I had a problem.  This past spring when I upgraded my computer I noticed that there were some files that did not get copied over from my old one to my new one—and some were copied more than once.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the empty folders were ones that contained photographs of my kids—photos that my wife had not yet scrapbooked.  And it didn’t help matters that she is over at a friend’s house tonight scrapbooking.

So, I had to try to look around and find my CD backup of all of those images, dig around and try to find any and all pictures that may be missing of my kids.

Have you ever really looked around your computer to see all the different kinds of files that are in there?  Everything from pictures to things with a DAT file extension inhabit your computer and (hopefully) make everything run.

As a software engineer by trade, I’ve even made up some of my own file extensions for files that I need for some of my applications to run—of course this was before current trends to standardize some of the extensions (or hide/remove them altogether).

My biggest piece of advice about extensions?  Don’t open anything that’s a .exe, .doc, .com, or .vb from anywhere on the web unless you know the website that it came from.  Don’t open these especially if they’re in e-mail.  This is the primary way to spread computer viruses!