Save Thousands With a Free Tool (You Already Have)

Yesterday I struck up a conversation with a fellow "mature" student while waiting to take a Final at my local JC. He was taking a photography class and he had his gear bag with him, and I asked him about his digital equipment.
(In a former life, I was a photography student too.)

He was a friendly sort, and chatting with him was easy. He explained that he was a professional, and that he had been "all digital" for a while now. And when he discovered my line of work, he told me a very sad story.. and I felt bad for him.

The sad story: It seems this fella kept all his photography on a large portable drive, which he kept referring to as a "jump drive", and a few weeks ago he went to plug it in and, his words, "immediately I heard strange noises, and smelled a funny burning smell". And his computer did a BSOD.

Oops.

He told me he unplugged the drive, and rebooted his computer, which came back up fine, and when he tried to reconnect the jump drive, nothing bad happened (no shooting flames) -- but nothing good did either. His jump drive was dead.
He told me that - at this point - he wasn't worried because he had bought the "extended warranty" for the drive and he was still covered.

Oops.

So he told me how he contacted the drive's manufacturer, and reported his problem, and was told that- yes, they would send him a new drive. And they told him that for recovering the data from the old drive, he was on his own. And that if he did use a 3rd-party to try to recover the photos, they would have to open the hard drive's case, which voids their warranty.
This came as quite a shock to my new friend, and it clearly still upset him.

He went on to tell me that he had no choice in the matter, he had to get those pictures back (one set was a wedding) and so he sent the drive off to a data recovery service.. which was able to get back almost every single file and cost him a bit over $2,500.

I told him he'd got a bargain.. but he didn't seem much cheered. In fact he clearly still felt cheated. He really thought the warranty should have covered his pictures.
I believe a lot of people have this.. gross misconception.

The simple facts are these:
* hard drives die
* nobody is going to make backup copies of your stuff for you unless you pay them. Like you would pay a maid, or chauffeur.
* Windows comes with a copy-my-files-from-here-to-there tool called (can you guess?) Windows Backup; which can be set to run automatically. On Vista, it can now burn-to-disc, even.
* Professional data recovery is $$$$

Please read How To Use Windows Backup Tool and follow the steps outlined. Or run a data backup and recovery tool of you own choosing. And do so often-- a backup dated 12/20/04 is not going to do you any good!

It would have taken my new friend just a few minutes to make a 'sync' of his drive. But he never did, and he's out the drive and $2,500.
I really did feel bad for him.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Getting Rid Of Malware, Step 1*

What do you do when your PC is displaying all the signs of having been infected, but your antivirus and anti-spyware scan reports come back clean?

This was the case for a fella who called me for advice recently. He had done things 'right' -- and by that I mean he has a firewall, he keeps his antivirus definitions up to date, and he runs a couple of anti-spyware applications -- but suspected his machine had been hacked anyway.

He couldn't do things he was used to doing (like deleting a file) and his machine was "really slow."
But according to his scanners, his machine is in perfect shape.

Tip of the day: If you should find yourself in a similar situation there are several steps you can take to help resolve your questions and (hopefully) fix your machine without taking the drastic step of wiping your hard drive, formatting, and reinstalling Windows.

The first step is to use a scanner that isn't installed on your machine. Here's two ways to do that: one, if your antivirus allows it (and most of them do these days), follow its instructions and make an antivirus recovery disk. This is a bootable disk that scans your system before Windows loads.

To use one, put it in your CD tray and restart your machine. A plain-text sentence will appear telling you to "press any key to boot from CD..." (if you don't see this, click here.) When you see it, hit your spacebar or, well, any other key, and then follow the instructions. When it's finished, remove the CD and restart your machine again.
[note: you may also use a properly prepared USB thumb drive. Click here to read my article on how to do that.]

A second method is to use an online scanner. I have a list, with links, of several good online scans on my Website, here. Quite a few of the online scanning tools will try to sell you their full application, but you're under no obligation to buy. The big advantage to these two methods lies in the fact that they have not been compromised, or altered, and the files and scanners on your machine may be-- the modification being done by the virus or hacker.

Another thing to do is scroll down to my "Today's free link" and download HiJack This! Run it and dump the result into a .txt file (there's instructions for this) and then register on one of the HiJack This! forums (there's instructions for this too) and post your results there. Before too long, an expert anti-malwareologist [don't bother looking: I just now made that word up] will have looked over the intricacies, and will post his analysis and instructions. These guys (and gals) are really, really good at what they do, and you can trust their answers.

Also run CheckDisk with the "r" "f" switches (this probably will require a reboot) to make sure the problem is not your hard drive.
Click on Start >Programs >Accessories >Command prompt. In the white-on-black window type "chkdsk /r /f" (no quotes, and be sure to include the spaces). You may be told that certain files are in use, and asked if you want to "schedule this at the next reboot Y/N?" Type in a "y" and restart your machine.

