Replies

I am at the point where I say “why bother with anything”. I jumped on the Windows a bandwagon only to discover that it was a waste of time and money. I understand that Microsoft is going to move off of Windows 7, but it also means that I am not going to invest any sizable money into Microsoft products because they change their mind too much. However, I do have sympathy for my friends who use Apple iOS and iPads because they spend a lot of money and pay a premium price for something that is hard to keep updated. If you follow a lot of the YouTube videos they would talk about the new technological advances but those advances are only good if somebody uses them. I have not found a substantial use for USB 3.0, except for external hard drives. Therefore, why would I care about thunderbolt. I am happy that this article reminds us that we don’t have a lot of control as consumers except not to buy something, but with big companies that not going to feel it as much as you think. The article also reminds us that improvements come at a price. I’m okay with paid a price as long as it is an improvement that I can actually use without having to mortgage my house.

I have used Acronis, Avanquest Perfect Image, and Paragon disk utilities 15. The last 2 are basically identical in that Paragon is the parent coder for Avanquest. Acronis is much faster but the ability to customize your activity is much more limited than with Paragon. I’m actually happy with both. So far I haven’t had reason to go to a cloud imaging backup but I do use a cloud service for my file backups. The main advantage that I see for imaging software on your desktop is that you can create a startup disk to restore your images. If you are box has crashed, how are you going to get to the cloud to restore it. I would also caution that you actually need to use your applications and see how they work rather than waiting for a disaster and then discovering that you do not have all of your stuff. You also have to be aware that your external hard drive that you are using for an image storage has to be big enough to hold everything. A 2 TB image requires at least a 2 TB external drive. You may in fact need more than one external drive but you can either build one very cheaply or by one at one of the computer stores or even Costco. This is one of the areas where a USB 3.0 external drive actually comes in handy. The speed advantages noticeable although you may not be one of those “lucky people” to obtain the advertised USB speed. Backing up to a flash drive or zip drive is okay but you have to realize their limitations.

I don’t use the online password savers because every week there is somebody being hacked. Even companies that are supposed to be security conscious or security vendors don’t seem to be immune from this.

I used the PDF tools from Nuance. The software is not terribly expensive and it has a lot of decent tools. The only problem I have had with this company is that it’s customer service has not evolved from the “concept stage”. If you have a problem with their applications, you are going to crawl over broken glass to get some help. This also lightning PDF but as mentioned before, depending on which version of Microsoft Word that you have, word will save as a PDF if you have the driver.

CNET download is actually okay. You have to realize that in PCs there is nothing “free”. What bothered me is that CNET, as big as it is, got on the “additional software” bandwagon and when you download something you also download bloatware and you have to pay close attention to make sure that it is not installed. I used to subscribe to their technical update service but no more. In so far as their news and information shows, they are pretty good but they seem to have purged most of their people who criticized Apple Computers too much. Now they are like many other California-based media outlets, mostly a mouthpiece for Apple. I have uninstalled all of this software and or apps. However, you may find that a hard-to-find application may only be found on their download.com site.

Wireless will so that. USB ports will go out on you. The case mounted ones are the worse. I use an external USB powered hub now. You can replace the mouse which I have done a few times, AND check for cookies and the like.It won’t hurt to reinstall the driver.

I’m with the folks who advise a database. The thing to understand is that desktop database applications, like all the rest of this techno-wonder, have their own cats and dogs. MS Access WILL choke on you after a bit. I also have Access files with 1m+ records and it’s a hope and a prayer to fight against file corruption. If you have the savvy I would look at using a desktop data base that uses an SQL service like MS SQL server as Oracle is WAY too expensive. There are others that are free to moderately priced and my main caveat is that you want something from a company that is not going to go poof with the next IPO or bankruptcy filing. If you want to set this up yourself (recommended) rather than paying someone, it’s WORTH IT to get a short free course or one from a community college. Database management is more like coal mining with a stick than rocket science but lots of people (including me) have learned this stuff.

