For one, there are FIVE different versions of the operating system.  That spells total confusion for the average consumer.  Does the average consumer know whether they want the “Aero Glass Interface,” or whether they want “Remote Desktop?”  I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of people buying a version of Vista that has too many - or too few - features compared to what they want.

I found this video on the internet this morning and thought gimme-five’s readers would enjoy it.  The video is of two high school football teams: Plano East and John Tyler.  With three minutes to go, Plano East was down 41-17.  The game is incredible… and so is the commentary.