You never know when a hard drive is going to play up! Sometimes a problem with your PC can be easily remedied, and sometimes the problem requires drastic action.

One of the things that you will want to reinstall if your hard drive has to be formatted is your Address Book, filled with addresses of friends and acquaintances gathered over maybe many months. Backing up this information is the most simple thing in the world to do, but so often overlooked. Here's how to do it.

There are two ways. One is to save the file to a different partition on your hard drive, that's if you have a partitioned hard drive, or failing that, save it to a floppy disk. The reason you save it to a different partition is that the address book is stored on Drive C. That's the drive that will be formatted if the need arises, so there's no point saving it there.

If you are saving the information to a partition on your hard drive, make a new folder. Call it WAB, for Windows Address Book. If you are saving to a floppy, there is no need to create a folder, but write WAB on the floppy so that you know what is stored on it.

Now open Outlook Express and click on Addresses. Click on Edit and choose Select All. Click on Edit again and select Copy. If the data is going to a newly created folder, find the folder in Windows Explorer and right click and Paste into the folder. Alternatively, right click on the Floppy in Windows Explorer and Paste the addresses there.

That's it. You have now safeguarded your email addresses. It needs doing perhaps two or three times a year, but so often it is forgotten......... until a problem occurs.