Go west young man
Warning: External Hard Drives
One of my mantra’s over the years is about backup. Over the past few days, I have been working for a newer customer who hasn’t heard my sermons.
He had a "computer expert" setup an extremely complex home network and a NAS (Network Attached Storage) backup system. None of this is out of the ordinary. However, unfortunately, this was the only backup the customer had. Last week, his external hard drive failed. All of his important data existed on that drive that was seemingly lost.
External hard drives use the same hard drives we have in our computers with an added few components to allow the drive to function independent of a computer. Problem is that a hard drive is a hard drive…moving parts and all. Moving parts eventually fail and power can quit as well. These increasingly inexpensive devices work fine as a secondary backup…but should never by your primary drive.
There really is a first time for everything!
I showed up at the wrong client’s house today. Let me lay out the situation so that I don’t look like a total buffoon. I do take total responsibility for the error, but my reasoning is just…at least in my own mind.
Yesterday, I received a panic call from one of my clients on my voice mail. When I returned the call, the husband answered so I asked for his wife (who had called originally). She picked up the extension line in their home and now both were on the phone talking to each other and I could barely hear either one of them. In the garbled conversation, I determined that they desperately needed help and I informed them that I could squeeze them between two of my already scheduled appointments that were near by their home.
Windows XP Repair Option
I was ‘back in the saddle’ today after a hiatus last week for spring break with my kids. Helped a client out with a problem that, fortunately, isn’t too common, but common enough that it warrants its own tip. It applies to Windows XP only and you might need to try using it if you cannot boot your computer up to anything other than the startup menu screen (where you get the option to start in Safe Mode…see picture).
If after turning on and off your computer a few times to try and get your desktop to come up, AND you can’t get into Safe Mode using the menu shown, AND using the "Last known good configuration" option don’t work, try these steps:
Travel tip from a customer…
A major light bulb went off today when a customer of mine talked about a tech travel tip he had recently received.
For better or worse, when many of us travel today, we bring along cell phones, cameras with rechargeable batteries, laptops, MP3 players, portable DVD players and more. These gadgets crave power and usually at the same time! When I travel, I’m usually unplugging lamps, clocks and other devices in the hotel room trying to make room to charge and power my tech. Often times it means sacrificing light in order to get my phone charged.
Don’t assume it is your problem….
If you use a high speed Internet connection, don’t assume that if you have problem accessing the Internet that it is your computer’s problem. I encountered a situation today where a customer, in an effort to save money, had problems with their DSL connection. Before calling me she:
- Attempted to troubleshoot the problem herself for two days by playing with the settings of her email and network
- Her husband intervened and did the same thing
- Called Qwest and spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with them
- Called Dell and spent another 2+ hours on the phone with them
Result? Still no Internet connection.
Not everyone needs or wants a computer
My first appointment of the day was at the house of a couple whom were given a hand-me-down computer about six years ago. I taught them how to send and read email and a few computer basics back then and haven’t heard from them since. They needed me to look at the old Windows 95 computer today because nothing would come up on the screen. Indeed, Windows had crashed and they elected not to fix it.
After talking a few minutes, they confessed that they really didn’t want to get a new one or fix this one because they weren’t particularly interested in the machine. In fact, they pointed out that they had disconnected from the Internet just a year or so after I had seen them because they hated getting the forwarded email from friends and decided to cancel their service rather than tell their friends to stop sending the junk. Since then, they only played solitaire. And now they think they will just continue on without a computer.
The Trouble with Macintosh Computers
I received a call from a nice woman today who had a Macintosh computer that was on the blink. She made comments about how tough it was to find someone to work on her computer and thought I wouldn’t work on them either. I told her that I could look at it, but if it needed hardware work, we would have to find someone who could work on it for her since I didn’t do that. Sounded as if her disk needed initialized (Mac speak for formatting the hard drive and starting over).
Apple makes great computers and they have the best designs of any computer on the market. Overall, they are stable machines and there is not argument that they are safer to use on the Internet than Windows computers. My only reservation about Macintosh computers lies in their number of users…less than 3% of all computer users use Macintosh.
Everyone is an expert….
I put gas in my truck every week, but I’m not a car expert. We raised some goats from ‘kids’ to their adulthood, but I’m not a farm or goat expert. It always strikes me as funny when some folks who merely ‘use’ computers think they are computer experts.
Today, a client of mine illustrated this point perfectly. He has a widescreen Compaq laptop (not the typical almost square monitor). The icons and text on his monitor looked a little squashed and blocky. He wanted me to look at it because a friend of his told him that that was indication that the hard drive was going to crash soon and he should be careful.
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
Every day I go out and make my rounds, I’m surprised at how many people have never visited our web site. We believe that we are building the best computer help web site on the planet. We cover all the basic and most frequently asked questions that computer users have and in the last two months have added many new features and made the site easier to navigate and search.
Adam and I had lunch with a colleague today who told us that "everyone knows about you guys". We do our best to promote the show and our businesses, but in the long run, the more people we can refer to our web site, the more people we can help and the greater the content of the site can grow. So, we challenged our colleague to ask the people who say the know us if they have ever visited our web site.