The subscribers have spoken! Direct e-mail it is, by a landslide. Hope your e-mail clients don't foul it up too much. If it's just too much to handle, my home page will be archiving Web-ready versions of the newsletter soon after the newsletters are mailed out. And there's always eGroups or ListBot as an alternative. Let me know how this issue looks.

This first issue of the newsletter – I don't even have a catchy name for it yet – has been delayed terribly, and I apologize. The story behind its delay isn't too long, and is a pretty fair cautionary tale in its own right.

I've devoted a great deal of space in my Web site to the idea of backing up data: keeping copies on some sort of removable disks in case disaster strikes and melts your computer into slag. Of course, since I've given all of this advice, I've been the first one to take it, right? Rrrright. Actually, I have backups of almost all my critical applications either on CD, floppy disk, or on a second hard drive (in a folder cleverly named "Backup"). But it had been over a year since I had gone through my documents and miscellaneous files and backed them up to disk. Resumes, important correspondence, financial info, even the raw text files for my Web pages, none had been backed up to disk in over a year. So, one October weekday afternoon, I bought a box of floppy disks, parked them beside my computer, and left to watch something edifying on the tube – probably "Whose Line Is It Anyway" or something equally uplifting. The box of disks sat unused over the weekend. The idea was to transfer all of my critical documents to floppy disk, since the documents are small enough to fit on floppies, and floppies are the ubiquitous storage media for modern PCs. No matter whether I had to use a computer at work, a friend's machine, or even a rental at Kinko's, I could be confident that I could retrieve and work with the documents on floppy disk on just about any machine.

Well, Monday night came along, the TV was dark, my wife was deep into her book, and my conscience was nagging at me. I trundled into the room we use as an office (and library, and workout center, and "Cat Central," and what have you), ready to start inserting disks and backing up data. I turned on the lamp, and POP! the light bulb blew. That didn't concern me, but the fact that the computer's screen saver suddenly went to black did. Turns out that whole side of the house was out – several circuit breakers had tripped. Mumbling and grumbling, I reset the breakers, the house lit up again, and everything was good – except the computer remained dark. When I crawled under the desk to fiddle with it, I noticed that I was not hearing any of the usual start–up sounds the hard disk usually makes. Worse, the power–strip lights, monitor lights, and printer lights were all indicating that they were getting juice. It was just the main unit of my computer that wasn't behaving.

Just!? Arrggghh!

Contrary to what you might think, I am not a techie. I don't deal well with hardware breakdowns. When I flip the power switch back and forth and nothing happens, my first impulse isn't to get a screwdriver, it's to get a shot of tequila – or a baseball bat. I did know enough, though, to figure that I had been the victim of a power surge that blew my light bulb, tripped my breakers, and gotten through my surge protector to nuke some or all of my PC's innards.

My general advice in this kind of situation is for the victim to first get a grip on themselves, get the cursing and weeping out of their system, and then call someone they trust. I called a relative of mine who happens to be a senior engineering type at a national telephone/company. He told me what I had already thought, that the power surge went right through the surge protector and blew my power supply. That was almost a given, considering that my machine was currently comatose. That isn't such a bad thing, necessarily. A good power supply of the size I needed (250 watts) doesn't cost more than $40 and sometimes less. Since my buddy has the technical expertise to install a power supply himself, and was willing to do it for free, the cost to me would be minimal in both time and money. Of course, that wasn't the whole story.

Power surges are notorious for causing major damage to sensitive PC innards. Of course, "yer computer's innards got zapped" isn't exactly a specific, high–tech explanation, nor does it give much direction to getting the problem fixed. So I trundled the comatose critter down to the local techie repair shop and dropped it off with them to troubleshoot. I knew they'd charge me a fairly hefty fee just to look at the thing, which they did. What I couldn't be sure about was whether or not they would deal honestly and competently with the problem.

Two days went by, and after several phone calls to ascertain their progress, I finally got a report. "She's pretty much toast," the guy on the phone said, trying to sound mournful. "Your power supply is gone, of course. We're not 100% sure about the other components, but it looks like the surge got to your motherboard and your memory chips. They're not working, either; in fact, the technician who actually did the diagnosis says he saw scorch marks on the motherboard. We can't get enough power to go through it to even check your hard drives, so we're thinking there's a 50–50 chance that they survived." That, of course, was exactly what I didn't want to hear. "We can fix it up for you for $485. We would, of course, subtract the $65 we've already charged you, so that would come out to be a total of $420."

