Should you consider a Solid State Computer Drive?

One “Next Big Thing” that’s been slow to arrive is the Solid State Drive for personal computers.

Only high prices have kept these super-rugged drives from replacing the fragile old spinning platters mechanical hard drives.

For years now it’s been a “chicken-and-egg” thing. Not enough people were buying SSDs because the price was too high. Therefore the price couldn’t come down because there wasn’t a high production volume. Now, thanks to gamers and other high-end computer enthusiasts, SSD prices have dropped considerably.

Will this be your “Year of the SSD”? If so, you have a lot to gain and some nasty computing threats to lose.

Why You Should Get a Solid State Drive

What’s the most unreliable part of a personal computer? No, it’s not really the user – it’s that spinning 7,200 RPM, high precision mechanical disk drive. Your hard drive is guaranteed to fail eventually. The only questions are when and how expensive it’ll be to restore your precious data afterwards – if that’s possible.

Hard drive manufacturers rate expected failures as MTBF hours of operation (“Mean Time Between Failures” or “Mean Time Before Failure”). But few people pay attention to MTBF numbers, because they’re heavily dependent on statistics and are derived under ideal conditions, making them extremely optimistic. Real world conditions for spinning platters hard drives are anything but ideal. And many of them run 24/7/365 – meaning lots of MTBF hours are logged.

Standard hard drives are:

• Sensitive to mechanical shock and vibration
• High precision mechanical devices with tight tolerances, several coordinated moving parts and many failure modes. Yet these fragile devices must be mass produced at very low cost to achieve their commodity pricing.
• Known to have a limited lifetime, typically a few years
• Must be kept cool to prevent early failure
• Are comparatively slow at loading your data
• Can be a bit noisy

Solid State Drives:

• Have no moving parts
• Are not mechanical devices, but interconnected memory chips
• Make no noise
• Are more heat tolerant

Jim Coe

Microsoft Outlook won’t load – Quick fix

Have you ever attempted to start Microsoft Outlook and nothing happened? Myself and my computer consulting clients have this problem from time to time.

You could fix this by restarting Windows, but there is a quicker way. This problem is caused because some processes didn’t completely shut down the last time the program was running. Some parts are still running, even though you don’t see them. Since Outlook thinks it’s already running, and wants to prevent multiple instances from loading, it doesn’t load again.

So the fix is to disable the parts that are running invisibly – using the Windows Task Manager:

1. Start Task Manager with the keyboard combo Ctrl+Alt+Del
2. You’ll get either a menu from which to select Task Manager or Task Manager itself
3. In Task Manager, go to the “Processes” tab
4. Scroll down the long list of running processes (did you know Windows was so busy?) and look for any called “OUTLOOK.EXE”. When you find one, select it and use the “End Process” button to kill it. Ignore the warning.
5. Once you’ve disabled all Outlook processes, Outlook will behave normally

Even though you’ll get warnings when “ending” any process, I’ve never had a problem killing Outlook processes in this way.  Stopping other process may be more of a problem – depending on what they are.

Hope this helps…

Feel free to leave a comment below

Until next time…
_jim coe

Jim Coe

Joys of the right-click

Wireless Optical Mouse

Trackball Mouse

I find that many of my Windows computer clients don’t benefit from the many things which that right mouse button can be made to do.

Right-Clicking for Windows 7
You can right-click on any file to get a handy pop-up context menu – including the ability to invoke many programs you may have which are associated with that type of file.

Right-Clicking on the Windows Taskbar
A right-click on the Taskbar, on any item that’s currently running, will get you a list of the most recent things you’ve done with that item, the ability to add it to a permanent list or to close the item – and more. So much easier to right-click on the Word icon on the Windows Taskbar, then select a document you’ve been working on, then to find that document in Windows Explorer (the Windows File Manager). It works like the “File > Recent” menu inside Word.

Right-Clicking on the desktop background
A right-click on the desktop background (not on an icon) will let you customize your desktop (“Personalize”) or create a new desktop shortcut or a new desktop folder (“New”). You can also make changes there to your display settings.

