A Better Way to Deal with Owners' Manuals

Take a moment and think about all the appliances, electronic equipment, and handheld devices you have in your house. Now think about how many owners' manuals that means! It's always a good idea to keep these manuals, but it's so easy to misplace them. Since they're rarely used and not the most important type of document you may have in your house, they usually end up in some box in the attic where you've forgotten you've placed them.

Why would you want to keep an owner's manual?
There are a few good reasons you'd want to keep an owner's manual, especially for things like major appliances. Although the chances of you actually using an owner's manual are slim to none, there are moments where it's extremely important to have one on hand. For example, if your washing machine breaks down, you may need the owner's manual to have model numbers and/or warranty information to compare if it would be cheaper to repair it instead of buying a new one. If your stereo is suddenly showing some kind of error code in it's display, an owner's manual could explain what it means and what you could do to fix it.

Taking advantage of technology
So many records are kept electronically now, including medical records, court documents, account information, etc. So why not owners' manuals? Believe it or not, there are ways to keep your owners' manuals electronically and not have to pay a dime. Of course, it's a good idea to keep the actual physical copy somewhere, but if you were to lose it, or couldn't get to it very easily, it might be nice to have a back-up copy, just in case.

The first way you could store an owner's manual electronically is to use a scanner and save it to your computer. From there, you have a few choices. You could save it to your computer's hard drive, save it to a USB flash drive, or save it to both. The only disadvantage to this method is the ability to lose the information either by deleting it by accident or your computer becomes corrupted. Also, since a USB flash drive is a small physical device, it might be easily lost as well.

Another method of saving your owners' manuals electronically is to actually find them online. Using popular search engines like Yahoo and Google can usually yield some good results, if you know what you're looking for. If you take a good look at the physical item you are trying to find a manual for, you can usually at least gather a company name, and often times a model number. Popping this information into a search engine with the words 'owner's manual' afterwards will sometimes find you an electronic version of the manual you are looking for.

Lastly, a growing popular method is to register with an online owners' manual library. One of my person favorites is Manuals Online, because you can find a vast majority of owners' manuals and you can store them under your user name as well. Other great choices:


Manuals Online
Online Owners' Manuals
All Owners' Manuals
Books 4 Cars