How To...

Recovery is only as good as the LAST backup...

Now where have you seen this before?

A question: How much is your data worth?

Do you know how to figure out the cost of recreating all of your data if you lost it?

Stop by my site there is a lot of information about data backup

Backup your Data

A bootable device, or bootable USB.

A device that will allow you to boot your computer if you have a hard drive failure or it becomes corrupt.

How to make a USB device bootable

Computer not as fast as it used to be? Taking a long time to open a program or your files? Click on an email and it takes fifteem or twenty seconds to open when it used to 'pop' open? Your hard drive has become fragmented. To find out how to defrag your drive stop by my site.

Hard Drive Defragmentation

Consider this:
Do you have all the cd's and cd keys for the programs loaded on your computer? Do you know where they are? If you do you are one of the few.

If your hard drive failed today and you had it (or fixed it yourself) fixed how long would it take you to install all of those programs and get your desktop back to even close to what you had before the hard drive failed?

2 hours? 4? 8?

What if I told you it could be done in less than an hour, say maybe twenty minutes?

Unbelievable? Nope. True, I do it all the time.

It is called a drive image.

You will find complete insrtuctions on my web site.

Create an image of your hard drive for restoration

You can get more speed out of that old computer, maybe.

There is an old trick to gain new life from an older computer, the trick is Overclocking.

But there is a catch! [ain't there always?]

Actually two of them.

One: Your computer must have the option to overclock.
Two: You have to accomodate the increased heat overclocking produces.

Have a look at the article on my web site before you decide to overclock your computer!

Overclocking - Processor and FSB

Back in the good 'ol DOS days we used a special cable and a program like LapLink to transfer data from one computer to another. It was slow, sometines painfully slow but then it was Megs of data not Gigs of data.

Now you can transfer data from one computer in three or four different ways. Depending on how much you want to transfer and how fast you need to transfer the data.

One way is to write it to a CD or DVD on the source computer and then copy it from the the CD or DVD on the target computer.

Another way is to copy the data to a pen drive (if it isn't over say a gig or so) and then copy it on to the target computer.

Another way is with a special USB cable and interface that looks like Explorer, this of course costs money and you have to carry the cable and the setup program around with you. Although it is fairly fast there is a faster way.

The fastest way is with a network crossover cable. These days all computers have a built in network card so all you need is the special Cat5e or Cat6 cross over cable and the instructions for setting up the network paramaters, nothing extra to carry and the cable can be up to 30 feet with out signal loss.

If you want to know more about how to use either the USB or the network crossover cable have a look at the article I wrote on my web site:

Crossover cable connection to transfer files.

Motherboard upgrades can be simple or can be a nightmare.

Case in point - I am making a video on a How to upgrade your computer, new motherboard, processor, memory, and video card.

I am curzin' along and got it all together, video is made [not edited yet] and I decide it is TIME to power that puppy up!

Powers up, nothin' and I mean nothin' on the monitor! [scratchin head here!] So I go through the motherboard check list, nope, powers ok, all the cards and memory seated. The board is getting power so it may not be the power supply.

Re-read the documentation for the motheboard and the video card. Nope did all that.

What can the problem be? Maybe my power supply isn't powerful enough. Ok, pop down to my local electronics store pick up a 380 watt PS.

Plug in the new power supply - nada!

Power down the system, feel around the heat sinks, hummmmmm, not even warm. Now this is a Intel Core 2 Duo and them heat sinks should be warm if not HOT!

Remove the processor heat sink, ah... the Artic Cool heat sink compound is every where! I clean off all the excessive compound, take out the processor.

The compound leaked down into the processor socket. I think my new Intel Core2 Duo is FRIED!

Lesson: becareful with the heat sink compound, cost me 130 bucks!

Motherboard Upgrades


Troubleshooting Motherboard problems

External hard drives are very convenent devices. The thing is that if you need to make it bootable you have to open it up. Now this may cause you some heartburn because most Commercial external hard drive cases have a seal, and if you break the seal you void your waranty.

So if you don't care about the waranty or have a case that you put your own hard drive in then you can make it bootable.

Now you ask why would I want to make a bootable hard drive? Well there are a couple of reasons:

For recovery purposses or maybe you want it to be your boot drive so you can lock it up at night for safty reasons (never thought of that eh?).

I wrote an article about how to go about doing it here:

Making an External Hard drive bootable

Now what in the world (ours, not the one next door) is a virtual drive?

A virtual drive is a drive you make with the extra memory in your computer.

Neat, everyone has an extra gig or more to make another useable drive don't they?

Anyway what it does is it takes a portion of your system memory and makes a drive. The thing is if you modify any data that is present on the drive when you power down or restart your system it will be GONE! So if you do this make sure you make backups of any documents you change!

A good use for a virtual drive or ram drive (as they are mainly known as) is if you have a very large document say a spreadsheet. You copy it to the ram drive and then when you open it the time it takes will be extermaly fast. I used to use ram drives all the time back when hard drives and CD drives were slow, I would load up the ram drive and copy all the programs I would be using in to the ram drive then open them from there. Worked really good for games, they would play a lot faster.

So if you want to play with your extra memory here is the article I wrote:

Information about Virtual Drives

Loads of Virtual stuff these days, Virtal Drives, Networks, and Computers.

Actually a Virtual Computer or Virtual Machine (VM) is an emulaton same as a Virtual Drive. The software emulates a computer on your desktop. Neat.

If you are a developer or an experimnetor this is gerat, if you are a student and are learning a new operating system or want to do labs on a computer but don't want to trash you own computer this is a must.

I reviewed two programs that emulate a computer on your desktop: VM Ware and VirtualBox, read the reviews here:

Virtual Computers

Internal Solid state disk - SSD

After years of work the hard drive manufactures have came up with a hard drive that does not have any moving parts. Whoa, no more crashes!

This new technology uses the same type of flash chips as the 'pen' of 'flash' drives that are popular for small fast storage.

The differances are very apparent, the SSD has higher power requirements you can't get from USB. They are larger - but that won't last long - 2.5 and 3.5 inchs respectivly.

The maximum capacity at this time is 128 Gig. Now that is something you can use, not a 16meg or 8 gig ( you can load Windows XP on this drive) USB 'Jump' drive but a drive that is almost as fast as the memory in your computer.

A drive that the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 1.5 Millon hours.

A drive that can take 1500 G shock, try that with a tommato...

I think this technology will replace the old mechanical drives of today and very soon.

At this time the only draw back to the SSD is the price, but as with all new technology the price starts high and will soon be very affordable.

If you were to install a very affordable 32 Gig SSD as your primary drive and installed your OS on it can you believe a computer that is almost instant on?

Yea!

Read more about these drives here:
Internal Solid state disk - SSD

A couple of weeks ago a guy asked me what is Network Attached Storage - NAS?

After explaining how it works and giving an idea that had been cooking in the back of my mind for about six years I decided to write an article about NAS.

Really a NAS device is a computer with a lot of storage capacity and a Operating System that is bare bones, only the services required to connect to the newtwork, run the storage, and keep the thieves out. No frills, no thrills. Stripped down.

You have a extra pc that has a OS License? Have some extra memory? Have a couple of hard drives that are still good?

Then make your own NAS.

Read the full article here:
Network Attached Storage NAS