Considering that the laptop in question was 10 years old, it was probably a good time to move on from the old technology it was still carrying. So, I decided to purchase a new laptop. Purchasing a new laptop did cost me a lot of money, but it gave me a sense of security and an understanding of creating backup & recovery plans. Of course, because I had the data backed up already on an external disk, it was easy to restore & recreate them on my newly purchased laptop. Following that experience, I started using the System Restore facility of the Windows OS, which automatically monitors and records key system changes on a user’s computer by creating a system restore point that allows users to select a previous system state to restore to/from. According to Ashcraft et al. al (2020, August 19), it is “designed to reduce support costs and increase customer satisfaction by enabling a user to undo a change that may have caused a problem with the system or revert to a day when the system was performing optimally”. Not sure if that would have resolved the issue of the bad sector on my hard disk, but it is certainly a technique worth implementing going