One important upgrade every computer owner should perform is to have surge protection. Sure protection protects your desktop or laptop from a power surge that can happen during a storm.

A surge protector is a piece of hardware that your computer is plugged into. The protector then plugs into the wall. Thus, it is an intermediate between your computer and the power outlet. The surge protector prevails dangerous levels of power from reaching your computer and causing overload problems.

Here's the scenario:

You're using your computer during an electrical storm. Lightning strikes and sends a high amount of power to your computer.

With a surge protector, the surge protector notices the power is too high and prevails the high power from reaching your computer.

Without a surge protector, the high voltage travels right to your machine, and you're left to pray that it does not overload your computer and cost you to have repairs performed.

A surge protector can also prevent spikes that occur because the power go out and then come back on at a higher level.

Thus, surge protectors are reliably cheap and are the standard in computer protection. A wise investment to be sure.

The second topic for this article is data backup planning.

Data backup planning is not only important to large corporations, but to the personal computer owner as well. We'll be focusing on the personal computer owner here.

Many people do not think about backing up their data. They should though. Recently someone came to me and asked me if I could recover data from their storage drive. It was their only copy. Unfortunately, I had to refer them to another service provider – someone who would have to perform some low level data recovery (expensive). This would not have had to happen if the person had kept a second copy of their data. There are a number of ways for people to back up their data.

One way is to buy some writable CDs or DVDs and burn data to them – of course you'll need hardware that can write to CDs and / or DVDs. These would probably be a good option for people with not too much data they want backed up. These are also nice because you can store them in a different location from the original data and then the computer should be destroyed in some cataclysmic event, you still have a good copy.

Another option is to purchase an external hard drive. These usually require a USB hookup. They are a nice option and are generally much larger in size than a CD / DVD. They are also easily transportable and lightweight. Furthermore, you can read, write, and rewrite (write over) data – something Most CDs / DVDs do not do. So, they can be a money saver and space saver when compared to CDs / DVDs.

Another option still is to purchase an internal hard drive. This will stay within your computer. It provides read / write / rewrite and generally large (and inexpensive) storage capacity. These tend to be less expensive than a similar external and faster. However, they are less mobile than the two previous options. Still, you've got to know a bit more about hardware in order to find out which drive to purchase and install, making the other two options more user friendly.

I think all options have their strong points, it boils down to what you require or desire. Bottom line, it's a good idea to have some backup strategy, because you never know how valuable your data is until it's gone.