Right-Dragging for Windows 7
File Copy or file Move?
If you right drag a file to some destination (another folder or such) you’ll get a handy pop-up menu where you can choose to Copy or to Move that file, or to Cancel the operation. This prevents you from accidentally moving a program which you only meant to copy – which is easy to do by mistake with a Left-Drag.

Right-Clicking for Applications and Microsoft Office
A right-click on any document in Office 2010 pops up a context menu, which can save you from having to search through the menu system to find what you want to do. Right-clicking on a Word “Style” lets you modify it and do several other things.
Right-clicking on the Office 2010 “Quick Access Toolbar” lets you add items to this handy widget (it’s in the upper left corner of your Office application’s screen).

There are many more ways to use right-clicking in Windows and Office than I can list here. Microsoft has an online article about right-clicking: Microsoft Article

Types of Mice:
Mechanical Mouse
The old original mouse used a Teflon coated ball, which rolled against small axels inside the mouse. That ball would pick up debris from the surface under your mouse and had to be removed and cleaned from time to time (along with those interior axels) to prevent erratic behavior of the mouse cursor. I hate to think of the number of mice which were probably discarded when all they needed was a good cleaning.

Optical Mouse
Problems with the mechanical mouse were solved by the optical mouse, which bounces a beam of light from an LED off of your working surface to a light sensor inside the mouse. You still have to clean the mouse periodically, if the LED or sensor become obscured by debris. But this happens infrequently.

Wireless Mouse
The other big change in mice (and keyboards) was to use a small radio transceiver to communicate between the mouse or keyboard and the computer, instead of a physical cable. The disadvantage is that this requires batteries. So, you have to keep batteries in stock and change them fairly often.

Space Mouse
Some digital artists and gamers use a “3D Space Mouse”, which responds to its position in space. In other words, instead of moving it around on a tabletop, you wave it around in the air.

Track Mouse
Some computer users have always preferred a “Trackball” to a mouse. Because of this, some mouse manufacturers offer a mouse with a built-in trackball. Never used a Trackball? Try one in a computer store some time – you might love it. The idea is that the Trackball case (or Track Mouse) stays still and you roll the ball around to move the mouse cursor on your display.

Trackball Wired Mouse

That Mouse Wheel
If you have a mouse with a wheel between the left and right buttons, you can use that to scroll up and down in your documents. The mouse wheel also doubles as a 3rd button, since you can click it.

Hope this helped you….
_jim coe

Jim Coe

Windows rearranges your desktop icons – don’t you just hate that?

Save your icon setup

Windows 7 rearranged my (many) desktop icons twice this morning, when we had a couple of power outages!

Happily I had the free “Icon Restore” by Tim Taylor, so my desktop was back to normal in a couple of mouse clicks. Icon Restore is not listed as working in Windows 7, but that’s never been a problem for me. Check it out!

Change desktop icon size

Your desktop icons may also change size, forcing their rearrangement. You can change the size of all desktop icons at the same time. Right-click on the desktop background > View > choose a Large, Medium Or Small icon size.

Jim Coe

See top FREE Windows products instead

As a professional computer consultant, I recommend the best and most reliable products to my clients. I have to. If I didn’t, I’d be stuck fixing them for free – couldn’t charge for a mistake like that.

By keeping my clients from using poor products I save them money, hassles and risk - and save myself the aggravation of unnecessary free repairs. 

Below are my recommendations:

Backup Software:
For home and small office users, Acronis ‘True Image Home edition’ is the best choice. I’ve been using Acronis True Image for a few years now and find it trustworthy, of high quality, reliable, and as easy to setup and use as any such product – which is to say, not real easy. I’ve had considerable experience with 3 or 4 backup programs in the past.

I had issues with the first version of True Image I’d ever used, several versions ago, but none for years. Iv’e run it under Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. In my own office, I’m currently running it under both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows XP Pro.

Recover from a Disaster to ‘Bare Metal’
Don’t settle for a backup solution (like uploading to the web) which only protects your work product. Think of the productive hours you’d loose if your hard drive failed and you had to install another drive, plus install Windows (and do many, many Windows Updates) and install all your software products (do you even know where all your license keys are?)! And what about your emails? And re-connecting to the Internet and maybe a local network? Sure, you can pay someone to do all that for you. But it’s a huge, expensive job and things are bound to go missing – A good backup image is a so very much easier way to recover.

