jsloan, you may have missed my point. My ISP stops the stuff before filling my in-basket. It tells me what's there, & lets me decide whether I want to look at it or not. I delete the infected ones without looking at them, & 99% of the others, as well. Occasionally I allow them to forward mails from companies I have done business with in the past, but if I didn't have them stopping most of the commercial stuff, my in-basket would be full of unwanted advertising offers very day.

Roy, we went thru a period where we were getting all kinds of junk email. What we started doing was marking them as spam before deleting them. It took a while but now we hardly ever get junk email.

Hi Roy

Something we do is NOT give our email address to everyone, only to those we want to hear from. I used to get tons of spam, but now I treat my email as my phone number, if I want to hear from a particular company, then I'll give them the email.

I often tell people that I don't have email, that alone usually stops them cold. I also have been known to tell them I am using a friends computer, if they need more info, etc, then they have to call.

Yes, it is aggravating.

Had another hard drive fail.

Data lost: None
Downtime: None
Time to restore system to full fail-safe: ~15 minutes
a. Confirm bad drive: 2 minutes
b. Connect cold spare: 2 minutes
c. Initialize (now hot) spare: 2 minutes
d. Remove dead drive: 1 minute
e. Reboot, load, and execute restoration program: 8 minutes (Restoration will take several hours, but it runs in the background and doesn't affect use of the computer).

I note that the drives in my peecee are "enterprise" units (supposedly more robust than "consumer-grade" - and more costly).

Anyway, why no data loss or major inconvenience? I run RAID 5 with 3 drives. If one fails, the remedy is what I typed above. The same thing applies to RAID 1 (typically 2 drives); if one had failed, there'd be no data loss, and incorporating the new drive into the RAID 1 is slightly less complex than with my array.

Nevertheless, I image my drives on an external drive weekly, so even if two drives had failed, I'd be up in a few hours.

Speed Up Adobe Flash

If you have the right nVidia graphics card...

The releases will significantly speed up things like You Tube.

Adobe, in concert ("collusion?") with nVidia has released v10.1 Beta, which takes advantage of PhySX capabilities of later nVidia graphics cards.

Since it's likely that few Barthmobiler Forum members have an 8-series (or later) nVidia graphics card, I'm not posting any details.

If you have one of the capable cards, PM me, and I'll direct you to the sites to snag what you need.

So, Bippy, when's the last time you defragged your drives (weekly, right?)

And of course you run Malwarebytes, AdAware, and Spybot Search and Destroy routinely, right?

And back up vital files to that external hard drive, right?

Naturally, you've implemented a RAID 1 or 5 on your PeeCee to insure against drive failure, right?

No? Sorry, there's no "Sympathy smiley"...

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
So, Bippy, when's the last time you defragged your drives (weekly, right?)

I do this about once a month since my PeeCee keeps telling me there is no reason to defrag when it checks.

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
And of course you run Malwarebytes, AdAware, and Spybot Search and Destroy routinely, right?

I do not use the Malwalebytes program - I do use the other ones. Should I get that one too?

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
And back up vital files to that external hard drive, right?

I use Data Deposit box which monitors and backs up my files automatically each time a file changes. It also holds the last 3 copies & allows me to download any of my important files. I do this so I can get the most up to date files that are on my home/biz PeeCee without changing the core files.

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
Naturally, you've implemented a RAID 1 or 5 on your PeeCee to insure against drive failure, right?

This I have not done because it seems a little overwhelming. I tried to find out more about how to do this but I keep getting "Information Overload" and it seems a little overwhelming. Sometimes when I hear the jargon my eyes roll into the back of my head and I start to suck my thumbs while recoiling into a fetal position.

If you can "Dumb it down for me" and coach me on "How to do" and which way is best with actual links to what you're talking about. I might give it a go.

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
No? Sorry, there's no "Sympathy smiley"...

This one is probably more appropriate.

quote:

I do this about once a month since my PeeCee keeps telling me there is no reason to defrag when it checks.

Monthly is fine. I got into the habit when I was maintaining my agency's servers; we had a lot of data coming, going, and changing. NTFS-formatted drives do a better job of indexing and writing (Win98 and later) than FAT. If the defragger checks and says, "no need", don't bother. Very little speed is gained by defragging when fragmentation is <5%.

quote:

I do not use the Malwalebytes program - I do use the other ones. Should I get that one too?

Yep. Can't have too many effective malware removal tools.

quote:

If you can "Dumb it down for me" and coach me on "How to do" and which way is best with actual links to what you're talking about. I might give it a go.

