Anti-Spyware Roundup…
Saturday, September 1st, 2007 | Tech News | No Comments
PC World has recently updated their top anti-spyware applications. PC Tools PC Doctor 5.0 comes out on top with a very impressive 95 rating. PC Doctor 5.0 will set you back $30 but a starter version is available from Google in the Google Pack. I've tried the starter version of PC Doctor and found it easy to use but no different than the other anti-spyware free-ware options.
Use Gmail to Manage All Your Email Accounts…
Friday, August 31st, 2007 | Tech Help | No Comments
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 Pro Premier…
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 | Tech Help | 3 Comments
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.
Defrag Update…
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 | Tech Help | No Comments
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.
Vista: 9 Months Later…
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 | Tech News | No Comments
It has been 9 months since Vista has been released into the wild. Nearly a year ago, and before general release, I posted a comment on Vista. I had used it for about 2 weeks at work to test the various applications I run. At the time I thought it was the prettiest bloated cow I'd ever seen. I made the decision not to migrate our XP/2000 fleet any time soon. I didn't install XP at work until after SP2 was released. I think I will be waiting at least until SP2 for Vista as well. In fact, if M$ decides to support XP long term I may never migrate.
In related news, Jim Louderback is leaving PCMag for Revision3 and has some parting shots at Vista. Jim was a proud supporter of Vista since the launch, but after using it extensively he has changed his tune.
A Lesson Learned…
Monday, August 13th, 2007 | Baby News, Tech Help | No Comments
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:
- Kris had 2 ultrasounds last week. Baby girl was in the wrong position to get a good look at her spine so the second scan was needed.
- 7-Zip is an open source application that I have used for a few months with great success. It compresses/decompresses data quickly, into small archives and can open almost any of the popular compression formats.
Of course the originals were written with great eloquence and wit. Let this be a lesson to you all, backup your data.
Ol’ Aches & Pains…
Monday, August 13th, 2007 | Sports | No Comments
I am not referring to Luke Appling, I'm talking about me after a weekend of baseball. It was an up and down weekend for the Minnow Hut Crew. We started off with a convincing win over the team we let come back from a 14 run lead in last years semi-final, to a hands down drubbing by a team from Thunder Bay (and eventual A-side champs), to a default win, to another drubbing by Atikokan, to finally a 1 run loss to Lac Seul. The final loss was particularly hard as 5 runs against came after a blown call by an ump. Despite a 5 for 5 game with 4 home runs we fell just short when the Lac Seul SS made a diving play to nab a line drive in the bottom of the seventh with the tying run at 2nd. Needless to say my legs have felt better. Time to rest up for the start of the playoffs this week.
Baby, Baby…
Friday, August 10th, 2007 | Baby News | No Comments
Just a short note before I head off to play in our annual softball tournament. The 20 week doctors visit went well, but the radiologists report was not ready due to the return visit on Thursday. So no official news on what was seen, although Kris's doctor took a quick look at the unofficial report and everything looked good. We will find out more next month. Kris's mom came in on the train on Thursday so she also attended the appointment and got to hear baby's heart beat. We also attended our 1st prenatal class on Thursday, it runs twice a week for most of the rest of August.
Disk Defragmentation
Friday, August 3rd, 2007 | Tech Help | 5 Comments
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. › Continue reading
It’s a…well…an IT!
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 | Baby News | No Comments
Yup, thats right. You heard me clearly, I'm going to be daddy sometime near Xmas (and I guess technically Kris is going to be a mommy). Kris had her 1st ultrasound yesterday and so far everything looks peachy keen. I'll have a scan of the 1st photo of the lil bug up later today. I finally get to open that package of Dominican cigars I bought years ago and that have been sitting in my moms freezer. They are going to be horrible, but hey, its tradition!
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