All posts by Computers Made Simple

How to back-up your computer – what is a back-up anyway?

This week I am backing up my daughter’s computer before she goes off to university. I have stressed backing up your computer data before but, now that I’m doing it for someone who should know better, I’m wondering if everyone out there knows what ‘backing up’ your computer actually means.

Depending on what you do with your computer, you probably have different backup needs. As for me and my daughter, we are both photographers and audio-visual nuts. Our computers get cluttered with photographs, movies, tv shows and music. While I tend to be very anal and backup my computers several times in a month, my daughter doesn’t seem to have the time or the inclination to do a regular backup. Hence the need for my job today. Out of a 100 gigabyte drive, she has over 47 gigabytes of movies and tv shows. The rest, according to WinDirStat, more on that later, is pictures of her and her travels and friends.

If your computer is chugging along a bit slower than it did before, and if you have lots of things on your hard drive that you would hate to lose forever, then backing up your computer is what you need to do.

The first step is to figure out what space you have on your hard drive. If you have a large hard drive and if there is lots of space on it, then you only have to back up your drive if you don’t want to lose important data. While it seems that your computer is safe and sound, hard drives fail, laptops drop and theft and fires do happen. If you have pictures of your babies, your family and things like that, and if you can’t replace them, then back up your computer now.

Step one : Click on My Computer in the Start menu, or double click it on your desktop and then right click your C: drive. This is your main hard drive, although you may have others. I will use the C: drive terminology for now. Click Open and then right click C: again and choose Properties. A little pic will show up :

C Drive Image
A visual representation of my C drive

 

As you can see in my picture, there are two distinct areas on the hard drive. The pie chart shows how much total space you have, in gigabytes, plus it shows how much space you have left on the drive. Basically, if the purple piece is small and the blue piece is huge, then you don’t have a lot of room left. Since Windows uses the purple space for it’s scratch pad, putting things there while it thinks about other, more pressing things, it’s important to have a lot of room for the Windows scratch pad.

If you think of your hard drive as your bedroom, maybe you can get an idea of what I mean. In a huge bedroom with lots of floorspace (purple area) you can toss your clothes about and not worry about them piling up too much. If you have a tiny bedroom with very little floor area (purple area) you have to take your time to put your clothes away since you simply don’t have room. Windows runs into the same problem and slows down considerably as your hard drive gets loaded with files.

That’s enough for now. Check back soon for the next few steps in a backup routine.

Geocities is dead – here is a solution to save your website material. (Works for other sites, too)

After many years of operation, Yahoo has decided to close their Geocities site, putting thousands of website owners out of a free and comfortable home. I’ve had a geocities site for over ten years, probably more like 13 years. Back in the day when every Internet family had a web presence of some kind, geocities was a lot of fun. Depending on your interests, you could join a community and share your thoughts about those interests with the world. Many people used the free hosting as a launching ground for limited interest sites as well as some small businesses.

Well, it’s all gone now, dammit! I was lucky enough to have one of the more popular pages on geocities, depending on your search parameters, it was continually number one on google. Those days are gone, the Internet changes daily so we have to work out other solutions, right?

My geocities site was pretty small but I had different pages that I wanted to keep, to save for posterity. It had been a long time since I updated the pages and I had forgotten my passwords to the different ones I had. What to do? Well, as always, there is a solution to problems such as these and, as usual, I was able to find a free answer to my problems.

Instead of spending a lot of time saving each and every picture and web page, I downloaded a small bit of free software to help me. A search on google led me to HTTrack, which is available here: HTTrack. I had been thinking of Sitesucker but it’s not free and I love free!

After installing it, I directed HTTrack to my geocities site and in a matter of moments, my site was saved to my laptop for archiving later on. Quick, painless and oh so free. Loved it! Now I want to try it on other sites, just to see what happens if I try to download everything on a larger site. Might be fun!

Why I love Cathy – cathy.exe that is!

If you’re like me, and who the hell is, you’ve got hundreds of dvds and cds full of movies, songs, pictures and everything else that you collect on your way around the Internet. Unlike most computer users, I do regular backups of my ‘stuff’. I actually have a folder on my desktop that is named Stuff! Into this folder goes everything that I want to save for posterity. Since I’ve been using the Internet since about 1996, there is lots of stuff to save.

I have all of the DVDs and CDs in one place, more or less. If you have a stack of these discs, maybe you spend a lot of time looking for something on one of the old backups. Your resume, for instance. Can you lay your hands on it immediately? I can, thanks to Cathy!

Cathy is a tiny bit of software written by Robert Vasicek, a Slovakian who lives in Bratislava, Slovakia. You can download the application from here http://www.mtg.sk/rva/ or in different other places around the Internet. Once it’s downloaded, unzip the folder and leave it on your desktop. That’s what I did anyway, you can do what you want.

Cathy doesn’t have to be installed on your computer. It just runs, it doesn’t have an installer program which is the reason it’s so small. Everything it needs to run is in the folder. Pop in a dvd or a cd, wait for a moment until it loads. Turn off any Windows thing that starts and then double click the cathy.exe file. Once it’s open, click the CATALOG tab and choose your drive, even the hard drive on your computer can be chosen, then click ADD. Cathy will scan the drive and make a list of everything that is on it.