Use a program, like Acronis True Image backup, which makes an image of your whole hard drive. Such an image can be easily written right back onto a new hard drive (or a new computer), giving you a perfect clone of your previous drive and all software and settings. All you need to do is use their built-in feature to burn a “Recovery CD” when you first install True Image – or when you make major changes to your computer, or every few months for good measure. After a disaster, you can then simply start your computer from this CD, start the recovery process with a couple of clicks and supply your image backup file (from your backup hard drive).

And True Image also lets you easily recover individual files or folders from inside your backup image (unlike the Windows 7 backup). It really delivers peace of mind. And as a pro who has had to do several full disaster recoveries, I know it works, and I know how many hours or days it saves after a disaster.

How prepared are you for a computer disaster?

Do you even know where all the license numbers and serial numbers and web addresses for all your software products and vendor sites are? Many people don’t. And if you bought a big name brand computer like a Dell, the only disaster recovery they offer is to run a CD which will restore your computer to the condition it was in when you bought it – minus all the software and work you’ve added since.

Backup Hardware:
To my mind, there are 2 kinds of backup computer hardware:

1. The hard drive you save your periodic backup image onto (I prefer Seagate hard drives).
2. An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which will keep your computer and other components running long enough for a safe and automatic shutdown of your computer (even if you’re not around) when your power fails. A UPS is also great if you need to keep a VOIP phone service, like Vonage, running during a blackout.

Check back for more recommendations in the future…
_jim coe

Jim Coe

It’s happened to my clients – it CAN happen to you!
Your computers and all your paperwork are destroyed in an office fire or other computer disaster. What will you do?

Even if you’re prepared for a computer disaster, you’ll still have to:

• Deal with your insurance inspector and claims adjuster
• Hire a cleanup contractor and salvage what you can
• Arrange to rebuild your old office, if that’s what you want
• Locate, procure, rent and move into a temporary or permanent new office (or your home)
• Buy everything new
  • Office furniture and appliances
  • Telephone equipment
  • Computers and all peripherals, including Internet and network equipment
  • Other minor office and computer equipment

You’ll have to recover all your computer programs, emails and data from your backup software:

• Setup new computers, peripheral equipment, Internet connection and networking
• Use your backup software to recover your programs, operating system and data to your new computers
• And while you’re handling all that, you’ll have to carry on with your current business projects and management

If you’re not prepared for a disaster

You could be driven out of business or forced to start over – without all your records, computers, software, data, etc. A good disaster recovery plan, excellent backup software and backup drives should be part of every business computer installation.

How to prepare:
Insurance
I’m no insurance expert, but I can suggest a couple of things.

You need a policy that will cover not only your office and computer equipment, but the costs of restarting your business, like renting a temporary office, cleaning up your destroyed office, a computer consultant (unless you have the skills yourself) and much else.

Be aware of what software replacement terms your policy carries. Will it pay replacement costs for software products? How about your own past work product, all those documents, databases, spreadsheets, presentations, etc?

You’ll need to work closely with an insurer to make sure everything is actually covered and that you understand your policy thoroughly.

Maybe a good method would be to sit down and write out a scenario of what would actually happen in your unique situation, if a bad disaster occurred. If you don’t give it serious thought now, you’re going to have a hard time covering everything you’ll need when disaster strikes.

I don’t even want to think about running a business without insurance, let alone without good backup software.

Computer security:
Backup software and methods:
The key to easier computer disaster recovery is off-site backups.

Here’s my recommended plan:
Use large USB flash drives or USB external hard drives to make nightly, automatic full “image” type backups of each computer’s hard drives, while you’re out of your office.

Every few days (as many days as you’re willing to loose everything for) swap each backup drive with an alternate backup drive and store the backup drive with the latest backup image off-site.

Never leave both backup drives for each computer in your office at the same time – for any longer than absolutely necessary. In the event of a disaster, you must not lose both backup drives and your computers at the same time.

Do NOT make “file-by-file” backups!
Don’t use backup software such as those which backup to the Internet, or the Windows 7 built-in file-by-file backup tool. You must use an “image backup”, which makes a “snapshot” of your whole hard drive, including your operating system. Only an image backup can restore your old computer (or a new one) to exactly as it was at the time of the backup. Please note that the Windows 7 image backup does not allow you to recover individual files or folders. Acronis “True Image” backup software and Storagecraft’s “Shadow Protect” backup software do.