First some definitions (applicable across the board, not just for RAIDs):

1. Physical Drive: A hard disk drive, the tangible hardware itself.

2. Logical Drive: Actually, should be called "Illogical Drive". This is what your computer thinks it is dealing with. For example, I have 4 physical drives on this PC. One is a "hot" spare, so only the remaining 3 actually count. They are in a RAID 5, so the PC sees them as one logical drive. However, I have that logical drive divided into 5 partitions, so now the PC sees them as five logical drives. 3 drives seen as 1 drive, partioned, now seen as 5...simple, huh?

3. RAID: Redundant Array of Independent Drives; these are more than one physical drive configured to appear to the PC as something else. Drives can be controlled by software (very slow) or a controller. Controllers can either be built into the motherboard (integrated) or an add-on card. This PC has the latter (integrated controller is turned off); my PCs #2 and #3 use the onboard controller.


RAID 0: Uses an even number of drives, and data is "striped", or distributed, between the drives, which then are seen by the computer as one drive. This option is available on most integrated controllers. Capacity is the sum of the individual physical drives.

Advantages:
1. Capacity is the total of the drives attached.
2. Read and write speeds are much increased, as two drives are working in parallel.

Disadvantage: Loss of one physical drive loses ALL data, because they operate as pieces of one [logical] drive.

RAID 1: Is the most commonly used for personal or small business applications, and is also a usual option on integrated controllers. It too requires an even number of drives. In RAID 1 the drives each have all the data ("mirrored"); and the computer sees the physical drives as one.

Advantages
1. Loss of one physical drive does NOT lose data.
2. Read speeds are very slightly faster for long files than a single physical drive.

Disadvantage: Capacity is the lower of the drives attached. A 500 Gb + a 750Gb results in a 500 Gb logical drive.

RAID 5: Combines most of the speed of RAID 0 with better fail-safe protection than RAID 1; requires 3 or more physical drives; data is distributed across the drives in such a way that loss of 1 drive loses no data. This is an option in the integrated controller on some later motherboards. Capacity is 1 less than the number of physical drives (3 500 GB drives yields 1,000 Gb); "Hot" (physically connected but unused) physical drives do not count.

Advantages:
1. More usable capacity than RAID 1, as the capacity of only 1 physical drive is ignored.
2. Much faster than one physical drive or RAID 1
3. "Hot" spares allow restoration to full integrity within minutes.

Disadvantages
1. May require expensive upgrades
2. Even without upgrades, the cost of a controller and the additional drive/s can be >$200.

Summary:

Only RAID 1 should be of interest to Barthmobilers, due to the preservation of data with the loss of one drive. RAID 0 is used where read and write speed is desired and loss of data is prevented by backups. RAID 1 and RAID 0 are available on many inexpensive motherboards. RAID 5, although providing the advantages of 1 and 0, has a serious disadvantage of cost, as only the more expensive motherboards support it with integrated controllers, and add-on controllers are expensive - then, of course, there's the cost of the additional drives.

Worse, if your physical drives have the older IDE parallel interface (40-wire ribbon cable), a/k/a PATA, add-on controllers are very hard to find.

Simple add-on RAID controllers are <$100. You don't need an $8,000 card [yes, they go that high!)

NOTE: RAIDs do NOT eliminate the need for periodic backups. An elaborate RAID will store corrupted data as faithfully as a single drive.

Webites of Interest:

Wikipedia on RAID

Newegg RAID card selection.

Black Screen of Death Win XP, Vista, & 7

Thanks to Jack, who discovered this link.

I've not encountered it, nor has it shown up on any of the Geeksites I frequent. I'd advise NOT downloading the fix if you've not encountered the problem. EDIT 9:39 PM: Well, now it has, and the company that reported the "problem" had backracked.

Anyway, it could happen, but I'd judge the possibility to be infinitely small.

Shopping for a Laptop for Yourself, a Loved One, or ME?:

See this. Anandtech is one of the most thorough and respected Geeksites.

Have a D-Link Wi-fi Router?

Check this out.

Record-tying Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Read about it. Thirteen patches, most of which don't affect the home user, will be available.

Oh yeah, the patches include fixing a 17 year-old vulnerability that dates back to the MS/DOS kernel, and affects Win2000, XP, Vista, and 7.

I rarely pimp specific hardware, but this Dell Vostro is an awfully good buy if you're in the market for a capable (except for graphics-intensive apps, such as games or video-editing) laptop. I don't like Dell desktops, but I've been quite pleased with the customer service on the 3 Dell laptops I've had.

Hmm, How can I say this.........God, we love our Mac's BUT ! I LOVE RAID 5, I just don't have it right now.

A Better Defrag Utility

I check these things out so you don't have to...

I've never been really happy with the defrag engine in System Mechanic (which I rate 9.8/10) or the Windows-included one.

Overclockers.com (my 15th year there) has a mini-review of defrag utilities.

I chose Defraggler, as this is brought to you by the same folks that created the robust and famous CCleaner.

Highly recommended, even though it doesn't have some of the automated features of other defraggers.