But according to the New York Times, an increasing number of Americans are doing precisely the same thing as Dr Tucker, in what we can only regard as an orgy of wastefulness.

Rather than suggesting that these people might need to have their brains re-formatted, the newspaper presents it as perfectly reasonable.

“In the face of a constant stream of pop-up ads, malfunctioning programs and performance slowed to a crawl or a crash – the hallmarks of spyware and adware - throwing out a computer is – and here it quotes Lee Rainie, director of Washington-based Internet research groujp Pew Internet and American Life Project , “’a reasonable response’”. It is nothing of the sort.

It takes time to research, source and actually buy a new PC. It takes a lot more time to install software and updates, transfer your files, and set up backup routines etc. The cost of a new PC could be trivial compared with the value of lost time and inconvenience that’s a likely consequence.

As it happens, we were about to write about some applications and techniques that can preserve you from that sort of loss and frustration. We were looking at them from the point of view of backup, but they do have other benefits. What we’re talking about is disk imaging.

One of the great truisms of computing is that if you are willing to spend money on a problem, you can win more free time. You would rather be poor but happy, right? Microsoft (with Windows) and Apple (with OSX Tiger) should really provide all the tools you need for backup in their operating systems – and they do provide some – but for true peace of mind we (reluctantly) recommend a bit of a spending spree.

For Windows, that means buying the US$52.90 Partition Magic Pro and the US$69.95 Norton Ghost 9.0 (that now includes Drive Image technology). For Mac it means buying SynXchronize! Pro.

Once you have these programs, a day’s work will put you way ahead because you will know that whatever happens to your hard disk’s data, you can always restore a perfect mirror image of the disk (including your boot disk). You know you can boot from a CD if necessary. And you know you can restore even the boot partition with confidence. This is like having comprehensive insurance for same day repairs for your new Porsche Carrera.

Scoffers will be thinking now about all the OSX shareware that can do this for free. Why wouldn’t you use Mike Bombich’s free Carbon Copy Cloner for example? There are both obvious and more subtle answers. The first point is Tiger compatibility – the fairly expensive (US$99.95) Synchronize Pro! X is compatible, whereas Carbon Copy Cloner is not yet (despite workarounds we still can’t get to do what they are supposed to). Then there are secondary factors. Tap Cmd-Shift-W in Synchronize Pro! X and you can invoke “non-overlapped read write mode” which saves an external Firewire drive from that supremely irritating mid-backup hang that confounds some backup runs using other software.

In the Windows world, there are also cheaper alternatives, but they are generally less approachable for anyone but an expert user. However just as we finished this article, we had a report from a Ghost user reporting serious problems which have forced him to switch to True Image, which we’ll look at in another colujmn.

In the Windows world, it pays to have a fresh copy of XP to boot into if your main XP boot partition is corrupted – especially during a trip or before a crucial conference presentation. Achieving that requires the creation of a new disk partition (hence Partition Magic), another XP install (with Microsoft authorisation) or, better, a restore from Drive Image. After that, you can simply add an entry to the system settings after right clicking “My Computer” so that boot.ini knows about your new partition and alternative XP installation. That gives you a choice of operating system at boot up.

Of course you may need to change the partition size of an existing partition to create a new one, which is where Partition Magic shines. Apart from some slightly unnerving forays into a DOS-like world to achieve that, Partition Magic makes creating, changing and deleting partitions very easy.

In the Mac world, the US$59.95 VolumeWorks (from SubRosaSoft.com) will do the same thing, but Mac users benefit from the fact that Tiger’s own Disk Utility can create a sparse image (a kind of virtual hard disk) that Synchronize Pro! X (and other programs) will treat like a new physical hard disk even though it is actually just another file on your hard disk. Mounting the sparse image can make it available for system restoration if you ever need it.

These processes tend to create some large files, and we recommend using an external hard disk, although the files can be chopped into 4.4GB slabs for easy (but slow) export burning to a DVD to save disk space. Nowadays, an external 500GB Firewire/USB2 drive from a company such as Lacie costs a good deal less than $1000, and of course provides very useful storage for your music and digital images.

Taking these simple measures will let you frown less, get to sleep faster and enjoy a genuinely more productive time with your computer. But enjoy it while you can. With Longhorn’s eventual release, or Apple migrating OSX to the new Intel chip, all these certainties may evaporate as a new era of backup neurosis dawns.