Backup, backup, backup!

Posted by Brian Haines on Jul 4, 2011 in Computers | 0 comments

Why should I backup my computer(s)?

Hard drives fail. That is it, plain and simple. They don’t need a reason to fail, a certain percentage of hard drives are going to fail at some point in their life and in most cases there is no advanced warning. Everything that you store on a computer hard drive should exist also on one or more backup locations, otherwise you are at risk of data loss.

Hard Drives Fail

If you are a business the impact is obvious and can be expensive. The loss of days, months even years of work can be devastating. Most businesses have computer consultants that will suggest backup strategies and professionally implement them. (Brian Haines 954-434-1968)

The home user is often left on their own and unsure of what to do. Maybe they think they don’t need a backup because their data isn’t as important. Then a hard drive crash and all the pictures you have taken for years are gone! This is very heartbreaking and unless you stored your photos in Web Albums using Picasa or a similar service they are lost forever.

What to backup to?

So you need to backup, but how, and to what? Well a simple and inexpensive solution is backup to a local external hard drive. There is the one-time purchase of the drive and it often comes with

XP Pro Laptop Refurbished – $300

Posted by Brian Haines on Nov 3, 2010 in Price Alerts | 0 comments

http://www.buy.com/prod/IBM-LENOVO-GRAND-SLAM–Refurbished/q/loc/101/217573743.html

$412.80 Laptop – Core 2 Duo 4GB 320GB 16” Win7

Posted by Brian Haines on May 13, 2010 in Price Alerts | 0 comments

This is a very good deal on a refurbished laptop. MSI is not well known but most of the personal computers I have built have MSI motherboards in them. This is a great laptop for the price. I can hardly keep from purchasing it for myself.

Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz 4GB 320GB DVD?RW DL 16” Windows 7 Home Premium w/Webcam

BUY.COM Laptop Deal

Keep Your Internet Email Safe

Posted by Brian Haines on Apr 13, 2010 in Computers | 0 comments

More and more people are having their Facebook, or Email account hacked recently. I use a few weak passwords myself, but I know many people who use pathetically weak passwords and I think it is well past time to strongly encourage everyone to strengthen their passwords.

“Why,” you say, “would anyone want to get into my email?” Well, its not for the latest political rant, the reward for helping a Nigerian Man collect his family fortune or a new place to buy pharmaceuticals. Access to your email means access to your personal information, gives a spammer the ability to send spam to all of your contacts, and often people store personal passwords for banking or other personal information in their email and or contacts.

Brian Haines recommends Windows 7

Posted by Brian Haines on Feb 17, 2010 in Computers | 0 comments

I knew we would all move to Windows 7 eventually, but I didn’t know that I would be this happy about it. Really.

Not only has Windows 7 performed well on my 2 year old laptop with only 2GB of RAM, I have enjoyed using it and find that some of the new features are welcomed improvements.

I was very critical of Windows Vista because of the very poor performance, more than glitches and bugs, of which there were some. The vast majority of computers that were sold with Windows Vista performed horridly mainly because they lacked the memory capacity needed to run the operating system effectively. Computers like my HP Pavilion dv6000 came with the memory maxed out at 2GB, but even those with 3GB or 4GB were barely able to run Vista and still have enough memory to run larger applications like Photoshop, and forget it if you needed to run more than a few applications at a time.