During the week I turned on the computer to have a black screen and the information that that the windows startup file had been corrupted. The sytem told me I would have to restore using the original disk which came with the computer. When I put this disc into the cdrom drive it told me that the sytem would be restored to the original factory settings. But not to worry as all the data would be saved.
I pressed the “R” for recovery button as requested and after about 30 minutes the computer was back to its pristine state – i.e. no Realplayer, no Adobe readerr etc. Unfortunately there were also no data files. Not to worry as of course I have a back up. Unfortuneately time seems to be getting faster with each passing year and so I discovered that the last back up was further back than I thought. We have never had such a serious crash from the computer before and so a valuable lesson learned and so no doubt we will in the future be doing a backup at least once a month.