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hard drive

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The Clicking Sound of Your Hard Drive

For people who have computers for quite some time, you would normally notice that your CPU would be as silent as possible. Aside from perhaps the fan or when your CD drive loads, you would hardly hear a thing.

When you boot up your PC, the beep is all you expect to hear. But what if you suddenly hear something weird such as clicking sound? Chances are you will open it up and try to find if there is something malfunctioning. In some cases, you may notice that it is coming from your hard disk. Once this happens, rest assured your hard disk is about to give way.

Hard drives have a certain life span. Some say it depends on the brand but others say that they are just the same. The thing here is that your data and files are perhaps the most important stuff to be considered. Once weird sounds start, you better start backing up your files by writing them on CDRs.

If you value your files and important documents, you should do it immediately. While you can make use of the hard disk drive for the meantime, you never know when the next time would become the

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Written by PC Freak on June 27th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on CDRs and optical drive and CPU and otherSoftware and Hard Drives and hard drive.

TrueCrypt Is Cool

My business requires me to safeguard the security of certain files. For years I have used Encrypted Magic Folders (EMF) from PC-Magic to encrypt those files, and to hide them from the view of an interloper. I loved it, because files were always encrypted on disk and yet were fully accessible to applications. However, when I upgraded to Vista 64, the new EMF crashed my system so completely that it was unbootable even in safe mode. I tried it twice, recovered twice with some difficulty, and gave up on EMF.

In the meantime I had heard about TrueCrypt, an open-source disk encryption package for Windows and Linux. It’s free! I must admit that after I downloaded it, I needed some time to get my mind around it.

Here are the basics:

  • Using the TrueCrypt application you create a large “container” file on your system, larger than you will need to hold your encrypted files. It can be on any read/write disk, even a memory stick, and is initially filled with random data.
  • The container file can be copied, moved, deleted, or renamed just like any other file. It’s not fragile.

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Written by Don on December 11th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on otherSoftware and data encryption and TrueCrypt and Backup and hard drive and vista and Computer and computer and 64-bit.

RAID Backup

Working perfectly!

Usually, a person needs a backup when their disk drive fails. All disk drives fail sometime - there is no escape from that truth. But there are other reasons for keeping good backups:

  • Total disaster, such as a fire or flood that destroys the whole computer and all nearby backups.
  • Deliberate mischief, such as a virus that deletes important files.
  • Accidental deletion or modification of one or more files.

I’m sure there are more reasons, but if we cover these we’ll probably have the rest covered.

Drive Failure:

Disk drive failure can mostly be avoided by using two mirrored drives in a configuration known as RAID 1. RAID means Redundant Array of Independent Drives, and has several well-defined levels. RAID 1 is a simple comfiguration with two drives which always contain exactly the same information, hence the term “mirrored.” If either drive fails, the other simply becomes the system’s sole drive and takes over without a hitch. Since the probability of two drives failing at once is very small, RAID 1 pretty well covers that problem. The new computer here employs RAID 1.

Total Disaster:

If the building burns…

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Written by Don on December 2nd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on mirrored disks and otherSoftware and Backup and hard drive and raid.

Installing the Upgrade on a Blank Hard Drive

Few days back, I bought Windows Vista Business Upgrade the other day so I could start playing with it. Since I did not want to mess up the configuration of my current computer, I thought I would install Vista on a blank hard drive.

Sounds easy enough, after all the previous versions of Windows required you to have a legitimate copy of an older Windows operating system and simply asked for that copy during the install so they could verify upgrade compliance.

Before installing Windows Vista, I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on my current system. As I suspected, my video card was not up to Vista standards and the 512MB of RAM was on the low end of what Vista wanted. (more…)

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Written by Jason on November 17th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on current system and current computer and chipset and proceeding and source windows and vista upgrade advisor and video controller and installing windows and hard drive and Hardware and Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and vista and windows operating system and system memory and video card and Windows.

The Computer Is Built!

And I’m pleased with it.

Performance:

Windows Experience Index screen in Vista, click to enlargeThe overall Windows Experience Index is 5.4, which I believe is pretty good. The limiting subscore (5.4) is the disks, actually, and they are very high-speed SATA II 7200-RPM drives, though you can get 10,000 RPM drives which should be faster yet. The highest subscore is the Windows Aero graphics, 5.9. Everything else falls between, so the system is reasonably well balanced.

Quietness:

When there is nothing else going on in the room, TV and the old computer turned off, sitting at my desk, I can hear a faint, low-pitched roar similar to the sound you hear by holding a large seashell up to your ear, but certainly not that loud. It has a resonance to it, despite my efforts to dampen sounds inside the box. I think that the rear fan is the origin of most of the noise. It’s not objectionable, because it’s faint, but I will probably try to do more to limit the sound, such as:
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Written by Don on November 4th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on quiet and otherSoftware and hard drive and raid and vista.

Speed up Firefox without reinstalling

You cannot imagine life without Firefox but over time, your favorite browser keeps getting slower and slower.

Not only is it slow, Firefox sometimes hangs for no reason, consumes a large amount of memory and CPU usage can climb to 90% or more when you have multiple tabs open simultaneously.

You have uninstalled most of the extensions and toolbars, deleted all the cookies and internet temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates but none of this has helped you speed-up Firefox. (more…)

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Written by Jason on November 3rd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on software updates and new profile and temporary files and cpu usage and profile folder and firefox add ons and hard drive and Internet and Firefox and Internet and Web and Web.

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