Once Cathy is finished, you will have a small file in the same folder as the cathy.exe file that will be the image that cathy uses to tell you what is on the drive itself. Name the file with a name that makes sense to you. I tend to use things like ‘back up of laptop 08/2009’ or something similar. Now, once you have that image along with cathy.exe, you will be able to search for anything on the drive or the CD/DVD. If the CD/DVD is actually in the drive when you search, you can click on anything you want to see and it will open, just like it would in Windows Explorer.

I just scanned my C: drive on this laptop. Cathy tells me that I have 178,000 files, more or less and I know that I can find anything on it, much faster than Vista can, using cathy.exe. Besides this drive, I also have hundreds of DVDs and CDs that Cathy has also scanned for me. With recordable media, of course, the things that are on the CD or DVD cannot be changed so there is no need to update the database with these. On my hard drive, on the other hand, I would have to rescan it weekly in order to have an up-to-date version of it. If you name the file something that is easy to figure out, then you can simply delete the current record and make a new one any time you have to find something on your main or external hard drive.

To organize your life, simply mark the CD/DVD with the same name or number that you saved the file as, in order to keep the two things matched. Get it? Cathy will organize your collection of CDs or DVDs in a very short time, thanks to Mr. Vasicek! Thank him first and then thank me for letting you know about it. OK?

Windows 7 – first steps to getting it installed – Part 2

Now we have two partitions on the hard drive, just as we did before the formatting. What I wanted was a smaller C:\ partition and a larger D:\ partition. Vista can help with that, too!

On my drive, my main partition with Vista was about 235 gigs. First, I backed up all of my important stuff and the used space shrunk accordingly. When I was finished, I had about 75 gigs used and the rest was open. I right clicked the drive in the Drive Management window and chose Shrink Volume. A little menu popped up and I chose to shrink it to about 180 gigs, which left me with 55 gigs of unallocated space. Once Windows had finished shrinking the partition, or volume as they call it, the drive now had three windows on it, the large Vista partition, the unallocated partition that was left after the shrink job and, finally, the old recovery partition.

The unallocated space was then formatted to NTFS and then, finally, I was able to Extend it to include the old recovery partition. Now, in round figues, I had a volume or partition of 180 gigs which held my old Vista installation and a new volume of about 70 gigs. I named the second partition Windows 7, just to keep it straight when I was installing the new trial version of Windows. Vista was running great, albeit slowly, and I didn’t want to lose it.

After all of this, which took longer to write about than to actually do, I was able to pop in the Windows 7 DVD and reboot the laptop, choose to boot from the CD/DVD drive and install Windows. Installation didn’t take long at all, nothing compared to the old versions of Windows and, except for a lack of drivers for my laptop video card, everything went well.

Your mileage may vary with all of this but, hopefully, I’ve given you the basics of partitioning your drives in Vista. Remember, above all, to back up your important data regularly and, of course, before you try any of this stuff on your own computer. Backups save information and lots and lots of headaches and heartaches. Don’t put it off!

Windows 7 – first steps to getting it installed

Windows 7 RC (release candidate) has been available for several months now. I’ve downloaded two copies, one worked and the other didn’t. Ahead of the official release date in October, Microsoft would let you download this trial version to test drive until March 2010. I figured that seven or eight months of free computing from Microsoft wasn’t a bad idea, even if I don’t plan on buying the final release later on. The trial version will actually work until September 2010 but after March it will run for two hours and then stop, kind of like most versions of Windows anyway, right?

Before you can install a trial version of anything, you have to use a new hard drive or another partition on your current hard drive. For me, it was simpler and cheaper to install Windows 7 on my desktop, for which I already had another 200 gig SATA drive than to partition my newer 250 gig SATA drive. Windows 7 installation sets up a dual boot process which simplifies everything. Now, when I’m booting my desktop, I choose either my old XP Media Center Edition or the new Windows 7 Ultimate.

On my laptop, however, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have another hard drive so I had to figure out how to partition my old 250 gig drive. As it turns out, this was very simple, thanks to Vista’s cool partitioning app. XP doesn’t have it so you are on your own with it but if you have Vista you’re in luck. Here’s how you do it.

On my laptop I already had two partitions on my hard drive, one large one for Vista and everything else that I use daily as well as a small 12 gig one for the HP recovery on my laptop. Since I’ve had the laptop for well over a year, and I have already made up the recovery DVDS, I didn’t feel that I needed the recovery partition any more.

Step one is to go to your Control Panel. Double click on Administrative Tools. Double click on Computer Management and click once on Disk Management in the left pane. Just to the right, in the bigger pane, a visual representation of your drives will show up after Vista ‘populates’ the list. In my case, I saw two partitions and two drives. The second drive was my CD/DVD drive, by the way, and your setup would be quite similar.

Next, I formatted the Recovery partition. Before you do something like this, make sure you are positive that you want to get rid of everything on the partition you decide to format. Once you format it, everything on it is gone. Right click the partition and choose ‘Format’ and then choose NTFS as the file system. After you agree to all of the things that Vista will ask you, “Are you sure you want to do this”, etc., you will have a clean partition that is the same size as the old one.

In my case, since the old partition was only 12 gigs, I felt that I needed to make it larger. I probably chose the wrong way to do this but it worked. You can’t argue with success, right?

My next post will describe the steps to get a completely new and larger partition on the same drive that your current version of Windows is installed on. Back in a bit!