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?

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 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!

I’d run into a problem this week with the wifi in my home. I have a mixed network, some wifi, some wired for a total of about seven or eight computers in my home. The problem was with my HP laptop and it’s cheap Broadcom wifi adapter. In my usual morning writing spot, I had limited, or very slow, Internet access.

I have a widget on my desktop that shows me my wifi strength but it registered 62%, even though I had incredibly slow access to the Internet from the dining room. On the weekend, I moved my Dlink 615 router upstairs, partially because I wanted to surf and write on the back deck, and partially to solve the dining room problem. No go!

That’s when Heatmapper came in to save me. Heatmapper is a free bit of software that you can download here:
Heatmapper download

Once you get it downloaded, unzipped and installed, run it and you’ll see a simple screen, graph paper one one side and some writing on the right. Basically you want to map out your house on the graph on the left. Walk to where you normally use your laptop. Imagine the room on the graph paper and left click on the graph. Move slowly to another spot, keeping in mind the spatial relationship to the first point, and left click again. Walk around the house and click now and then to get a complete map of your house, according to the wifi signal strength.

Once you are done, right click and Heatmapper will display a kind of topographical map of your home. How cool is that? Very cool in my case since I saw that I didn’t have a lot of signal strength in the dining room.

My next step was to drag out my old Panasonic Toughbook and do the same thing with it. In this way, I was comparing apples to apples. If Heatmapper saw something different on my Toughbook map, then I knew that the Broadcom adapter on my HP was screwed up. Turns out it was totally out of whack. I disabled it, installed a cheap TRENDnet USB adapter and, voila, I had good access everywhere in the house.

Who knows what’s up with the Broadcom adapter in my HP laptop? I don’t. I have uninstalled it and will look around the net for driver updates, troubleshooting charts, etc. but, for now, my old USB adapter works just fine, thank you! And thanks to Heatmapper, I know where to get the strongest signal in my house. Check it out. It’s free and very, very helpful.

I’m sure everyone has heard about the people who are making a fortune on the Internet ‘sending links to google’. All of the ‘work at home and make a fortune’ scams that are around these days are all based on this. Listen for a while and you’ll see that it might be possible for you to make some money on the Internet but it’s probably very unlikely that you will make a fortune.

The Internet is based on numbers. There are millions of websites and millions of users. Put those two groups of millions together and you have untold millions of searches and millions of pages viewed. At the top of EVERY search category there is a number one website. If you search for ducks in molasses, you only get 68,000 sites in response. If you search for ‘making money on google’, however, you get 189,000,000 responses. The ‘making money on google’ search is the one I will concentrate on for today.

People search for certain keywords. I guess sex, drugs and rock and roll are popular searches but there are others. Diet and weight loss is a big one. Movie star names are popular too, Brad Pitt, Brangelina, etc. If you were to make a website and tell a little story about these topics, then people would come to your website.

Google makes a bit of money if people come to your website and see the ads that you put up there, as long as they are Google ads, of course. The more people that come to your site, the more money Google makes and the more money you make because Google pays you a very small amount of money for each 1000 people, as an example, who come to your site. Google will pay you more if someone clicks on an ad and even more, I think, if they buy something from the ad.

The whole basis of this way to make money is numbers. If you can write, which many people seem to find impossible, and if you can create a website like this, which is very challenging, then you might be able to make a few bucks.

Here’s a tip. If you look around the web you will see many pages such as this one, some quite well done and some very badly done. It’s the badly done ones that you want to study so you can learn how not to do it. As an example, if you don’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ then you probably should keep your day job.

Besides knowing how to create a web page you have to also know how to get a Google Adsense account as well as knowing how to set up their ads in your html. If all of this is Greek to you, again, don’t quit your day job.

Finally, there is no easy way to make money on the Internet. No one, and I mean no one, is making a fortune by doing nothing. It takes a lot of work and a lot of skill. If you are up for it, then give it a shot. Good luck to you! I think it’s probably easier to make money on Ebay but that’s just my stupid opinion.