You can buy these in many places.

I bought some on ebay.com to back-up my desktop computer.

They come in many sizes. The 16GB ones hold a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive



I've managed to keep the laptop (an HP) going by using the tools that are on the computer. Go to COMPUTER. Right click on the local disk C: and go PROPERTIES and click on TOOLS. Run the two things that you can for ERROR-CHECKING.

It takes some time to do to this it seems to have helped.

Make sure to clear the cache and delete cookies.

Also, run defrag. That may speed things up too.

Hope this helps!

Also, DON'T use System Mechanic. It's unnecessary bloatware. Does nothing but bog down your system. Uninstall it.

I keep my win7 laptop kicking ass as well as an WinXP laptop.

Glary Utilities has some great features to tune up computers

employ the "Disk Cleanup" tool when you exit the interwebs? My rather old laptop is slow as molasses if I don't do the cleanup whenever I exit the web browser and turn off the modem connection. It's located in the start menu. I run it once, delete the files selected like temporary files and thumbnails and then run it again using the system files cleanup-button located in lower left of the frame. That psrt takes a while but it shows how much crap follows you home from the web. If you do this regularly you can keep your computer running well with quicker response time. You may not want to replace it after you see how well this little maintenance move works for speeding up those processing.

run something like ADW Cleaner, Malwarebytes. Backup to an external
hard drive, but I would do a cleanup first. This is what I do for a living.

Those are not reliable. Put them in a drawer for a year and the data will be unreliable. Your best bet for a simple home backup is a portable hard drive. Complexities go up from there, but that is the simplest form of safe backup. I do engineering for one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world--all my laptops have SSDs in them, (same tech inside thumb drives) but I back them up to a series of hard drives on my home network.

I'm in the process of digitizing all my old photos; eventually, I want to transfer photo files to what? Thumb drives, discs (on exterior disk drive) or another hard drive? or other? I am a rank amateur on all of this. My computer is a MacBook Pro. Thanks in advance for any advice.

You can buy drive bays - I like the ones for SATA drives - and use more than one. Best practice is to back up to one drive, store it offsite. Next month back up to a second, store it offsite. Then alternate between the two.

Great advice that I don't do, LOL!

I was backing up my photos to CDRs and DVDs but now many new computers do not come with optical drives. The CDRs have been very reliable - the first one I burned is still viewable though I have long since copied all the pictures off it to other media. Now I use external drives and make copies to my sister's external drive to share with her. I also put copies of the old family photos online.