I had trauma with UEFI. I was building on a Z98 board and it had all kinds of boot problems.If you have a fairly straightforward and generic set up with SATA drives and USB 3.0 cards, you are not going to have a lot of trouble. I have SCSI drives mixed with SATA drives and could not get the Asus board to boot from the SCSI drive. I spent a very long time(days) with Asus tech support and had to use CMA to get everything right but then I had to RMA the board. I now have a Z97 board which is a lot less trauma but from time to time, the CMOS will reset itself to looking for SATA drives to boot from. In other motherboard forums, I see similar experiences.

I have read a lot of stuff about UEFI and still don’t see what the advantage is. Once you get past all of the CMOS setup eye candy, you began to realize that most of the stuff is for people who want to overclock and water cool. This is not a criticism of that group, and we are all lucky to have them because they can teach us a lot, but if you want a simple machine to do the ordinary stuff, and you want something a bit exotic on your board, be prepared for a lot of effort.

Within 6 months we have gone from Z87, which was supposed to be the world’s savior, through Z97, the replacement of the world’s savior, to Z99 using DDR 4 which is supposed to make the heavens open and the angels sing.

If you have some form of exotic device such as a SCSI drive, I highly recommend that you go to your manufacturer’s website and see what kind of workarounds that you have. I went to Adaptec’s website and found that all of my trauma have been documented but for the time being, no one is really going to do any serious upgrading of these devices. Therefore, that super great device that you have had all of these years, and works like a charm, is going to have to be trashed if you want to stay up on the latest and greatest.

Maybe a desktop database which has indexes and you can embed objects

Thanks for the reply… saw this file in my W7 root directory and wondered what it was.

I have an Asus Z87 motherboard with a Haswell i7 CPU and a lot of RAM as well as a new 750W PSU. The problem is that when I do a restart from Windows, the machine is trying to decide whether or not it wants to restart or shut down. It will not retain its CMOS boot information even though I recently changed the CMOS battery. I checked the BIOS and it does not need to be flashed. The company tech support seems to think that this is because I have 2 SCSI drives (which have adaptec PCI express adapter). Once it reads the drives, the machine boots up fairly well without a hitch but it does not want to retain or save the boot up information. To be more precise, it does this inconsistently. Sometimes it will restart normally and sometimes it will hesitate for more than 10 or 15 seconds. I then have to hit either the restart button or turn the machine off and turned on again. Suggestions?[/SIZE]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I appreciate that very much especially since this appears to be a problem inherent in the new generation of motherboards. I went to the Adaptec site and found that The 1st issue is with the UEFI protocol (http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17087/~/adaptec-controllers-and-uefi-motherboards). I guess I should consider myself “lucky” that I was able to modify the boot instructions to legacy. When I had earlier changed the boot instructions to UEFI, the board said that it did not recognize any of my boot devices. When I went back and changed the boot sequence to legacy OPROM the discontinuity became more controllable. I think that this is only part of the problem because my earlier MSI board, which had a traditional bios, had similar problems. The manufacturers don’t want to support SCSI anymore. Unfortunately, these drives last a long time and especially the ones that are 15.5 K RPM which means they generally have some good quality. I did notice that when I installed a 6 TB drive that the machine seem to “run out of gas”; it recognized the drive at all of that but it was basically saying that 6 TB is a lot of real estate to plow through but all the other things going on.

The CMOS battery is spanking brand-new and you are correct that when a board sits on a shelf in someone’s warehouse for any length of time, the batteries will degrade.

The weird thing is that I have had driver problem with the Asus driver CD and luckily have another stash of drivers. If you are installing these type boards and are using the traditional consumer drives, you’re not going to have a lot of problems. I noticed this when I built an i5 Z97 unit last month.

When I set the boot sequence to legacy, the machine finally shut off properly and more or less tried to boot on a restart. That is a good sign but they should not be these kinds of problems in these more “advanced” motherboards.

Again I want to thank all of you for your responses.

There is not going to be any privacy rule reform because there is too much money being made without it.

The shareholders of these companies all lobby Congress to alter or remake the laws in the way that they want and call the consumer a politically foul name for protesting. If you can remember back in the days when there was more than one ISP in a neighborhood, they almost had competition. The cable companies successfully lobbied Congress to give them regional monopolies under the fallacy that prices were going to be lowered and services were going to be improved (go back and check your handouts) and what we have is none of that.