A file-by-file backup can only restore your work product, not your operating system or your programs. If all you have is a file-by-file backup from which to recover your computer – you’ll first have to re-install Windows (if you even have a Windows CD), get your Internet connection working, do many, many online Windows updates (restarting your computer after each one),  get your email working all over again and re-install all your programs (if you have your original program media and all your software license keys).

Only then will you be able to restore your work files from your file-by-file backup. That can easily be a full day’s work for each computer, versus maybe one hour to restore everything from an image type backup software in one step – with no need for your software license keys or original program media.

Microsoft Windows 7 does offer a built-in image backup. But unlike Acronis True Image or StorageCraft’s Shadow Protect backup programs, it doesn’t let you recover files or folders from inside the saved image. You would have to keep both an image backup AND a file-by-file backup for complete protection.

Do NOT depend on an online backup!
You can do file-by-file backups to servers on the Internet. Besides the fact that these are only file-by-file backups:

A ‘gotcha’
There is one important caveat about the ability of an image backup software to quickly restore your computer to exactly the state it was in when you made the backup. Suppose your destroyed computer was running the 32 bit Windows XP operating system and the new computer you purchased to replace it runs 64 bit Windows 7.

32 bit programs have to be specially handled by a 64 bit version of Windows 7. But the 32 bit programs you restore from a backup made with 32 bit Windows XP won’t have had that special treatment and won’t run. You would need to re-install them under Windows 7. There may also be other issues when restoring from one version of your operating system to another.

Best security and disaster recovery products:

• Acronis True Image Home edition backup program -$49.99. My first choice for the home office/small office, or
• Shadow Protect Desktop image backup program – $89.95. My second choice
• Balarc Advisor free computer inventory program
• Seagate USB external hard drives, from Newegg.com online store
• Storm Case water-tight cases by Hardigg Cases. These expensive cases can often be found used on eBay

Also have:

• An excellent insurance policy and an insurance agent you trust
• A relationship with an expert and capable personal computer consultant

The future of backup

Solid State Drives (SSD) are slowly coming down in price. As they gain in sales numbers, the price will drop faster. With no moving parts these SSDs are much more reliable than today’s complex, delicate, high precision, high RPM hard drives. They are also extremely fast to start Windows and run programs.

Most data disasters are caused by hard drive failures, so I encourage you to switch to a Solid State hard drive as soon as possible. You can use a smaller SSD with only Windows and your programs on it as you “boot drive” and store your large amounts of data on a second standard hard drive, in order to buy a less expensive SSD drive.

Disclaimer

My usual disclaimer that I get a (tiny) sales commission if you purchase Acronis Ture Image Home backup or buy from the Newegg store via links on this blog.

Until next time – I hope you’re prepared…

_jim coe

Jim Coe

A To-Do program I can use – at last…

So much to organize!

I really need a great organizer! I manage a lot of projects. Each has many levels, criteria, priorities, ideas, gathered intelligence, data to track, etc., etc., etc.  And that’s just my business stuff!

It’s hell to try to handle all that on paper and not much better using typical office software. I built my first personal computer in 1976 (soldering iron and the hacking of surplus equipment required).

Since then, I’ve tried out a dozen different organizing programs, or GTD (Get Things Done) programs, as some call them. They all had one downside or another that eventually made them too much bother. I even tried to write my own, by programming the Microsoft Access Database Manager. But that didn’t nail it either.

At Last – the MLO Organizer!

Over a year ago, I discovered “MyLifeOrganized”. This organizer quickly turned my skepticism into enthusiasm. MLO is:

• Quick and easy to use
• Expands in complexity as needed
• Has many project management tools and features
• Presents your tasks any way you need
• Has an excellent mobile app for just about any smart phone
• Syncs with Microsoft Outlook Tasks
• …and just behaves as your intuition expects – no muss, no fuss.

Unlike all the other task management software I’ve tried to use, MLO doesn’t get unwieldy or slow as the number of new and completed tasks grows.

I still keep each day’s to-do’s on paper, but anything not requiring action this very day goes into MLO for review every day.

