The advice you were given about Notepad is correct. Here's why:
Until (and unless) you save the contents of what is in Notepad, the text is stored in RAM (memory) and NOT on the disk. So, when power was lost everything in RAM was lost.
Microsoft Word has a setting that periodically save interim work automatically (I've forgotten the default setting it's somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes).
Notepad requires an explicit manual save, otherwise data is lost.
There is a free tool that you can use to replace Notepad (and it does much more) that will automatically save notes, as well as give you the ability to collect and save a lot more than just Notepad-like text. It also is cross platform so that your note would be available on any device (Android, IOS, Linux, Mac, and Windows) -- and it's free. Consider Evernote
http://www.evernote.com.
I have and use Evernote on my laptop, tablet, phone and more. I am a Premium subscriber (pay for an annual subscription to get addition capabilities), because I use the tool that much. The free account has everything you need to get started.
There is a comparison of the differences here (Texas A & M):
http://guides.library.tamu.edu/content.php?pid=351837&sid=2943218
If you want, you can use this referral link to Evernote and we both benefit:
https://www.evernote.com/referral/Registration.action?uid=9442527&sig=c95588f84e4ea623f700f0a0665a25d3
Any questions...
David
------ Original Message ------
Received: 04:31 PM EDT, 05/23/2014
From: Korwynn Brown <
korwyn...@gmail.com>
To: pc...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [PCTOL: 16143] Question: Computer History Recovery
My laptop (running Windows 7) recently shut down from a low battery. I was working on some documents at the time, both in Microsoft Word and Notepad, and had a lot of unsaved data. While I was able to recover the Word files upon startup, I was unable to do the same for the notepad files. I checked around online, but everyone's been saying notepad is unrecoverable, but it occurred to me that there might be a roundabout solution. My question is; does the computer keep a detailed record of all of my activity? Is it detailed enough that I could potentially reconstruct the unsaved work based on that? And if so, how can I access said log?
A swift answer would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.