Got Computer Questions?

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Hi Guys,

When I was meeting with Nick this past Friday he recommended I start a thread here. If anyone has any computer questions, problems, etc, feel free to ask me here. I've been building & repairing computers, doing networking, etc for 20 years. I've built over 400 computers in that time as well and spent 10 years trying to find the cheapest way to build quality computers for schools. I'll respond as quickly as I can. I moved on to software a few years ago (I have a degree in Computer Science) but still consult and keep up with everything.

I can see quite a few good posts getting buried in this thread quickly so I'll make a little index here:

1. Backing up your data: http://www.nachi.org/forum/showpost....15&postcount=3
2. How to free up disk space: http://www.nachi.org/forum/showpost....4&postcount=14

[Bruce A. King]

Thanks for offering to help

I also have experience with PC's but have not kept up to date lately.
I always tell people that it takes a PC to fix a PC. Many times you need one working PC to search the internet for the answer to the problem since a lot of PC problems are not with the hardware.

I often wonder how many HI's trust their hard drive and have a poor backup plan?

Anyone who depends on a PC should have at least 2-3 of them and backups made very often. A backup should be also kept at another location, I would not even trust a fire safe with my entire business.

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Extremely good point. I get several calls a month from home inspectors who had a hard drive crash and want to know how they can recover their inpsections. Short of sending out your hard drive to hard drive recovery place (which isn't a guarantee and is extremely expensive), you can't.

You have several options for backing up your important data. It would be best if you chose SEVERAL of these methods or perform each several times (i.e. 2 external drives, external and upload).

1. The simplest method of backing up is to back up to an external hard drive. Once hooked up these drives appear like another drive on your computer ( the e: drive for example). They can be set up to run automatically every night or every week. You can drag and drop your files to the new computer or use a software program to automatically back them up. External hard drives are very cheap. You can pick up good ones at http://www.newegg.com (my favorite online store) for great prices. Here's todays special, a 250 gig external drive for $75. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148233 . I have 2 of these drives and always rotate where I keep them. The Maxtor one touch backups are nice, but I prefer to use the free Cobian software I talk about below.

2. Backup to CD/DVD/Tape. You can use a program like NERO or even the free burner software built into XP/Vista/Mac to burn files to a cd/dvd. Make sure to store the copies in multiple places. If you store them at home with your computer and your home burns down, your backups are gone too. Give a copy to your parents, your safe deposit box, wherever. The drawback of this method is that as your needs grow you might have to copy to mutiple dvd's each time which requires more effort on your part.

3. Backup online! If you have a website and some extra storage space you can use a free program like Cobian Backup http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm to automatically sync your files with your webserver via ftp. This great program can also copy your website to your local computer. You can set how often, how many backups to keep, etc. I use Cobian backup for backing up our website as well as my nightly computer backups to external hard drives. You can also use one of the many online backup services available online. If your software has an upload online feature for your reports such as Home Inspector Pro (ours), HomeGauge's or InspectVue's, use it! The price isn't that much and is well worth it to protect your data.

Review: Check out the FREE Cobian Backup for all your needs: http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

[Larry D. Kage]

Originally Posted by dmaricic

Hi Guys,

When I was meeting with Nick this past Friday he recommended I start a thread here. If anyone has any computer questions, problems, etc, feel free to ask me here. I've been building & repairing computers, doing networking, etc for 20 years. I've built over 400 computers in that time as well and spent 10 years trying to find the cheapest way to build quality computers for schools. I'll respond as quickly as I can. I moved on to software a few years ago (I have a degree in Computer Science) but still consult and keep up with everything.

Nice offer, Dominic. I'm sure I have questions at some point as will others.

[Bruce A. King]

I use to work on several machines (8mil. to 15mil. each) that had one host computer and many other computers in the subsystems.

After years of seeing these things up and quit and drives going bad I am so careful that I actually save my report several times during the writing process to a memory stick. Overkill? You bet! Will I ever have to start a report over from scratch at midnight when I have two inspections the next day? Nope, won't ever happen to me.

[Scott Widick]

Hello Dominic, Thanx for stopping by our NACHI chapter meeting in Colorado. Your SEO tips were great. It is nice to see you offering to help further here. It is ROCKTOBER .....

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Saving while you work is definitely important. Laptops lose power, tablets get dropped and children run by and kick the computer Something that I found that people don't realize (althought I'm sure you do) is that memory sticks go bad pretty easily. Especially with the fact that people throw them in their pockets and close to magnetic objects frequently.

No problem Scott! I'm glad you enjoyed the tips. If you need any more, let me know.

[Greg Bell]

I have an HP Pavilion m7560n. It has a 320 gb hard drive. My problem is that the c hard drive has storage of 18 gb and the d drive has 280 gb. How do I change the storage capacity of the c drive?

Thanks,

[Michael Larson]

Originally Posted by gbell

I have an HP Pavilion m7560n. It has a 320 gb hard drive. My problem is that the c hard drive has storage of 18 gb and the d drive has 280 gb. How do I change the storage capacity of the c drive?

Thanks,

Dom is offline but here is a Solution

about $70

[Stephen W. Stanczyk]

Greg,

I would leave it alone. I have my desktop purposely set this way. The "Programs" go on the C drive, all documents, music, back-ups and anything besides the program itself, go on the D drive. I don't get any cookies or temp files or garbage on my D drive so it is easier to protect and keep clean. All those internet and security problems stay on the smaller C drive. Granted some programs nowadays are pretty darn big, but you would think 18 GB would hold the programs you need.

Steve

[Dominic J. Maricic]

See what happens when I go out to eat!

Like Mike stated, Partition Magic is the way that most people go. 18 gigs is a little small so I can see you wanting to make the partition larger. Partition is what each drive is called when one physical drive is segmented into multiple drives.

Like Steve stated, there are several good reasons to split your hard drive up into partitions. The first being that if you install all your programs and store all your documents and photos to the 2nd drive, you are more protected if your Windows installation becomes corrupted. When that happens you can simply format the C drive and reinstall Windows without the worry of losing any of your data. You WILL more than likely have to reintall most of your programs as most programs require the Windows registry to operate. You would still have the indivdual settings and files created by those programs though. We actually made our software not use the registry for just this reason. Be careful when you partition the drives though. Most manufactures have another hidden partition that is used to restore the system in case of emergencies and this partition shows up in Partition Magic and other programs.

Repartitioning your hard drive is a delicate operation and things occasionaly do go wrong, as you are changing drive sizes but want your data kept intact. Make sure to backup before your perform the repartition.

There are a few free alteratives though. Check out:
http://partitionlogic.org.uk/index.html as it's probably the easiest free alternative to use. If you are going to use it with Vista make sure to check out the notes.

[cwhite2]

Originally Posted by sstanczyk

I have my desktop purposely set this way. The "Programs" go on the C drive, all documents, music, back-ups and anything besides the program itself, go on the D drive.

I do the same except I have 3 directories C = my operating system (Windows) only, D = just my programs & Z = a 2nd separate hard drive just for mass storage. This way, after a while when Windows gets buggy & sluggish - I can do a clean install of the operating system only & not have to re-install EVERYTHING else too.

[Greg Bell]

Thanks I will try to free up some space.

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Ahh, freeing up some space. Check out this GREAT free utility called WinDirStat. It is a must have in any computer geeks aresenal. It graphically maps out your hard drive so that the largest files take up the biggest blocks. It makes it extremely easy to clean up. Let me know how it works for you and how much you find that you deleted. Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Did anyone ever check out windirstat? It's a cool program!