Hopefully these efforts will be rewarded with a rejuvenation of your machine, and you will be back in business again.  If not, you have my sympathy. You may have a rootkit and then your best solution is to re-format your hard drive and reinstall everything, or enlist the aid of a professional

Today's free link: HijackThis™ is a free utility which quickly scans your Windows computer to find settings that may have been changed by spyware, malware or other unwanted programs. HijackThis does not clean infections, but creates a report, or log file, with the results of the scan. A large community of users participates in online forums, where experts help interpret the scan results to clean up infected computers.

Copyright © 2007-8 Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

Thumb drives: did you get less than you paid for?

I received in my e-mail a question from a very upset reader yesterday. The reader wanted to let me know about a company that makes thumb drives (and other products, too) and told me I should warn you folks about how that company had ripped them off.

Now, I want you to rest assured, Dear Reader, and take joy and comfort in, that if and when I run across "bad things" in the world of tech-- I let you know about them. (I think we can all agree that a rip-off qualifies as a "bad thing".)

The writer named names and pointed fingers unabashedly.. and I suspect, had to go back and clean up their language before hitting Send. They were.. um, passionate in their outrage.
What had caught me eye, however, was the perpertrating company's name -- it was a (brand) name I think highly of; and frankly, so does rest of the industry.

What had our e-mail writer so irked? The company had ripped them off over a Gigabyte. They had paid for 16 GB's, and actually gotten just under 15. (14.9, to be exact.)
They felt short-changed, flim-flammed, and lied to... and as I may have mentioned, they did not like the feeling.
My letter writer's angst was natural, but misplaced.

When is a Gigabyte not a Gigabyte?
* Ever since the neolithic era of personal computers, way, way, way, back in the Early Days (circa 1984), when dinosaurs still roamed, and "kilo" was king (I'm talking before "mega", and well before "giga") the men who produced hard drives (aka "storage devices") described the size of their products using numbers other humans could understand. That is: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. of the good-old "Base 10" system [ten fingers and ten toes=20].
So to those guys, a "Giga" is 1,000,000,000... just like it is to you and me.
* Computers, in their relentless and perverse desire to frustrate, confuse, and generally annoy humans, decided not to speak in Base 10. Computers invented their own numbering system and named it "binary".
In this sick, twisted, and baffling numbering system, a one is still "1" (to sucker us, no doubt), but two is "10". And "3" (to us) is "11" (to them). Want a real kick in the head? Four is "100". And if you expect 5 to be "1,000", you're wrong-- it's 101.
A "Giga" to a computer is 1,073, 741, 824.

Let's see if I have done a good job and you've followed along: to the guy who is making the storage device, if he makes it big enough to hold 1,000,000,000 bytes of information, he calls it a "Gigabyte storage device" (always has and always will).
When you plug it into your computer, your machine will see 73,741,824 bytes less than what it thinks of as a Gigabyte, and it tells you that you you have ".93 GB's of available space".
In the case of my writer, we multiply the difference by 16... which equals 14.9 GB's of available space.

Let me be clear, the manufacturer did indeed provide a storage device that can hold 16,000, 000, 000 bytes of data-- 16 GB's. And machines "see" that as 14.9 GB's. So they're both right.. and my writer wasn't a victim of a scam, flim-flam, nor fraud.
It's just Base 10 vs. Base 2.

Yes. I understand.
And despite that, I actually like computers!

[For those of you who would like more of a description than my attempt, click here; and for more on binary, here.]

Today's free link: FreeRip 3, a C/Net Editor's 5-star CD application. Description: FreeRip is an easy to use application that can record digital audio tracks directly from compact discs to PC files. You can save CD audio tracks to CD-quality WAV files or encode them to OGG Vorbis, WMA, MP3 or Flac compressed audio formats. It can also convert/encode audio files from WMA/WAV/MP3/Vorbis/Flac. FreeRip also lets you adjust track volume and it supports ID3 tagging and CD-Text. Includes MP3 ID3 Tagger.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Online storage for data backup

Backup your data. Backup your files. Backup your pictures. Backup your 'system state'. Backup, backup, backup!

Backup your files. Please. (with sugar on top.)

Dear Reader, if your hard drive died.. would you lose valuable tax records? Irreplaceable photographs? How about your address book? Or.. have you followed my advice, so oft repeated here, and made two separate backups and stored them in two different locations/media types? If you have, you just may have saved yourself some tears of sorrow and frustration. (And if you run a business, maybe your livelihood..)
A good backup will mean the difference between a couple hours' of inconvenience --in case of a failure-- and total loss. Just recently, I wrote an article on how having the second backup saved my bacon on an XP machine (see Back in the saddle) when its hard drive decided enough was enough.
I cannot say it often enough: computers are complex devices and their parts DO fail (and usually provide little or no warning before they do). Make some copies of your stuff.

