It has been a long time since I've been able to get myself together to post something of worth here. Life has been very busy, yet at the same time nothing much of note has happened, tech wise at least. The baby continues to grow inside mommy, the babies room has been finished and a major overhaul to the basement and driveway has taken place. So you can see why I have had little time for a tech blog. View full article »
As a sys admin, the bane of my existence are printers. In fact I think I could make a list on how I hate them so, but that is for another time. Back to the story. In the past month I have had to take out my machete, enter the deep dark jungle of the registry and hack out all reference to printers and printer servers , twice. View full article »
Lets face it, most people today have an email address and many have more than one. Between work, home, your ISP and that old Hotmail or Yahoo account you got when you were 13, email addresses pile up quickly. You could setup Outlook Express (please never do this) or Mozilla Thunderbird (please use this if you have to use a desktop email client) and connect to all your accounts. But what happens when you are away from home or when your hard drive imploads? This is where Gmail comes to the rescue.
Diskeeper has a new version of its workstation class defragmentation application called Pro Premier. This version is targeted to high end PCs and power users and adds to its suite of products which include Diskeeper Home & Diskeeper Pro. The main difference I see between the Home/Pro and Premier version is the increased disk size that you able to support in Premier. You can defragment disk sizes up to 2TB compared to only 768GB in Home/Pro.
Earlier this month I showed you how to use the Open Source defragmentation application UltraDefrag. On my system I changed the scheduled task to run every day instead of once a week. Below is a screen shot of the results of this daily defrag.
The results are impressive. Or are they?
In some of the lost comments from my how-to were in reference to Diskeeper. I used this program at work on all my workstations and servers. Aside from some headaches with the management application Diskeeper has been keeping the hard drives at work running smoothly since 2003. To get an idea how good UltraDefrag is I plan on downloading a trail version of Diskeeper and analyzing my hard drive. Check back for the results.
I've been doing quite a bit of maintenance work on the site recently, updating to the latest version of WordPress, removing old unwanted plug-ins, updating plug-ins I do use, and the like. Today I went into the database for the site and noticed some old tables from uninstalled plug-ins that were still present. In my haste to remove them I made a cardinal sin. I forgot to backup the database first. Clearly stupid I know. I had accidentally deleted a table that references the posts to categories and the last backup I had was from August 4th. This backup was before the WordPress update and a bunch of posts & a few comments from last week have been lost. I was able to save the couple of posts from today and Friday (I had browser windows open to the text that let me copy and paste them back), but the 3 posts on an open source compression application and baby updates.
To catch you up on what I deleted I'm going to summarize:
Of course the originals were written with great eloquence and wit. Let this be a lesson to you all, backup your data.
Does your PC just not run as fast as it did when you first got it? Chances are your hard drive has become fragmented. What does this mean? Well, your hard drive is made up of many "slices" which are called sectors. When you create a Word document or download a song onto your computer it is written onto your hard disk. When you delete the file it is erased from the hard disk leaving an open space on your hard drive. Then you download the pictures from your latest vacation and part of the data is written to that now empty space and the rest to another part of your hard drive. Over time, after many songs, pictures, movies, etc your data is spread out all over the hard drive. This causes delays in reading the data off the hard drive when you want to show grandma your vacation pictures. Wikipedia has a lot more info on fragmentation. View full article »
Thank you both for giving me a few more gray hair this morning. Ive spent the past 3 weeks preparing for the DST change in North America , reading endless knowledgbase articles, patching all my systems and thinking that everything was going to be alright. Wrong. I came in this morning to an email from an external partner saying the MS approved TZEdit program does not work. So all my Windows 2000 servers and workstations will need to be updated, again.
To get Windows 2000 to recognize the changes you make in TZEdit you have to change the timezone you are in to a different one, i.e. from Central to Eastern, apply the change and then change it back again. After doing this you will see the correct time on the clock.
For those of you running XP or Windows 2003 you can apply a registry edit that will fix the problem for you. I've created the file for you here. Save the file to your desktop, then run it accepting all prompts.
If you have ever had a PC suddenly crash, freeze up or spit out the dreaded blue screen of death you probably thought that your operating system was the cause. In some cases, you would be right, but in most cases the problem lies with your hardware. Before taking your PC in for service there are a couple programs you can run on your PC.
Memory (RAM): Memtest86 is a great little program to test your memory. The site has in-depth instructions on how to use the program.
Hard Drives: Most of the major hard drive makers have free programs you can use to test your hardware.
These programs can either be copied to a floppy or a blank CD.
Try these programs the next time you are having system lockups, at the very least they will exclude your memory or hard drive as the culprit.
