-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPBatteries can and do act as capacitors, to an extent absorbing voltage spikes depending on their properties. But it also occurred to me that unless you have a separate UPS, you lose the inherent ability of a laptop to survive a power outage.
Most UPS units also regulate voltages, which is also important if you are like me and run your laptop on AC power with the battery out. Do not try running with the battery out unless you are connecting through a UPS.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPAnother part of this article made mention of the Windows 7 “God Mode”. Actually, there are a number of “God Modes” in Windows 7. An article in CNet News gives a rundown on several of them. These modes may be convenient for people like myself who heavily customize Windows, but unless you like to really get under the hood of Windows, these modes are not particularly useful, and harmful changes can be made using these modes. If you want to create these folders, be very careful about getting the corresponding ID Strings (hex-codes) correct.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10426627-56.html?tag=mncol;mlt_related “Windows 7 Has Lots of God Modes” by Ina Fried (“Beyond Binary” column)
Fascinating stuff, but definitely beyond what most users will ever need to know.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPTo reduce the size and time required time to back up my 100-Gb internal hard drive to a USB 2.0 backup drive with Acronis True Image, I have partitioned my internal drive. Using Partition Magic or Partition Commander (or the Acronis Disk Director Program), the C:Windows partition of Windows XP Professional needs only 40 Gb or so for the OS and the prograams in a typical installation. So allow 50-60 Gb, just to allow for defragmenting. (Vista and Windows 7, especially the 64-bit versions, take up much more disk space and take longer to back up.) Thus, I only back up about 13-16 Gb of used disk space each time I make an Acronis Full Image Backup. And I do not use a backup program for my Data Partition. I just use Windows Copy/Paste to a Data Partition on the external drive. Thus, I only recopy data files which have changed each week.
Using these methods, Acronis takes 20 minutes to make a 10 Gb backup archive, using Normal Compression. That’s a Full Backup of C:Windows. Only the C:Windows partition ever needs to be restored, unless there’s a catastrophic hard drive failure. In that case, my 15Gb of data can be restored from where I keep them on the external drive as a second operation if necessary. I once restored my Windows Partition from a backup archive, and the whole process took about 45 minutes, start to finish, using the Acronis Rescue Media, since Windows would not boot.
My point is that with careful planning and execution, there’s no need to back up every bit and byte on your internal drive in order to get a full restore in the event of disaster or virus infections. Time and effort are saved by separating your data from your OS and Programs, using partitioning methods. Just remember to make your first backup of Windows BEFORE shrinking the C:Windows partition, as this operation can destroy data. Full Image Backups can be restored to a partition whose size does not match the original partition — this is NOT true of so-called Ghost clones of the entire hard drive! And partitioning an external drive, to give your backup program its own dedicated space for backup archives, is a good idea in my experience. If any software comes with the external hard drive, delete it by formatting the drive to NTFS partitions. My opinion of pre-bundled backup and hard drive packages is that they cause more problems than they prevent.
So, as to the time involved, it is trivial — much shorter than a typical antivirus deep scan. And external hard drives are very reliable, but I have used Windows copy/paste to copy the Acronis Archives and data backups to a second external drive — this takes about ten minutes per archive, plus about a half-hour to select and copy important data files each week. A year’s worth of backup archives (for Windows XP, done monthly) can easily fit on a 500 Gb hard drive, which costs $50 to $100 at any of my local computer stores. True Image Home 2010, with full support and interim updates, costs $69.00 direct from Acronis. (Support and updates are sold separately from the program now.) The program without support or updates costs $39.00 direct.
I hope some of this information will help make folks more efficient and less hesitant about doing regular system and data backups. It really is in your better interests to get comfortable doing this.
Note about times — I don’t have a modern, dual-core computer. So my backups are nowhere near as fast in raw speed as PaulB’s backups. So for me, efficiency in what to back up and keeping backups as small as possible is critical to success.
PaulB — the differences in I/O speeds are partly due to the data structures. OS and Programs structures often consist of fewer files, but each file is larger, than typical non-media data files. More folders = slower I/O rates, as new folders must be created and entered into the File System on the target drive before actual data transfers can occur. e-SATA does have a faster throughput than USB 2, but this is trivial compared with the problem of re-creating the File Structures on the target drive.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPThreatfire is known to be incompatible with all Norton products. Choose one or the other. Also incompatible are AVG and Super Antispyware. There may be others, including Kaspersky.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPIt isn’t just Zone Alarm which delays the opening of the Windows Desktop (delays the startup of Explorer.exe, among other things). Avast has a boot-time rootkit scan which runs whenever you log into any account, every time. Comodo is another firewall with proactive defenses which delays other programs’ startups, sometimes causing drivers to fail to load (and resulting in a Blue Screen or reboot).
