Having recommended "sitting tight" on new technologies in the introduction here is another exception (scanners being the first).

Today, CD Writers (CD-ROM drives that both playback and record CD-ROMs) cost only $100 or so, complete with prerequisite software. Moreover, their blank media costs just 50 cents each, the same as blank floppy diskettes. So not having and using a CD Writer is probably costing you more -- in dollars, in frustration, in effort.

Think of home written CD-ROMs as high capacity floppy disks. While floppies hold less than 2MB of data, CDs hold 650MB -- over 300 times as much. For the same money.

Teenagers like CD Writers because they allow them to record lots of their favorite songs in MP3 format. I like CD Writers for their genealogy and backup uses.

A few years ago, a cousin lent me his grandparents' huge scrapbooks and family photo album. I spent weeks scanning photos, saved Family Bible pages, letters from home that arrived by schooner, marriage invitations and funeral cards -- all unavailable anywhere else and a wonderful boon for my genealogy.

Back then hard disks were smaller, so the best I could do was back them up to a series of then-popular Zip Disks, that held only 100MB each. When I got my first CD Writer, the entire series fit on a single CD-ROM. That made storing and retrieving those gems much easier. Better yet, I can now send copies to other cousins without taking out a mortgage.

No matter which PC you buy, no matter how defensively you compute, things can still go wrong. The worst and most common problem is a hard disk crash, which effectively ereases all you have.

The day your hard disk goes down your only hope will be that you have made backup copies as you went along and copied them to CD-ROM. If you have, your problem is easily fixed in a minute or two. If not you have just kissed years of genealogy effort goodbye.

In a Cardiff controlled world, all PCs would come standard with a CD Writer. They are that important to all your computing efforts. There is no excuse for not having and using this form of insurance. (Of course, a couple of years from now I will probably be saying the same thing about DVD Writers.)