It happened again today. A friend called me asking for help in reviving his PC that will no longer boot. He believes he caught a virus. I plugged it in, and sure enough, it won’t boot.

“Do you have your important files backed up?” I ask.

Queue the awkward pause. I got my answer.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen his scenario play out half a dozen times over the past year. A family shares an older model PC, usually running Windows XP or Vista. Files are saved haphazardly to a local drive. Malware and viruses enter the computer and eventually slow or shut it down. Or worse, a hard drive bites the dust.

And nobody backed up files to an external drive, CD/DVD, or online.

So this post is for my friends and readers who are in a similar situation. Eventually your hard drive will crash or you’ll catch a virus, or your children will delete the folder where all your financial data was saved.

I could tell you about nifty online back solutions or explain how I use a couple of small programs to copy files from one drive to another. But I’ll save that for a later post.

If you do not have a backup solution, stop what you’re doing and order this 500 gig drive from New Egg. Or this 1 TB drive if you have a lot of videos, music or other files that take up more space. This is not the most elegant or even the most effective backup solution. But it’s far better than nothing at all.

About a year ago, I advised my father to pickup an external drive and it’s saved his behind a number of times.

If your hard drive dies, and you end up paying someone to extract your data off it, you could be looking at hundreds if not thousands of dollars. And that’s the best case scenario.

About 10 years ago, I lost a years worth of pictures around the time our second child was born. I’m still kicking myself because I knew better.

Don’t let that happen to you. Grab a drive and backup your files today.

When I began this blog, I wrote mostly about technology. It didn’t take long to learn that I had little to say, and what I did say, wasn’t interesting. Then Engadget and Gizmodo burst onto the scene and killed the category.

Yet, as much as I enjoy keeping up on the latest gadgets, large sites like these have little influence in what I purchase. I’m far more likely to make a purchase after Dave Winer blogs favorably about a netbook, or when Aaron Massey tells me how his children use his iPad.

Whenever Ben Talbert or Keli Dean share a song, I’ll immediately add it to my playlist. If Mike Henneke mentions a new blog he’s following, I’ll add it to Google Reader. If Louis Gray posts a link to an article on Twitter, I’ll add it to Instapaper.

Each of these individuals have earned my trust, and I value their opinions.

Google can clutter the web with ads and companies can seed product reviews at Amazon. And that ad disguised as a travelogue of Disney World is just another mommy or daddy blogger who didn’t want to get left out of the action. I can’t tell whose pockets are being lined with free products anymore.

That’s why I turn to my friends when I’m researching a product. With that in mind, I want to share two products I love. (I purchased both products and I don’t use affiliate links.)

The first product is geeky and takes some work to install, but the payoff is nothing short of a stunning speed increase of my Windows 7 box: Corsair Force 115 GB SSD.

I replaced an aging SATA drive tonight with the Corsair. It took the good part of my evening to drop an image of my Windows partition onto the SSD, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat. My system is so quiet and boots in under 30 seconds. And, oh the speed!

For about $160, it feels like one of those Maximum PC geeks got hold of my PC and overclocked the crap out of every component. The speed in intoxicating. Why did I take so long to make the move? SSDs have come down I price, but are still expensive per gigabyte. They also work best when paired with newer motherboards. But no way am I ever going back to SATA.

The other product I recommend is for iPhone and iPad owners: Reeder.

I use Reeder more than any other app on my iPhone and iPad. What is it? Well, Reeder is an RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. This is the most elegant app I’ve used. So simple on the surface, but incredibly powerful without shoving feature after feature in your face. Reeder reveals itself slowly, but you’ll come to appreciate the dozens of small touches that make it a joy to use.

This is the app that, more than any other, keeps me on iOS. Flipboard gets all the press and it’s well-deserved. But it’s Reeder I’m use more than any other app.

The iPhone version is $2.99 while the iPad version is $4.99. If you read even a handful of blogs, you’ll love it.

Have you found any great products lately?