You can't prevent hard drive failure, but you can be prepared for it ...

While USB flash drives have largely fallen out of vogue, they can be handy as a backup when cloud backups or other solutions fail to save Windows.

Windows Update can update drivers, sure, but BIOS/UEFI updates are another beast entirely. They patch critical security gaps and need to be checked manually.

Microsoft offers an easy method to recover Windows devices when encountering fatal issues that prevent them from booting up – Quick Machine Recovery. It searches the cloud server for resolutions and ...