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Parts that move are far more likely to die than those that don't. Of the parts that don't move, frequently failing parts include diodes, resistors and capacitors.
There are things you can do to limit the damage and inconvenience resulting from a major failure: redundancy and back-ups are good for protection.
I've been running two computers with different operating systems. One of them makes hourly back-ups. The other one could have shared the back-up capability if I had told it to. The one with no back-up had its hard drive freeze up intermittently. Then the other machine lost its ability to talk wirelessly to the Internet.
Both machines were down, the second failing before the first could be completely restored.
The machine with the bad hard drive, let's call it Winnie, was being used to read unimportant email and to print envelopes. It contained music I had painfully ripped, over several weeks, from my CD collection but now rarely played. All these functions can be performed on its counterpart, which we'll call Minnie. I haven't been particularly concerned about recovering Winnie. I'm contemplating replacing its operating system with something else, something not made by the same company. Even though it has an operating system like the one it had when it died, it mostly just sits there. I rarely turn it on.
Minnie, on the other hand, is a workhorse. I use it for everything from the trivial (Freecell) to the vital (income tax preparation).
It took two days for the experts to find what was wrong with Minnie and to repair it. Like Winnie, Minnie was returned with a bare operating system.
But I had back-ups.
I tried to restore Minnie from the back-up. The instructions were vague but stated I could restore everything from a single file to the entire system. I tried it. Not having instructions, I just guessed what to do from the prompts presented. It was rather like playing one of those old Dungeons and Dragons games where you have to guess what action to take, trying many alternatives in order to guess the secret combination that would result in winning. It got old very fast.
I called the experts. The first one misled me completely. The second told me, correctly, that I would need to have the disk from which I installed the operating system in the drive, then directed me in the simple sequence I would need to follow to begin recovery. With the disk in place, I had to restart the machine and hold down the 'C' key until asked what language to use. He didn't tell me I would need passwords I had almost never needed and couldn't remember. I even had trouble remembering where the passwords were written down (on my Palm handheld).
I managed to start the recovery process. After about ten minutes the recovery program said it would take another four hours. I went off to watch television, checking once in a while. Recovery finished in just under three hours. Everything seems to be working again except that I can't print anything on my printer. There were about 500 messages waiting to be read. Minnie is once more happily making back-ups every hour or so.
If I decide to rip my CDs again, I'll do it on Minnie. Or I'll just play them on my stereo, if I can find it and find a new place to install it. I'm a bit short of space, though. Maybe I'll just give the little stereo away. I don't listen to music much any more, especially on radio; I now find commercial interruptions highly annoying. I assume I can find most or all of my CDs and I can get a cheap storage container that doesn't take up very much space.
So I'm back in business ... in a limited way. I can communicate with the world again and I can resume writing my stories. Once a year I can do my taxes. I can play my PySol Freecell game when waiting for some process to complete.
It's almost like being back to normal, except for the bitter taste in my mouth.
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