Consumer anger means absolutely nothing to a big corporation unless it impacts the share price or the consumers are so enraged that sales drop off. This is true in government as well as the private sector. Look at what happened with the rollout of healthcare.gov and the impact it had on government leadership ratings. Look at what happened to Target and how its sales are dropping and how that is driving reforms (?), Look at the drop in Apple share prices because of Apple’s arrogance despite the proclamations of its apologists. It takes events of this size and magnitude to make a difference. Uncle and Auntie in Cheyenne Wyoming simply want to click the button and do something without all of this hassle. They may not even have antivirus or malware software installed. Think about all the celebrities who were hacked and the fact that they, like our relatives in Cheyenne Wyoming, they simply wanted to click the button.

Think about the horrible software that we endure regardless of the operating system that we use and things do not improve unless there is some sort of marketplace event. The days of publishing software because it was good have all long since gone and are not going to come back as long as you have a large number of IT companies whose customer service attitude is “we got your money, now go away we have a party to attend”.

New privacy laws and not going to happen unless there is a voting advantage in doing so; we can rail and scream all we want but unless it shows up in the voting booth, we are just wasting our breath. Look at what happened with do not track at all those other initiatives for privacy that gave great press coverage, but not much else.

One of the things that you have to watch out for is that web applications are still pretty much a wild West show. You can either block them or you can’t but it is very hard to modify them. I had installed MSE on one of my grandchildren’s computers because I read that “it does a good job”. There were so many pop-ups and last week they got one of those hijacking messages that even Malwarebytes failed to stop. In fact, I had the paid version of Malwarebytes on that machine and the event still occurred. We are in a race with the shareholders (which includes many of us) and those of us who want some form of reliability and privacy. We are losing that battle. I have also used system utilities and a few others but they all pretty much do the same thing. I would agree with everyone that once you settle on one or 2 applications, that is probably going to be what you’re going to stick with for some time. I have tried some of the applications recommended in this forum and found that they did not work for me but that is okay because it worked for other people.[/FONT][/SIZE]

I used iolo once try try to “speed up” my older computer, and it completely messed up my computer and rendered it unable to connect to the internet. After trying to search for solutions with my phone and trying various other things, I ended up reinstalling everything from scratch. I was a carbonite user at the time, so I had my data backed up, but no image backup. It was a huge pain. To make matters worse, attempts to contact iolo put me onto some sort of email list they have. They refused to remove me from their marketing list. After numerous requests to unsubscribe via email and by phone, I finally had my isp block their email so I wouldn’t have to delete them.

I will never again use a third party cleaner like that. Lesson learned for me.

I’m since on a newer machine, and have ditched carbonite and follow Woody’s Windows 7 backup advise with several external hard drives that I rotate. So I’ll have an image for next time! 🙂

I have used IOLO for years. It has some very useful features but I would agree that you have to use them with caution. For example, the global fixing thing I would be very cautious of. This is true for all of the system mechanic tools. If you use the global repair features on these tools it will inevitably hit your registry and then you are going to have real problems. I also have Carbonite and for file backup is pretty good but I also agree that having your own external hard drives is highly recommended. I also agree that many of these vendors are persistent in their marketing and although their products do not change much year-to-year, they have to have a way of continuing the revenue stream or improving it. In the end, it all depends on what it is you want from your rig. You also have to remember that there is no such thing as “free” in any of these applications; to have to get paid some type of way.

Thank you all for your replies. My son has an SSD on his i7 rig and there is no doubt about its speed. What I am observing is that even though the motherboard does not wear out in the traditional sense, things start to choke and gawk over time. It is the traditional race between hardware and software. My X58 motherboard works perfectly okay and nothing is showing any signs of the usual failures, but the refresh rate for certain applications is getting worse and worse.

There is also the matter of the video card and a lot of other things but that’s okay because under certain conditions, is still runs pretty quickly.

Again, thanks to all of you for your responses.