There are some fundamental principles and some optional decisions to be made when selecting a computer that you are going to have to live with for years.
Laptop or Desktop — pretty much determined by how much you propose to carry the computer around. Airplane usage is a no brainer. Moving it to a summer cabin, a little less obvious. If you need long runs, a laptop may drive you to get a docking station for use at the main location which will provide a real mouse, optionally a decent larger LCD panel, and will recharge batteries.
No matter what it is, plan on 512 MB memory minimum because XP needs it for smooth operation and to avoid excessive paging. 1 GB memory is fine if you want to add that little snappiness to a computer.
The hard disk drive in a desktop will be large enough for anything you might want to do. A laptop, however, is another matter currently as either about 30 or 80 MB will probably be the choices. Go for the 80 MB because you will need the additional space for all of your backups. It is either that or pick up an external USB drive.
If you are going to go the USB external hard drive route, be sure that the USB ports provide the industry standard 0.5 amp of power or it will require an additional power setup which can be a pain. This applies to both laptops and desktops and applies especially to all vendors.
Currently the CD/DVD standard is the DVD Dual Layer unit which gives about 8.5 GB of backup capacity on a single platter. Anything less than this is a mistake. It is true that the on-coming fight of Blue Ray and HD-DVD is on the horizon, but we can't wait around for the outcome.
In today's marketplace, you don't need to concern yourself with the speed of the processor—all of the vendors are putting in the fastest they can and all of them are overkill for what you need. The main problem is power consumption and heat which are the limiting factors. Get too for out on the bleeding edge, you may have problems.
A pet peeve of mine is that many manufacturers bury the activity lights in ways that makes them almost useless. Many manufacturers use light pipes to transfer the light of a LED to some worthless plastic front cover slapped on the front for effect. Not only are the covers of no beneficial value, they tend to make getting information out of the computer more difficult because the indicators often are all but unviewable.
The most critical decision is in the support material offered by the vendor. Unless you can verify that the vendor is presenting you with both the Restore CD and the Drivers CD, pass on that unit. Whenever you have problems with viruses and you need to reload the image, you don't want to wait two weeks while the vendor mails you a copy – if it is available at all. Micro Center keeps their images on line for years.
As soon as you receive the computer, make a backup of the load as presented by the vendor using Acronis onto either a separate drive or a partition that you create on the single hard drive. This is not a recommended backup but will permit you to get back to before a mistake within just a few minutes without any significant reloading time.
Since the image that is on the hard drive from the factory is usually at least 6 months to a year old, you need to install Spybot and Adaware from a source of your choice without going out onto the net. It is impressive how many times problems are found in "new" factory software.
Then go get the patches. Use either the Microsoft Windows update routines or the Shavlik downloader that does not use the Windows Advantage program that sometimes gives false positives about the validity of your license key. Furthermore, the Shavlik program updates all sorts of programs—not just those of Microsoft.
One caveat on the updating of the Windows patches: make an Acronis backup before beginning. Many of the patches will be without problems, but the hardware drivers patches can often be a problem. Having the opportunity to install a patch to a working interface such as an audio driver or a video driver can be a great temptation, but it can easily turn out to be a patch to a working piece of hardware that leaves it in a burned-out puddle of mess on your computer. A classic case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". I have had many computers that were not interfacing with the Internet properly become model citizens after an update. But then there were…
Once you have wiped out the Messenger problem, put into place an anti-virus and run it, set up the passwords required by the Scheduler and locked all daily runs into the scheduler, set up a program like MailWasher, run one last disk check and also defragged, made one last backup, then you are finally ready to go out onto the net to get your email – and not before.
Then to protect your investment in time, plan to make a copy of your invoice and support CDs that came with the computer, a BelArc inventory and put it into a baggie and attach the bag to the inside of the computer for when you need it. Also, if you take your computer to a shop, automatically you will be also carrying along the CDs that are necessary for the resurrection of the computer.
Don't forget to set up the RECOVERY CONSOLE in the boot stream so that if you need to reinitialize the BOOT BLOCK or other stinky actions, the tools to do so will already be there. See also PC Magazine "Install the Windows Recovery Console" 06.13.05 by Larry Seltzer That NO manufacturer does this by default is an indication how much they want the money and not the headaches of helping you.
The manufacturer has a sweetheart deal with one of the "for profit" antivirus programs. You are given a program for free that will expire in 90 days and will then demand $30 or more for a year's worth of "service".
Remove what is there and put in (a) Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security ($50), which includes a firewall, anti-virus, sensitive information breach protection, port protection and special program port accommodation, or (b) Grisoft's AVG 7 Free, or (c) the new EWIDO ANTISPYWARE from Grisoft.In all cases, first completely remove any Symantec software as it just causes more problems than it is worth.
One surprising thing is that the manufacturer almost never thinks to do is to make their master into a defragmented master so almost all of the world starts with a supremely fragmented disk right out of the box. All of the machinations above will also guarantee that a defragmentation is in order. In general, once a month is more than sufficient.
Other than the above steps that the manufacturer fails to inform you about, computing is now simple.
Paul F. Kunz, of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a talk about Bringing the Web to America - a partial history of the Internet. He is mentioned several times in Brief and Biased History of Preprint and Database Activities at the SLAC Library.
Paul Kunz received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1968, and first went to CERN that year to do an experiment as a member of the Saclay group. In 1971 he went on to Michigan State and worked on one of the first experiments at Fermilab. He joined SLAC in 1974, where he has been ever since.
