Your PC can crash at any time. Not a comforting thought I know, but one that should prompt us all to save our work as often as possible. So, for this end of the year post I will extol the virtues of saving regularly, and by extension, of backing up your files.

Firstly let’s deal with saving your files regularly: to do so, simply hold down the Ctrl key and press S.

If you wish to use a different filename each time you save, hold down the Alt key and press F then A. This will open up the ‘Save as…’ dialog box.

Now the backing up your files. Since we are fast approaching a new year, now would be a good time to back up all your essential files. There are a myriad of ways of doing this such as using USB flash drives to backup your current projects, or using a DVD writer to back up many of your files in one go.

Another option is to set up a webmail account with lots of storage capacity as offered by the likes of Yahoo! and Google to which you can email the files you are working on. Or you could try other online storage facilities like box.net.

So make at least one New Years resolution: back up your files.

If you’ve been wondering where all the advertising for Windows Vista has disappeared to, look no further YouTube. Starting from last week, Microsoft has begun uploading a series of original short videos showcasing a combination of Windows Vista, Windows Live and Office 2007 experiences.

Unlike the $500 million heart-warming “Wow” campaign at the start of the year, this campaign focuses much more on functionality with realistic end-user scenarios and clear benefits on how using Windows Vista, Windows Live and Office can help get the job done. Perhaps this marks the beginning of the $300 million more Microsoft’s throwing into the Vista advertising pool.

The videos themselves are well-produced with scenarios most home users can associate with, such as making a panoramic photo. Instead of just talking about the benefits, it’s good they actually demo the products in-use from beginning to end to show how it can be done.

Unfortunately for Microsoft they’ve also left the floodgate wide open for ‘constructive criticism’. As usual, streams of Microsoft-bashers and users with Vista horror stories have taken it upon themselves to let the world know how much better the other operating systems are.

For example user ‘dasBaum1234′ wanted to share, “haha windows you suck so much. You faked everythibg from Mac OSX Tiger und you didnt get that right. YOU SUCK SOO MUCH!”. What dasBaum1234 doesn’t know is that Vista is not a person, and should not be referred to as “you”. However his argument is indisputable so it really doesn’t matter.