I do NOT recommend using the Windows XP firewall without third party additions. Vista and Windows 7 have perfectly good firewalls, but Windows XP’s firewall is infamous for its lack of outbound protections — the very kind of protections you need to detect and clobber today’s bots and Trojan Horse infections. Sometimes you have to just live with a certain amount of inconvenience for the sake of added protections. And Avast doesn’t really need to do its boot-time scans if you are doing weekly Deep Scans for rootkits anyway. So turn off the feature. Not so easy in Zone Alarm, which does not provide the user with such fine-tuning controls.
And do NOT apply Startup Delays to any firewall! You would be defeating the reason you have a firewall, by allowing some applications to launch and contact the Internet before they can be vetted by the firewall’s defenses.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPIt isn’t just Zone Alarm which delays the opening of the Windows Desktop (delays the startup of Explorer.exe, among other things). Avast has a boot-time rootkit scan which runs whenever you log into any account, every time. Comodo is another firewall with proactive defenses which delays other programs’ startups, sometimes causing drivers to fail to load (and resulting in a Blue Screen or reboot).
I do NOT recommend using the Windows XP firewall without third party additions. Vista and Windows 7 have perfectly good firewalls, but Windows XP’s firewall is infamous for its lack of outbound protections — the very kind of protections you need to detect and clobber today’s bots and Trojan Horse infections. Sometimes you have to just live with a certain amount of inconvenience for the sake of added protections. And Avast doesn’t really need to do its boot-time scans if you are doing weekly Deep Scans for rootkits anyway. So turn off the feature. Not so easy in Zone Alarm, which does not provide the user with such fine-tuning controls.
And do NOT apply Startup Delays to any firewall! You would be defeating the reason you have a firewall, by allowing some applications to launch and contact the Internet before they can be vetted by the firewall’s defenses.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPIt isn’t just Zone Alarm which delays the opening of the Windows Desktop (delays the startup of Explorer.exe, among other things). Avast has a boot-time rootkit scan which runs whenever you log into any account, every time. Comodo is another firewall with proactive defenses which delays other programs’ startups, sometimes causing drivers to fail to load (and resulting in a Blue Screen or reboot).
I do NOT recommend using the Windows XP firewall without third party additions. Vista and Windows 7 have perfectly good firewalls, but Windows XP’s firewall is infamous for its lack of outbound protections — the very kind of protections you need to detect and clobber today’s bots and Trojan Horse infections. Sometimes you have to just live with a certain amount of inconvenience for the sake of added protections. And Avast doesn’t really need to do its boot-time scans if you are doing weekly Deep Scans for rootkits anyway. So turn off the feature. Not so easy in Zone Alarm, which does not provide the user with such fine-tuning controls.
And do NOT apply Startup Delays to any firewall! You would be defeating the reason you have a firewall, by allowing some applications to launch and contact the Internet before they can be vetted by the firewall’s defenses.
-- rc primak
-
rc primak
AskWoody_MVPIt isn’t just Zone Alarm which delays the opening of the Windows Desktop (delays the startup of Explorer.exe, among other things). Avast has a boot-time rootkit scan which runs whenever you log into any account, every time. Comodo is another firewall with proactive defenses which delays other programs’ startups, sometimes causing drivers to fail to load (and resulting in a Blue Screen or reboot).
I do NOT recommend using the Windows XP firewall without third party additions. Vista and Windows 7 have perfectly good firewalls, but Windows XP’s firewall is infamous for its lack of outbound protections — the very kind of protections you need to detect and clobber today’s bots and Trojan Horse infections. Sometimes you have to just live with a certain amount of inconvenience for the sake of added protections. And Avast doesn’t really need to do its boot-time scans if you are doing weekly Deep Scans for rootkits anyway. So turn off the feature. Not so easy in Zone Alarm, which does not provide the user with such fine-tuning controls.
And do NOT apply Startup Delays to any firewall! You would be defeating the reason you have a firewall, by allowing some applications to launch and contact the Internet before they can be vetted by the firewall’s defenses.
-- rc primak
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