Tag: Hard drive
When Apple revealed Leopard with their brand new Time Machine feature which allows you to backup individual files from different time periods, everyone was in awe. However, what many do not know is that Vista is also equipped with a similar feature. Yes, you can restore deleted files or previously saved versions of your files on Windows Vista.
Table of Contents:
a. How it works
b. Getting Started - Enabling System Restore
c. Creating a Restore Point
d. Restoring a deleted file or folder
e. Restoring a previous version of a file or folder
f. Forgetting your file and folder location Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista | No Comments »
The never-ending two-step defragmenting process of Vista can soon become a thing of the past. With certain tools, we were able to cut defragmentation time of 25 GBs of files with Vista Ultimate from 82 minutes to 6 minutes!!! That is defragmenting 10X faster than the built-in Vista defragmenter! The tutorial also works with Windows 2000 and XP.
Right now, many things are probably whirling around in your head:
- Is this true? Yes, it is.
- Does it work? Yes. We will show you charts on hard drive fragments before and after defragmentation.
- This has got to cost money. Absolutely free.
These “certain tools” we will be using are called contig.exe and PowerDefragmenter.
When we used these two programs, the results were as follows: Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista, Windows XP | 2 Comments »
With all the attention that spyware, phishing, e-mails, and corporate hackers get on any given day, we mustn’t forget that good ol’ Windows itself can be the source of a security hole. It turns out that Vista has a back door that could permit someone else to read any file on your hard drive, and the same problem exists in Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP. But don’t expect a fix anytime soon. This bug is a “feature.”
Before you can copy files from one PC to another on your network, you need to share the folder containing the files. That’s contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that you should share only those folders you want made public and keep everything else unshared.
Enter Administrative Shares, which let network administrators perform maintenance remotely. The feature—which is turned on by default works by sharing your entire hard drive, and then hiding the share by adding a $ character as a suffix. But unless you’re in a corporate environment, you have nothing to gain by leaving this back door open and everything to lose. Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista, Windows XP | 1 Comment »
Windows Vista gadgets can do more than show the weather and keep you updated on the latest news. The Windows Vista Sidebar can also be used to install gadgets that are useful as system utilities that keep track of the resources Windows Vista is using.
Windows Sidebar gadgets have been created that can keep track of how Windows Vista is using your CPU, memory, hard drive and network resources.
Below are some of the best Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets available that can be used to help keep track of system resources: Read More»
Posted in Hardware, Windows Vista | 1 Comment »
When large businesses buy new PCs, they often wipe the hard drives clean and install a fresh copy of Windows, along with the other software they want workers to have. Some consumers, frustrated with all of the trial software, desktop icons and other stuff that comes loaded on their machines, are doing the same thing.
However, what works for businesses isn’t always so easy for individuals. Many computers don’t actually come with a clean copy of the operating system. Instead, many ship with a “recovery partition” or a recovery disc that restores the system back to the way it shipped–with all that extra software. Read More»
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Ok, I bought Windows Vista Business Upgrade the other day so I could start playing with it. Since I didnt want to mess up the configuration of my current computer, I thought I would install Vista on a blank hard drive.
Sounds easy enough, after all the previous versions of Windows required you to have a legitimate copy of an older Windows operating system and simply asked for that copy during the install so they could verify upgrade compliance.
Before installing Windows Vista, I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on my current system. As I suspected, my video card was not up to Vista standards and the 512MB of RAM was on the low end of what Vista wanted. So, I purchased a NVIDIA chipset video controller with 256MB of RAM and increased the amount of system memory to 1GB before proceeding. These upgrades drained my pocketbook of another $120.00 beyond the cost of the Vista Business upgrade.
Now I was ready to proceed with installing Vista and seeing what all the “wow!” was about. Read More»
Posted in Hardware, Windows Vista | 1 Comment »
MICROSOFT HAS let it be known that the behaviour of Windows Vista beta copies is about to change fairly substantially. From May 31, anybody using a beta copy of the OS will find that their machine reboots every two hours, and that intermediate access will be limited to base-level file retrieval.
That means that you could lose data you’re working on, and that your machine will be good only for reformatting. This isn’t as bad news as it seems. Users who had taken part in the Vista beta scheme millions of people, in fact were all given free copies of Vista Ultimate by the Vole as a ‘thank you’. Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista | 3 Comments »
After a new hard drive installation or maybe just to keep things organized the way you like, you may want to change the drive letter of a hard drive partition, CD or DVD drive in Windows Vista. The Computer Management tool makes this a snap.
Note: You cannot modify the drive letter of your main partition on your PC. In a normal Windows Vista installation, this is the “C Drive”. All other drive letters, including CD and DVD drive letters, can be modified though.
1. Click on Start and then Control Panel.
Tip: In a hurry? Type computer management in the search box after clicking Start. Choose Computer Management from the list of results and then skip to Step 4.
2. Click on the System and Maintenance link.
Note: If you’re viewing the Classic View of Control Panel, you won’t see this link. Simply double-click on the Administrative Tools icon and proceed to Step 4. Read More»
Posted in Hardware, Windows Vista | No Comments »
I was talking to an old friend the other day and he confided that he was once a magician. Wow! And of course, I asked him to share some of the cool secrets of the trade. Although we’ve known each other for over a decade, he was not forthcoming. In fact quite the opposite. Apparently, there is a secret code among magicians that they can only share with each other. That said, we all know that there really is no magic, just slights of hand that make things seem different than they might appear. Which brings us to Microsoft’s latest operating system - Vista.
During the development of our latest product, Disk MD, we did considerable analysis of Windows Restore Points. These are files that store important system information that enables us to restore critical system information to an earlier point in time. In Windows XP, we learned that these hidden files are usually between 20-50MB big, Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista | 3 Comments »
The best gift PC is a computer that’s as close to new as possible, in terms of both hardware and software. It represents the most work for you, but the reward is a computer that will be as trouble-free as possible, and no one can pull your personal data off the hard drive, because you’ll be replacing it.
Windows works best when it is freshly installed from scratch on a clean hard drive, so if you’re looking to make the computer as trouble-free as possible, reformatting the hard drive and installing Windows from the Windows installation discs is one way to go. But prices of new hard drives have come way down—you can get a 40GB drive for under $60 and a 200GB drive for less than $100—so consider replacing the drive. Read More»
Posted in Computer, Hardware | No Comments »
