Protect Your Research: Back Up, Update, and Prepare for Windows 7 Retirement

Recently, COMPHELP has been seeing many issues with research groups losing their research data, computers crashing, and computers not working correctly. There are three steps to help resolve these issues. Back up your data, shut down the computer, and update your computer.

Back up your data! Use OneDrive or a physical external drive to store your data. Students and Professors have access to OneDrive and should have up to 2 TB of storage space. Physical external drives have also become relatively cheap. COMPHELP cannot recover data once it is gone. You will have to use a third-party company to try to recover that data, and it may cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars to recover that data.

Shut down and Update your Computers Regularly! The best way to keep a computer from crashing or working improperly is to shut it down and update it regularly. In cases where a computer cannot be updated because it may cause an instrument to not work properly, it is still a good idea to shut it down regularly to prolong the computer’s life.

Windows 7 COMPHELP has discovered that many instrument computers used by research groups are over ten years old and need Windows 7 to operate the instrument. Unfortunately, COMPHELP cannot get an official copy of Windows 7 once that Windows 7 hard drive dies. So, COMPHELP cannot just install another copy of Windows 7 on that computer. If that happens, the research group will be forced to upgrade to at least a Windows 10 computer. COMPHELP knows and understands that upgrading to a new computer is not easy and straightforward. Not to mention how expensive it will be. However, those research groups still using Windows 7 computers will have to upgrade at some point because computers do not last forever, and Windows 7 is no longer an option as an Operating System.

If you have further questions, don't hesitate to contact the helpful people at COMPHELP.