Category: Computers

My friend Jenny has been having problems with her computers. She has 4 computers in her house and only one of them was still working. So I went over there last Saturday to work on them which is when I found out about heat pipes. That computer was still overheating some, but the bigger problem was that a virus (or something) had associated all .exe files with Windows Media Player and they wouldn’t run anymore, just open the media player (which in turn couldn’t do anything with the .exe files since they aren’t music or video). Since all anti-virus software is an .exe, this prevents fixing it. And I couldn’t re-associate .exe since Windows Explorer wouldn’t open (it’s an exe too). So I wound up taking the hard drive out, scanning it in my desktop computer that I brought over there (I actually brought my new and old desktops over since one has SATA hard drive connections and the older one has IDE and I wasn’t sure what kind of drive the affected computer had in it; it turned out to be SATA and mounting it was no problem except that in the BIOS I had to enable that hard drive port instead of the computer just recognizing whether a drive was present or not). A scan turned up 79 viruses or threats, at least some of which were trojans (sometimes browser “cookies” are considered threats, but they don’t really do any damage, unlike trojans). So Kaspersky got rid of all of the viruses. The computer would run and could browse the web, but you still couldn’t open executables and it would overheat and shut itself off in a few minutes. But I found a Microsoft online wizard named Mr. Fix It that would reset the .exe association and that worked perfectly. There are also a lot of shady website out there that offer fixes like that, but I didn’t want to try anything like that with a site I wasn’t familiar with.

Continue reading “Win2k All Over Again”

Mom dropped off her new Dell Inspiron 1545 for me to set up this weekend. Her old laptop was a Frys store brand, but this is a Dell and the price was the same (except that she got an extended warranty on the first one and this one she is just doubling Dell’s one-year warranty with her credit card). Moore’s law says that the number of transistors on a computer processor doubles every two years. It has been five years so everything should be at least 4 times better and maybe 6 times. Let’s see:

The old processor was a 1.3GHz Celeron and this is 2.2GHz Dual Core Pentium. Since there are two cores (processors) now I’m going to say this qualifies, but I have no idea how many transistors are on a Celeron or a Pentium. She had 256MB RAM and now she is getting 3 GB of RAM (1 GB was added to the old laptop later on). So that is 12 times. The old hard drive is 40 GB, the new one is 250 GB (6 times).

There are some notable changes between laptops of yore and today. Most of the ports, including the USB ports, were on the back of the old computer. Now they are on the sides. Her laptop didn’t come with a built-in wireless card (though the computer that replaced it when her hinge cracked did) but it was 802.11g and this one is also 802.11g (I guess that’s more of a notable lack of change). In the meantime they have come out with 802.11n, and most of the higher end laptops support that, but this one does not. There is a SD card reader in the front for transferring pictures from a digital camera. Also, while the old laptop had a microphone, this one has a microphone and a web cam for internet video calls. Also this screen is wider in relation to the height to mimic HDTV’s. That changes the overall shape of the laptop a little, but this one seems about the same size and maybe a pound lighter than the old one (and noticeably lighter than my 2-year old Dell), which was pretty heavy. Lastly, this computer has Windows 7 and the old one had Windows XP, so she skipped right over Vista. I like Windows 7 so far. It seems pretty snappy and hasn’t given me a ton of warning messages.

Jenny at work has a laptop she bought in 2007 from Gateway. This thing is huge, maybe 17 inches. While it was under warranty the hard drive failed so she took it back to Best Buy and they put a new one in. She lost all of the data (they said they could recover the data for $1200) and started doing backups more regularly. It may have failed again under warranty, putting her on her third hard drive. Now it is no longer under warranty and the hard drive has failed again. I took a look at it this weekend to see if there was anything I could do. Well, it wouldn’t boot up. So I tried to start it from the Vista installation CD (or DVD, not sure), bypassing the hard drive. But even this didn’t work. It would start, but as part of the boot sequence it would look for any hard drives and it would hang while it was identifying the hard drive (I think; it would hang on the screen with the status bar that says © Microsoft Corporation).

Continue reading “Hard Drives Gone Bad”

After ending up with a couple of extra notebook computer hard drives when I did the Archos upgrade, I ordered some cheap ($4.90) cases from China on eBay that would let me convert the hard drives to portable drives. They arrived this morning. I got a blue one and a black one. One will hold the 40 GB drive and the other the 20 GB drive (the blue 40 GB drive is for Nicole).

To set it up, you just take the end off of the case, plug the hard drive into it, slide it back in place, and screw two tiny little screws into the sides to hold it securely (they include a small philips head screwdriver). They even threw in a cheap looking leather sleeve for it. My computer had no problem recognizing it and I didn’t need the extra USB plug that can provide extra power (the only thing kind of non-standard is that they used the wide USB A end instead of a mini USB or USB B plug for the drive). The connection is USB 2.0, so data transferred very quickly. I moved 3.81 GB of videos over in 3 minutes 39 seconds, so 17.4 MB per second. That is at least a few times faster than the tests I did on my flash drives and way faster than when I connect the USB 1.1 Archos where 3 GB of data would take 20 minutes or so. USB 2.0 will allow faster speeds than that, so the limiting factor might be the hard drive itself or my computer. It is noticeably snappy when opening folders on it, similar to folders on the computer’s hard drive.

Anyway, this is pretty neat and a good use for a hard drive from an old laptop computer.

For a while I’ve been carrying around a flash drive on my keychain. It helps if I ever need to transfer files from work or pictures from Susan’s house, or whatever. One of the things I put on there is paystubs that I download from work and then bring home. And sometimes I want some spreadsheet from home to be available when I’m at work, so I’ve been carrying around some other financial stuff too. I realized I don’t want just anyone to be able to get all of this if I ever lose the drive or my keys.

I looked around for some kind of flash drive vault software and soon found a free one called TrueCrypt. Like a lot of really good SourceForge collaborations, it has a huge feature set as people make recommendations for improvements. That has also made it kind of complicated: it has a 119 page user manual. I had to follow the first 23 pages of instructions just to store my first file (and this is the abbreviated quick start).

TrueCrypt’s approach is kind of neat. You create an encrypted file on the flash drive (I chose to make my 300 MB out of a 2 GB drive) that can be any name (so I chose katie.avi and figured people would just think it was a video of my dog that they couldn’t open with Windows Media Player for some reason). You open the TrueCrypt software (stored in unprotected space on the drive), open the archive file, enter your password, and it mounts a new drive letter where you can see all of your files and also drag and drop files just like another flash drive (for instance, my flash drive might be drive J:, but the TrueCrypt archive will show up as drive M:).

I still don’t have the hang of it yet, but the level of protection is really impressive. They recommend a 20-letter password and they generate some kind of random key to use by having you move the mouse around for 30 seconds. There are other options like different security algorithms and you can hide the archive file if you want, but I just started on this last night.