In the late 1970s, Dr. Kunz invented the 168/E emulators and the concept of event processing via parallel processor farms. Dr. Kunz has been a pioneer amongst physics colleagues in adopting new computer technologies. Examples include his move to UNIX and object oriented programming over ten years ago. Lately, he has been giving a course, "C++ for Particle Physicists", a course that has been given over fifty times all over the world for more than 1700 students.
On 12 December 1991, Paul Kunz installed the first Web server outside of Europe at SLAC. Today, if you do not have access to the Web you are considered disadvantaged.
Before it made sense for Tim Berners-Lee to invent the Web at CERN, there had to a number of ingredients in place. Paul presented a history of how these ingredients were developed and the role the academic research community had in producing them. In particular, he addressed the role played by big science, including high energy physics, in giving us the World Wide Web and the Internet as we know it today.
Bringing the Web to America - Lecture by Paul F. Kunz (SLAC) - CERN, Geneva, 17 Sep 1999 duration: 1:10:57, 16 slides
Bringing the Web to America - Lecture by Paul F. Kunz - Web Lecture Archive Project
Paul Kunz provided the following information: "People asked me about a book with more details of the history of
networking. Here it is."
How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, James Gillies, Robert Cailliau (Oxford Paperbacks, 2000) ISBN 0192862073 (link to Amazon.com, with reviews and description)
Copyrighted July 2006
<N.B.- 13 Dec 06 - Gene Barlow of User Group Relations will give a presentation at the General Meeting.>
Backing up your computer's main hard drive is the most important task every user needs to do on a regular basis. Still, I hear end-users say they have nothing of value on their computers, so they really don't need to do backups. This is not true. I hope this article will help you understand why backups are important to do.
Most users think that the display, keyboard, and computer box are the main parts of their computer system. While the computer hardware is important, the real heart and soul of your computer are the many files stored on the hard drive. These files are what make the hardware run and do useful tasks. Without them, your computer would be useless.
Your computer's hard drive contains two general types of files on it - program files and data files. It is very important that you backup both of these types of files, but you will want to back them up for different reasons.
Program files include your Windows operating system and all of the application programs you run on your computer. Without them, your computer would do nothing. If your hard drive should fail without a backup, then you would have to spend days or weeks reloading all of these program files on your hard drive. This is a lot of work and you may never get your computer to run again like it did before the hard drive failed.
Data files are the files you create using the programs on your computer. These are the most important files you have on your computer. They are the email messages you send, the documents you write, the financial records you keep, your digital photographs and music files. So, when your hard drive fails on you, you will lose all of these important data files. This can be a major disaster for you. Let me tell you about a real situation that occurred this past year.
A member of a user groups in California had been taking lots of pictures with her digital camera. She saved these on her hard drive in albums ready to show her family and friends. Her wedding pictures were also saved on her hard drive. One morning, she could not get her hard drive to work. It had failed on her without a backup. She took the hard drive to a company specializing in recovering data from failed hard drives. They analyzed the drive and told her they could probably get most of her photos back and their fee for this service was $1000. She was shocked at this high fee, but all of her photos were very important to her, so she ended up paying this fee. A good backup would have saved her this expense.
Computer hard drives are very reliable today, but they still fail for many reasons. The hardware can wear out and stop working. A more common reason is that the programs on your main hard drive become corrupted and no longer function. It is not a question of if your hard drive will fail; it is more a question of when will it fail on you. You need to be prepared with a backup for when your hard drive does fails on you.
Backing up your computer's hard drive is a fairly simple concept. To backup your main hard drive, you copy all of the files on that drive and store them on another device that you can save away from your computer. Then if anything should happen to your main hard drive, you put a new hard drive in your computer and copy all of these important files to this new drive. You can be up and running again in minutes with a good backup.
Backing up your hard drive is very easy to do with the latest technology. To help you understand more about how to do backups, I have put together a training session titled the Perfect Backup Approach. You can find it on my web site at www.ugr.com/tutorials.html. Take a few minutes to watch this tutorial and you will have a much better understanding of how to do backups using the latest technology today.
To help you get started to backup your hard drive, we are running a Summer Special that includes the best backup software available today, Acronis True Image 9.0 Home edition. You can order this top rated backup software product for just $29 on our web site at www.usergroupstore.com. The Order Code is UGPBA. It normally sells for $50 in computer stores. To make the deal even better, we will include a copy of our Perfect Backup Approach training CD at this special price. Don't wait too long as the summer is coming to an end and this special will not last into the fall.
To make it easy for you to start to do backups, we have prepared a technical paper titled, Using Acronis True Image 9.0 Home edition that you can find on our web site at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html. Read and follow this article as you install and start to do backups and it will guide you through each of the steps in doing backups. It couldn't be easier to get started.
That completes this article on the importance of backing up your hard drive. If you have questions on this article or other questions about True Image or your hard drive, and I will try to assist you.
Gene Barlow
User Group Relations
PO Box 911600
St George, UT 84791-1600
www.ugr.com
This is one of a series of monthly technical articles that I distribute to those that have subscribed to this newsletter. You can subscribe at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html. Watch for them and learn more about your computer and its hard drive. If you do not want to receive these newsletters, simply reply and ask to have your name removed from the list and I will do so immediately. User group newsletter editors may print this article in their monthly newsletter as long as the article is printed in its entirety and not cut or edited. Please send me a copy of the newsletter containing the article so that I can see what groups are running the articles.