Save Your Work!!!

I have a suggestion to everyone. Save your work every 20 seconds or after you make any little change. I just lost over 2 1/2 hours of long hard work that I will never be able to duplicate. I am so suprisingly mad right now I'm nearing the point of throwing my fist through my monitor. God if only I had even made a screenshot so I could at least duplicate it to some degree....good thing it's nearing 10:00 bar-time. I need a drink very badly.

But just save your work frequently so you don't end up in the same s**t-hole that I'm in...

I try to avoid as many things that can go wrong with a pc as I can. By far the most stable OS is win2000 for ibm-pc clones, so if you can, definitely try to use that if you aren't using a mac.

Pc hardware can come into play with system stability as well. I went for an AMD Athlon system for my latest pc. I read up on all the motherboard chipsets to make certain that whatever motherboard I got, that it would have very little stability issues. Been 6 months with the new mobo/cpu and so far, so good. As stable as any intel based system I've built. Generic ram may not be a good idea on a system doing critical work either. I went with a name brand, trusted ram company when buying memory. Though I do recommend cheap generic ram in any other circumstance, just not on a pc doing real work. The final hardware issue is driver support for all your pci/isa cards if you're using windows. At all possible times, try to read a review of what you intend to put in your pc so that you know it won't cause further stability issues by having bad support or poorly written drivers.

A UPS (uninterruptable power supply) is next on the list of most needed things. Works on anything with an electric plug, and will make sure you have enough time to save your work if the power goes out for any length of time.

So far, with win2k and a UPS I've had no dire crashes in Photoshop. I used to run windows 98 and windows ME, and either Photoshop would crash itself, or something else on the system would cause it to crash more often than I'd liike.

And yeah, frequent saving is definitely the thing to do in all circumstances.

I'm using XP Beta 2 MSDN Subscription. I think this is more stable than Win2K, which I ran for a while before installing this.

It froze just as I went to save it. I chose "Save", and it never came up to actually "Save"....

You are keeping me away from my drinks...

yes, my computer freezes whenever there is oxygen in the room...

i too had been working on something and my
half-ass-swap-meet-corner-store computer
decided to be a wise ass and freeze ...
well i suppose the stupidity was on my part, b/c
within the 45 minutes, i didn't save at all!

i just made a new one, started doing all sorts of weird
experimentory things...and i thought that it had come
out quite well...so i went to saveas web blah blah...
and i was blessed to view the hallowed blue screen
telling me an error has occured...

from there it went down hill...
as i held down the power button for the
standard 5 seconds , i thought to myself
"gee, i don't remember saving"



[edit]

oh, and I personally think win2k is the most stable
win v. out there right now...

At work the saying goes....

"Save early, Save often, and Save before your ass leaves the seat anytime."

I preach this....