Hard Drives range around 60-$120 depending on the size and interface. Can’t stress enough how important it is to backup your important data. What would you do if you lost all your files in the blink of an eye? Some people have better “Luck” with their drives. Lasting them a good 10 years. For some, 6 months is all they got.

This week we have been seeing a bunch of 2 year old, defective Seagates. Some older Samsungs say their good-byes. Hitachi’s old deskstar’s failing as usual.

Back to our recovery process…

Related posts:

1. Friday! The end of our week.
2. Slow Week – PC Performance Wise
3. Busy Quick Post | Week Summary

This week was mainly virus removals and blue screens. Lot of time spent doing diagnostics this week. Also had a few laptops came in with heat issues which is very common. Replaced a couple heat-sinks, screens, keyboards for laptops too.

Had charter come out today because of some phone/internet issues. Was bad firmware on the modem & got a brand new one out of it. Was a quick fix for a little downtime. So far charter has been great for us. Probably because we are a business though, we pay a good chunk of money.

Overall was a good week. Kept busy. We are going to be moving one of our part time employee’s (Joe) to full time. We are excited to say that. Hes a great addition to this company! Mmm… Pizza…

Related posts:

1. Friday! The end of our week.
2. Defective Hard Drive Week
3. Slow Week – PC Performance Wise

I like looking at free alternatives, and when I do, most of the time it is open source. If you would like to take a look at some, head off to http://sourceforge.net/. They have a lot of software there, and a very easy to browse website.

That’s all for now, just a quick post. Looks like some scans are finishing, time to finish some virus removals.

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2. Sales & Information

This is the day we have to pump out the computers before we are unable to work on them for 2 days. Most people need their computers the day before they brought them in, so we are always rushing. That is one thing that sets us apart though from the other guys, were quick. Though my guess is that some of these shops have a lot of machines to work on. We have a steady flow going on where we are always working. Business is good considering the economy.

This week overall was good. We were kept busy, made a bunch of people happy and generated quite a few more customers. Hoping for a busy next week. I think I heard the pizza man…

Related posts:

1. Busy Quick Post | Week Summary
2. Slow Week – PC Performance Wise
3. Defective Hard Drive Week

The clients just wanted us to tune them up, and possibly upgrade the memory. We always tell our customers that with a machine of that age, there is a high chance that their hard drive is going to start to fail (if it is not already). Long story short, throwing more money into this machine might be a bad idea. Same answer for all, just need the machine to get by for another couple months. With the economy like it is, I can understand that.

Day later, and maybe an additional stick of memory, machines were working better than ones twice the specs that just hit our bench. Their prices were $50, $75 if they needed some more RAM. They were very happy with the speed when we showed them running on our bench. Then we told them they could donate those machines to a museum when they were done with them. All joking aside… We love to make our customers smile, hopefully a laugh out of them too.

I remember when I wasn’t spoiled with so much computer gear, I had whatever my parents handed down to me. They got the job done, slowly but I couldn’t complain. I ran those computers to the grown.

Related posts:

1. Friday! The end of our week.
2. Defective Hard Drive Week
3. Busy Quick Post | Week Summary

Discussions about whats going on with the business. Maybe some tech news every once and a while. What type of machines we are getting. Will try to keep a few blogs a week, hopefully with some useful information.

This website is powered by a very popular blogging management system called Wordpress. Might as well take advantage of that.

Related posts:

1. Busy Quick Post | Week Summary

Norton Internet Security, Norton 360 – Basic Norton Anti-Virus is OK
Anything that says McAfee on it – Labs don’t like it, we don’t either
Toolbars – Losing real estate for the convenience of something your browser does already
Firewalls – They are too advanced for basic users
Most Registry Cleaners – Can be too thorough, cause issues
Driver Scanners/Updaters – Can cause useless drivers to be installed, blue screens later
Fix it all Utilities – “Run Twice as fast!” – Too good to be true, sadly
Windows Defender – Will not keep your PC “Defended”, not even a little

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Cleaning Utilities. We use one, called CCleaner. You can find it on our downloads page. This will get rid of most, if not all, of your temporary files that your machine gathers from doing all sorts of tasks. Taking up space and in some cases, slowing you down. Cleans all sorts of other information that I could go into for hours but I’m just going to keep it simple. Download it, Run the Cleaner. We ourselves run it about once a day, after we are done surfing for the day.

Keeping your Hard Drive Organized. Defragging. You probably have heard that a lot. It takes your files scattered all over your hard drives platter (imagine a CD) and places them as close as they can get together so your hard drive has a faster time accessing the data. Download and Run Defraggler from the downloads page. We run it about twice a month because we are nerds, you can run it once every 3 months.

Stop all those start up items from running. They all take up a certain amount of memory, and a bit of CPU usage too. If you don’t use them till you need them, you could save your poor machine from a 5 minute start up time. CCleaner has a place where you can disable certain start up items under the Tools section (Left Had Side). I haven’t seen a machine that wouldn’t boot if I disabled all the start up items. I typically keep my anti-virus tray icon, and that’s about it. Play around with it, if it stopped certain features like hotkeys, turn the item back on.

Don’t Use a Overkill Anti-Virus (like Norton 360). If your going to buy Norton, buy just the anti-virus. A CPU & Memory hogging anti-virus is typically something that comes with a bunch of overkill features that you can either do for free or can cause issues. Ask us what we recommend, I can’t tell you here because we only sell what does good in the independent labs.

Clean the inside of your machine. Buy a can of Compressed Air, we use Dust-Off (By Falcon) or a Air Compressor (Be Careful, some have high pressure). Go outside. Blow the can into the vents, bursts are best. Desktops, blow everywhere. We have seen machines come in with a good 2 to 3 inches of dust-bunnies on the bottom. If your a smoker, its going to be worse. Save your computer from heat issues and dead fans by blowing the suckers out.

Upgrades are nice too…

We can do a lot more to your machine to speed it up, but those secrets will have to die with us. Or you could bring your machine in.

Related posts:

1. Slow Week – PC Performance Wise
2. Keep your Windows Up-To-Date

XP / Vista / Windows 7 are always updating. A lot of times, those updates are Security Updates. Those keep those holes plugged in the software so you don’t have to come see us as often.

Before installing a service pack, try to grab all the latest critical updates first.

Windows XP as of 2/2/10 has Three Service Packs. These Service Packs are a large bunch of updates thrown into one pack. Before we let a Virus Removal machine go, we update their machine to SP3 (Windows XP Service Pack 3). We also run the latest critical updates from: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

Windows Vista as of 2/2/10 has Two Service Packs. You can find both of these service packs on our download page. You should try to install all the updates before these large ones, using Windows Update (From Your Start Menu).

Windows 7 as of 2/2/10 does not have any Service Packs out. It has been rumored one is in the making already, already beta testing on it is being done. Just do the same thing as Windows Vista and run Windows Update (From the Start Menu).

Stick with critical updates, and stay away from Optional Updates. Also for drivers from the Windows Update Screen, don’t download them “it if it aint broken”.

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1. Windows 7 Free Upgrade Option – Expired
2. Windows 7 Review – Engadget
3. Windows 7 Review – Gizmodo

Dell Inspiron 570-6939PBK

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