There’s one thing that makes sport of all kinds interesting…

You never really know what’s going to happen.

The England v Wales rugby match last weekend could have gone either way and with the Winter Olympics in full swing, its already thrown up a few surprises and upsets.

Katie Ormerod the snowboarder, fracturing her right heel before the opening ceremony and forcing her to withdraw from the event.

Felix Loch the defending luge world champion, who was a dead cert on reclaiming gold, missed out on the top spot after a mistake on his last run.

Red Gerard the 17-year-old American, given his lack of experience at this level, was never in with a shout for a medal, but went on to claim Gold.

And there will no doubt be many more surprises before the flame goes out in two weeks’ time.

I’ve never been a great skier; wasn’t something I found easy to adapt to, as I spent most of the time falling on my backside as I watched the eight-year old’s whizzing past with ease.

But I do find the Winter Olympics a great watch because of the variety of events – with the downhill being my favourite.

Computers can also spring a few surprises, as I found out last week.

The Windows 10 Operating System’s (OS) been designed to force Windows updates on every machine. This has its pros and cons. At least Microsoft plays it safe knowing that all computers with this OS installed will have the latest security patches, but the downside is that they can cause problems at times.

After a major update last week, my laptop went into a right strop, so I used the System Restore function to put the system back to a date when all was working fine; or so I thought. Unfortunately, the usually reliable System Restore facility decided to be completely unreliable and not play ball!

Luckily, I had another plan to fall back on…

Every six months, I take a full image of my computer to an external hard drive which includes the Windows OS, programs and all the data.

What this means is that I can restore an image to my computer without having to re-install Windows and other programs. Luckily in this instance, I took the last image in early December and the amount of new data to download via Dropbox was minimal.

Having this software meant I didn’t have to spend a full day re-installing and setting everything up from scratch.

The program I’m referring to is Acronis True Image and you can read more and download it from here.

Don’t worry if you have a Mac; you’re not missing out. The software you need to setup is Time Machine and it’s already built-in to the Apple OS. Click here for guidance on how to configure this facility.

In my view, Acronis & Time Machine are two pieces of software you cannot afford to go without; especially if your machine goes belly-up!