Linux can still be of real help to Windows users who do not wish to use it on a regular basis. It can be used to retrieve files from a crashed Windows system that Recovery Console can't fix. There is a way to make a Windows Live CD, but a lot more effort is required to create one, and I'm not sure that file retrieval is possible with it as I haven't tried it yet. Downloading a Linux ISO file for a Live CD and burning it to CD is much easier as long as you remember to get your burning program such as Nero to recognize it as an ISO file.

 Many distributions of Linux offer a Live CD. A Live CD can be booted up and ran just like the operating system on your hard drive. Running an operating system from a CD or CD/DVD ROM drive will be a little slower than normal. You will probably need to reset your boot order so that your computer boots with the Linux CD. For help with this and a few recommendations for a Live CD, Click here.

 Some really lightweight distros such as Puppy Linux or xubuntu can be loaded onto a USB thumb drive which provides an alternative to your CD/DVD burner. Fedora 9 Live is a Windows-friendly Live USB maker that makes adding Fedora to your USB drive a really simple process. Click here for Fedora 9 Live instructions.  Most modern computers do support booting from the USB thumb drive. The boot order has to be set through your CMOS utility to set it as your first bootable drive.

Some ways to save your files is to burn them to CD or use a USB thumb drive. An external hard drive works quite nicely, providing the Linux distro recognizes it. CD burning programs such as K3B for the KDE desktop or the CD burner application built into the Nautilus file manager for the Gnome desktop are usually already included in the CD. The only catch is that you have to have another CD burner already working with your computer if you are booting off of a Live CD. It can be an internal or external CD/DVD  ROM  drive with burning capabilities.

 A USB thumb drive is usually recognized by Linux, so it is a simple matter to copy the files from a FAT or NTFS partition to your desktop and then to the thumb drive. What I have found out about using the thumb/flash drive is that sometimes the permissions are set for use by root only , so it is a good idea to log in as root user to start with, without going through the hassle of changing permissions.

 You can also save your files to another computer on a network. This will require setting up a program called Samba to communicate with other Windows computers on that network. I may do a how-to on Samba at a later date. A DSL or Cable connection is automatically configured by the Linux distro as it is booting up in most cases so you can even go online if you wish.. Some distros may even have drivers for your wireless card making it easy to connect to your network as well. The dial-up modems or so-called Win-modems are another matter and are not usually worth the aggravation of trying to set them up.

 Some distributions offer another alternative to running from the CD drive. The copy2ram feature allows you to load the entire operating system into RAM at boot-up. The only drawback to this is that you should have at least 2 gigabytes of RAM. Once the operating system is loaded into RAM, your CD/DVD burner is freed up to help with file retrieval. Also, you will find that your computer runs much faster with everything loaded into RAM. 

Note: For really large files over 4 gigabytes, you may want to consider putting your hard drive into another computer with plenty of hard drive space to save your files, if possible,

Obviously, frequent backups of your data will save having to go through any of these procedures!.