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I spend lots of time in front of my computer and that time expands from beginning of my work day to the majority of my free and personal time between family responsibilities and tasks. I love breakfast but I rarely ever sit down, eat breakfast and read the paper. That’s so old school right? I do somewhat of the equivalent though with my browser at every startup.

I have a collection of web pages that open in tabs automatically when I start my browser each session. This gives me a variety of launch tasks to take advantage of as I start my work day and other periods after coming back to the computer.

• Gmail – gives me the opportunity to check my "business" email account for items of interest
• Yahoo! Mail – is the email account I use for mainly email from friends and family
• BrightKite – give me the opportunity to "check-in" wherever I’m working that day
• Startlike Outdoors – serves as a launch and portal page with a great picture of nature to start my day

Maybe you want to open your banking page, or your company’s intranet site, or your email, or anything else you can think of to open. Whatever you want to see first to get your day started.

You can do this with your own browser and select your own start pages in Mozilla Firefox. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options and the "General" tab. You just place each page you want to startup on a separate line.

Let your computer be your new morning paper. Nothing will replace that first cup of coffee though right?

Image: Composite of browser tabs and opened tabs shown together

It used to be that when you received a new computer you also received a handful of discs that could be used to completely restore the computer to the factory default state. Many times now you don’t receive discs, unless you want to pay extra for them. All the restoration files are put in a partition on your hard drive installed on the machine.

I can understand the value of this as now you don’t have to go tracking down all those discs, unless you’ve organized them and know exactly where they are kept. Everything you need is on the hard drive that’s always with the machine.

The question I now have though is what happens if you fry your hard drive or have some other type of complete hard drive failure? My personal opinion is to either move those recovery files off the hard drive and put them on a disc yourself, or purchase the separate discs for your use.

Before you do anything else when setting up a computer, be sure to create all the necessary recovery and emergency boot discs you’ll need for your particular model. You might even go so far as to visit the manufacturer’s website and download all the available drivers and program files that are available for your machine and burn them to a disc as well.

You hope you’ll never need any of this stuff. But the first time you need it and done have it, just go grab some aspirin instead because your headaches are only the beginning of the price you’ll pay for not taking these precautionary steps.

Image: sxc.hu