Once you have the list, try to open the files from Word, and see what you come up with. Because the files are temporary, they often have a lot of random-looking junk in them. If you see this, try scrolling down some, and you should be able to get most of your paper back.

On Macintoshes, the process is a little different. Similar temp files are sometimes created and placed in the "Rescued Items" folder of the trash.

However, according to some of my Mac-using colleagues, these files rarely have useful data in them.

Instead, they recommend using a utility such as Norton Utilities or Rescue to retrieve your file. Norton Utilities is on all lab Macs.

On both platforms, your odds of recovering your document improve the sooner after the system crash you act.

So instead of re-writing an already questionable paper, you can rest assured that the haphazard junk you put together in a few hours is stored somewhere on your computer and is waiting to be recovered!

--Baratunde R. Thurston '99 is the Claverly User Assistant for HASCS, editor-in-chief of Computers@Harvard, published by the Harvard Computer Society, and a Crimson editor. He wrote this column at four a.m.