Jaw drops, shakes head sadly ... slowly backs away.

Yes that never ceased to amaze me, backing up to a separate partition on your system hard disk so you can recover your data on failure.

If a hard drive failure means days of down time then someone is not doing their job properly. In the case of an office copy machine it is possible to have it down for days while you wait for the tech to appear but it also possible to print to alternative machines assuming there are some and if there aren't again that is a major management problem.

In the case of PC's a base OS install be it MS Windows or even Linux should take no more than an hour or two and possibly much less than an hour with the right recovery/rebuild infrastructure, of course getting back lost data can be a major problem and that is the responsibility of the PC owner.

On corporate systems the system disks are normally mirrored and data disks are usually RAID even in a SAN configuration so if a disk fails or start to fail the hardware tech usually just takes the faulty or failing disk out and replaces it with a new disk (no outage required) although it is always sound policy for the IT manager to raise a change request and get it signed off by management.

Actually if you have a hard drive crash you probably did not take notice of the warning signs.

When a drive is failing you should get plenty of warnings such are performance issues and a quick check of the drive should show that something is wrong. The problem here is most people have no idea how to check the performance of a hard drive much less be aware that there is a problem that is only going to get worse before the disk finally gives out and by then it's too late.

A few months ago I had my system disk hard drive start to fail on my laptop (it originally had 2 650GB 2.5" 5400 rpm drives) I ran some checks using the SMART tools and found that my my drive was failing which immediately prompted me to purchase a new 1TB 8200rpm HDD and install it after I had fully backed up my old disk.

Since I have a pure Linux system (Fedora 22) it was actually quicker to rebuild my new hard disk from scratch which meant installing the OS, customizing, patching and then recovering my user data. The install of the OS took about 30 minutes with customization and patching taking another 40 minutes and by that time I had a working system although it did take another 5 hours to get back my data. Since I replaced my original 5400 rpm disk with an 8200 rpm disk the performance of my laptop is so much better.

BTW. I am aware of SSD's and decided not to get one since I would need a minimum of 650GB and an SSD of that size is not cheap. Also with my new disk most applications are open withing 10 seconds compared to maybe 1 second with an SSD and it won't kill me to wait a few extra seconds. I do recommend a small SSD for just for the system disk if you have a PC with has multiple disk slots. IMHO putting personal data (that includes games) on an SSD show that you have more money then sense, still it is your money.

Basically anyone who has a PC or even a mainframe should document their customization's such as wireless info, user info, firewall (if any) info, additional software info, etc. You should also be aware of any disk configuration such as partitioning, possibly volume management and file system type. Lastly you should always Backup, Backup, Backup .... :-) If you have a hard disk or even a solid state disk it is eventually going to fail. How long before it fails? Well how long is a piece of string?

I got a day one PS3 and in the instruction booklet it showed you how to swap out your hard drive for a different sized one.

While I have not purchased a PS4 yet for numerous reasons you can also change it's hard drive without voiding the warranty. So basically the 1TB PS4 is a standard PS4 with a 1TB disk and if you look at the price between a 500GB disk and a 1TB disk there is about a $10 to $20 difference and in OEM quantities you would probably be looking at a few dollars. Still when the new 1TB PS4 becomes available I think we are most likely looking at an increase of approximately $50.00. I could be wrong and it may even be possible it could be the same price as the 500GB PS4 but I doubt it. Still even if the price is about $50.00 dearer it would most likely be worth it rather then purchase a 1TB drive later and swap the 500GB one.

Yes you are right Apple do make their brand however so do other vendors. What apple and the other vendors don't control although they do have some say are the carriers and if an update is released IOS or Android then it is up to the carriers to push it out.

There are other vendors that sell Android phones and so far it is only the Samsung brand that has the issue and not the Linux kernel, so basically it is a Samsung problem.

Oh dear another golden haired gaming elite! Well if you wish to compare the "next gen" to train wrecks then I am sure over a billion people on this planet would disagree with you since most PC owners don't have anything more powerful than those next gen machines. Sure there are PC's that are more powerful but they are very much in the minority and they definitely cost allot more.

Over a 160 million combined PS3's and Xbox 360 sales and assuming only 30% are still being played then that still is allot of potential sales you are basically throwing away, still it's Bethesda we are talking about.

Graphical interfaces have been around since the 1970's and on workstations or any graphical interface you can display the equivalent of a standard 80x24 tty terminal or any sized terminal (within reason of course) so that was not the reason why creating so called short options made sense. Basically Unix people preferred efficiency in typing over long winded typing. As an example why type "copy" when you can type "cp" or "ls" when you wish to list files and directories. You can even alias commands and their options if you are using them allot so there is even less typing to do.

You should realise that Powershell is basically a copy of the Bourne Shell with allot of Microsoft additions so that they can say this is our unique command line shell.

If you look at the man page of "cp" there is no difference, it really is left up to you what option you like. Personally I use "cp -rp" since I also like to preserve the information on the directories and files I am copying, although when copying to a MS Windows file-system you many have trouble with letters like ":".

When using the command line you can never go wrong with the"man" command. If you are not sure or just want to search for a pattern then use the "-k" option to search the manual entries. Of course you can use "--apropos" if you wish which does the same thing or use "-K" or "--global-apropos" which are similar but different. The most important thing is to have fun.

Of course it may be possible to find a pizza shaped world carried on the back of four elephants who in turn are standing on the back of a gigantic star travelling turtle :-) (in memory of Terry Pratchett)

You do know that Hewlett Packard makes PC's and Super Computers as well printers don't you? Basically they are just running the event and it is good PR for them.