Tip of the day: consider storing one of your system backups online. Online backups are convenient, (most are) secure, and most important, offsite. "Off-site" means, literally, "not here", but "over there". This is a key element in enterprise "Disaster Continuity" and you can implement it as well by taking advantage of an online storage service.
Think of it as being like your safety deposit box. If your house (God forbid) were to burn down, get hit by a meteor, or swallowed by an earthquake.. and everything inside destroyed, you still have copies of your vital documents in your safety deposit box (right?).
With an online storage service, you "upload" your files, via the Internet, to somebody's server.. where they sit until you need them. When you need them, (and, I understand, hopefully you never will.. but.) you simply "download" them back onto your repaired machine.

A reader has written to ask me which of the many online storage services I recommend (thanks, Bryan W.) and inspired today's article. Sorry to say, I don't have a "favorite". What I can do is tell you what to look for, and point you to a comparison list. Fair enough?

* Security: the storage service you want will have security in place so that some hacker can't come rifling through the server, and read all your vital docs. (you wouldn't want your bank to leave the vault wide open, and all the safety deposit boxes unlocked.. would you?) This is usually accomplished through encryption. Look to see if the data transfer occurs using SSL, that the account is fully password protected and your stored data is encrypted by some method.
* Price: some of these "storage solutions" are quite pricey, charging 10 times as much as others. Why? Shrug. Because they can? While price alone shouldn't be a deciding factor, be aware that some places gouge.
* Size: These storage services charge you by how many Gigabytes you are going to take up on their server. There are MANY free online storage providers for very small allotments (typically 5GB's), but these really won't hold a full system state backup.. you need a "plan" that will allow you to store backup copies of each of your hard drives-- with a little room to spare. But unless you're a big corporation, you won't need Terabytes.
To quickly see how much data is currently on your hard-drive, Open My Computer (just "Computer" in Vista) and right-click on the icon representing your hard-drive(s), and choose "Properties" from the context menu. You will see a pie chart showing the total size of your files and folders.

Today's free link: PC World magazine has two comparison charts of online storage providers: read this first, then click here, which will give you their number one pick(s). Then take a look at Tom's Hardware discussion/article (click here) and, may I suggest, skipping ahead to the Conclusion will give you their results.
* My friend Mike, over on My Tech Talk, has also written about his experiences with online storage.
* And Bill Mullins discusses Mozy here.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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How to use Apple's disk imaging tool

iPeople have long claimed that "their" operating system has been ahead of Windows. They say that Windows is always playing 'catch-up' with the Mac... and "borrows" (OK. Some say "steal") the best ideas and features from the Mac OS.
This is an old, and often lively geek debate.

I won't waste your time rehashing it, or taking sides, but I will say that one area in which the Mac was "ahead" of Windows was it has, for some time now (since OS 9), included a disk imaging utility. Windows users have to purchase such a tool (or find a download) unless you own Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise editions and... who does?
OS 9 came out in 1999.

This Monday, I wrote about how having two backup copies of your files/photos/music really is a Must Have, and how that had saved me much aggravation (I also provided a link to my article on setting the Windows Backup utility to automatically provide back-up protection.) when one of my XP machines refused to boot. Today I will demonstrate how to make a system-state backup copy of your hard-drive on a Mac.

Tip of the day: Create a "ghost image" back-up of your entire hard-drive for easier disaster recovery. The advantages to disk images are: they are compressible, you can encrypt them, and they are fully searchable.. so you can go into them and retrieve single files or folders. They also "mount" easily, making for rapid "deployment".
The primary disadvantage lies in the fact that since you are bit-for-bit duplicating an entire drive (or partition), they can be quite large. Also, they're typically "fixed in time", and can become stale if not properly amended.

The large size of a partition (drive) image is (usually) not an issue if you apply the second principle of a good back-up strategy: store the copy some place other than on that hard-drive-- such as an external hard-drive or optical disc(s).

To make the image, you will use the utility called "Disk Utility", which is found in the "Utilities" folder under "Applications", (kinda where you'd expect to find it), which Mac describes as "/Applications/Utilities".
Open Finder, and click on the black triangle next to Applications. Scroll down to the bottom, and click on the black triangle next to Utilities. Then click on the Disk Utility to open it.

* Under the File menu choose "New", then "Disk Image".

* Make sure the volume (drive) you want to copy is selected, then click "Image".

* Chose Desktop from the "Where" pop-up menu.

Here, you can choose to encrypt, and/or compress. [Generally speaking, you should not encrypt your own (home) back-ups. A forgotten or misplaced password renders them useless!]

* Click "Save". (You may need to enter an Administrator's name/password.)

That's it. Congratulations, you're done. You will now have an icon on your desktop that is for all intents and purposes another hard-drive (exactly like your original). Double-clicking it "mounts" it and lets you run from it like any other volume (like a thumb drive).
You can (and should!) now move this image to another (attached) hard-drive, or burn it to CD/DVD(s) using Finder, or a disc burning utility.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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