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This article discusses preventive-maintenance tips for PC internal and external devices. Few users are as diligent as they should be about backing up system, applications, and data. No backup strategy is 100 percent effective, and most take more time to set up and use than users are willing to spend on them. The very least one can do is to create an image of the hard drive when everything works. That way, when trouble strikes, users merely restore the pristine image, which usually takes less than 45 minutes. Symantec Norton Ghost 9 and Acronis True Image 8 restore Windows XP, Microsoft Office, and an assortment of other applications and utilities in half the time it would take to reinstall Windows, let alone the hours required to reinstall all programs, reload data files manually, and reconfigure system settings to the way one prefers them. The downside: Norton Ghost costs $70 retail, and True Image lists for $50. While saving the image to a second hard drive is far more convenient than placing it on a DVD, it is also more expensive. Incompatibilities between DVD drives and imaging software are common. To make data easier to restore, keep data files on a partition other than the one that holds Windows and applications.