"What?!?" I yowled. "420 bucks? I don't think so. I'd much rather sink the money into a new PC than fix this out–of–date clunker." I could hear the guy on the other end nodding his head. "I figured you'd say that." I told him to seal it back up and I would be down to pick it up directly.

Cut to the weekend. My friend and I spent one evening cracking the beastie open and looking over the insides. "Well," he said, "we know they actually did open it up, because it's clean inside. It should be full of nasty black dust, but it isn't. Looks like they at least blew it out with compressed air." He looked further. "I don't see any scorching…. I don't see any damage at all. Let's try something." He proceeded to open up a functioning computer that sat nearby, and connected the other machine's power supply to my machine. He quickly hooked up monitor, keyboard, and mouse. "Here goes nothing," he said, and pressed the ON switch. Immediately we heard the familiar whirring as the hard drive cranked up. The monitor came to life and the familiar startup screens appeared. We took a brief side trip into the CMOS setup screens, as the CMOS battery had become drained and the CMOS settings returned to their default state, but other than that, the beastie worked just fine.

"There's nothing wrong with your computer besides the dead power supply," my friend said, fixing me with one glittering eye. "Those boys at the repair shop lied to you."

It took another couple of days for me to buy a replacement power supply (price: $30, plus another $35 for a decent surge protector) and get my pal to hook it in. The job wasn't as simple as we had first anticipated, but my friend was up to the task, and a couple of hours later the beastie was back together and ready to run. It did perfectly well on its test drive, and it's done perfectly well since.

Of course, the first thing I did was to back up documents, graphics, and other necessaries onto floppy disks. Total time: one hour; total disks used: 3. (These were just the critical files, the ones I definitely couldn't live without.) Feeling of relief that those files were safe: incalculable.

I immediately stopped payment on the credit charge for the repair shop; it may not stand up, but I see no reason to pay them $65 to deliberately lie to me about what they did and what they found. I also called the repair shop and chewed on the customer service rep's ear for a while, with generally unsatisfying results. (Best line: "Even if we had just replaced the power supply, we still would have charged you around $480. With the level of work we would perform, the warranty and everything else, we wouldn't feel justified in charging anything less. …You're not the first one to say that our prices are a bit steep." My friend said, "At least they're honest in their thievery.")

So what's the use of this longwinded little narrative? Well, there are several cautions to be observed that this little saga illustrates. First, back up your data. Do it as soon as you close this newsletter. Don't wait. Second, surge protectors go bad after a while. I did some research on Consumer Reports' Web site and learned something I didn't know: surge protectors soak up minor power spikes and surges all the time, and as a result, they just wear out after a while. My old one was pretty long in the tooth, and apparently was just too old and decrepit to block a serious surge. You should change surge protectors once a year…just change them along with your smoke detector batteries. Third, don't believe the repair technicians. I was very fortunate to have a technically savvy relative who was willing to spend his time on my behalf, and his intervention saved me yea bucks. How else would I have known that the repair techs were either lying, or too busy playing Nintendo to take an honest look at my machine? ("Aaaah, I'm on Level 32. Just tell him the motherboard's burnt. Whatever…yaaah, take that, alien scum!") It's the same level of thinking as with car repair: if you're fortunate enough to know a professional technician that you trust, then you're a lucky person. Keep a good relationship with that person – learn names, send Christmas cards, and send him business. Sooner or later you're going to need him. If you don't…well, the best you can do is the usual round of asking knowledgeable friends, checking with the BBB, getting more than one opinion, etc. etc. Cross your fingers, send up prayers, dance around an oak tree, or whatever you think will get you connected with an honest tech. But do something. Otherwise, when you're faced with a hardware failure and your only recourse is to thumb through the Yellow Pages, you'll find yourself in an uncomfortable position. Chances are, someone will try to ease your suffering by lightening your wallet. And, losing both money and critical data…it's too much to contemplate. Just go handle it!