What a relief not to have to wade through a big pile of paper to stay on track! And managing all the edits to that pile of papers was much harder than keeping MLO up to date.

MLO – How it Works (links to MLO website):

Image from MLO website

Not a CRM:

The only complaint I have with MLO is that is doesn’t have specific Customer Relationship Management features. Of course you can save tasks under a customer’s name and do all the usual task manager stuff, but I don’t think you can track a customer’s contact history, make appointments, autodial them, interface to calendars, etc.

Perhaps I’m foolish to expect a company to do “just a little” CRM, since CRM is such a large, complex and specialized set of tasks.

Features:

Too many to detail here, but their site has all the details and a video or two.

Basically, you:

1. Enter tasks or sub-tasks, in an organized hierarchy
2. Set their Categories and “Contexts” (easily customizable on-the-fly)
3. Set their priorities, time frames and relationships to other task’s priorities
4. Report them out in various ways
5. Quickly get to work doing, instead of administering

Price (Windows version):

Free or a Full Version  for $45.95

MLO Website:

http://www.mylifeorganized.net/

http://www.mylifeorganized.net/products/my-life-organized/how-it-works.htm

MLO Blog:

http://blog.mylifeorganized.net/

_________________________________________

      _Jim coe

Jim Coe

Fix Windows quickly and do periodic Windows maintenance with the best tools

In this video tutorial, I show how to use the $30 ‘JV16 Power Tools’ product from Macecraft Software to fix Windows via a Registry clean or repair, and how to use some of the many other tools included in the ‘Power Tools’ kit to make your life with Windows easier. Jv-16 is great for periodic Windows maintenance too.

Please note the control on the video player which opens the player to full screen size.

Until next time – here’s to timely Windows maintenance…
_jim coe

Jim Coe

Jim Coe

Carry your whole computer in your pocket? Yes! (well everything you really need)

It’s now possible to put almost everything you use every day, including your Microsoft Office and other programs, onto a USB flash drive you can carry in your pocket!

How do they do that?
The secret is an inexpensive flash drive operating system. It’s called Ceedo and it uses the resources of any Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer, which it happens to be plugged into, to create a toolbar with all your stuff from  your own desktop back on your own computer. But it doesn’t  modify the computer it’s plugged into in any way (unless you want to save some work there or such). So now you can take the equivalent of your own computer with you in a shirt pocket, and run your own favorite applications and use your own data on any Windows computer anywhere.

Ceedo works on any USB device (USB 2.0 recommended for faster operation – as usual). So, you can also use it on USB portable hard drives.

Ceedo Personal works great for me!
Ceedo is good looking and reliable, can be password protected – and it’s smart. For example (after asking) it automatically updates to the latest version when you plug it in.

I stumbled onto Ceedo after I had wiped a flash drive and went looking for a new operating system to put on it. Now I’ve used Ceedo on a flash drive for several months and I love it. It’s perfect when I visit the offices of one of my computer consulting or web development and marketing services clients. And I even figured out a quick and easy way to update my flash drive with all the latest stuff from my own PC whenever I plug in my Ceedo flash drive.

Is Ceedo secure?
Of course I have my anti-virus program automatically scan my Ceedo flash drive whenever I plug it into my own computer. I don’t take chances on picking up malware from an infected PC. But as far as I can tell, Ceedo is no security risk.

Does it really have ALL your stuff?
Ceedo Personal comes equipped to support all the applications you’d expect, such as Microsoft office, a good file manager (like Windows Explorer), email and much more. But “out of the box” it won’t let you run every application you might have.

But they have a fix for that. For an additional$19.95 they offer their “Argo Application Installer“. It lets you easily convert a great many programs into mobile versions, which will then run on your Ceedo flash drive. When I bought Ceedo Personal, the Argo tool came as a free bonus and it’s worked great for me.

What’s the cost?
Ceedo Personal costs just $39. Both Ceedo Personal and Argo have free trials too, so there’s really no risk in testing them out. With the cost of  flash drives (at newegg.com) down to $25 for 16 GB or under $60 for 32 GB, all this computer mobility is quite inexpensive.

Until next time – happy mobile computing!
_jim coe

Jim Coe