Archive for the ‘PC Maintenance’ Category

So
you’ve been computing for quite a few years now, and you’ve built a
nice collection of hard drives, internal or external, collecting dust
in the corner. Here’s how to put them to good use.

10. Turn an Old Hard Drive into an External Drive

If you don’t have a ton of external drives lying around, you might still have a bunch of old internal drives, and the best thing you can do is put them in a USB enclosure so they see some use.
Furthermore, this trick also works for upgrading existing external
drives: if it dies or becomes too small to be useful, you can always
swap the current drive out of the enclosure for a better one you have
collecting dust.

9. Back Up Your Computer

If you haven’t set it up already, one of the most popular (and most
important) uses for an external drive is an automatic backup. Whether
you’re using Mozy, SyncBack on Windows, or Time Machine on OS X, an automatic, local backup is a must to make sure you don’t lose any of your important data to the ever-looming possibility of drive failure.

8. Clone Your Current Hard Drive

While backing up your data allows you to restore it should anything bad
happen, using those external drives for direct clones of your current
drive gives you a much faster solution. It requires more manual work,
but in the event of a drive failure, you can be up and running again in
no time (as opposed to reinstalling your operating system all over
again and then transferring all your data, which can be done when you
have the time to do so). We’ve walked through how to clone your hard
drive in both Mac OS X and Windows.

7. Back Up Your Backups Using Windows Home Server

Local backups are great, but they’re still vulnerable to lighting
strikes, fires, floods, and other immediate disasters. While you can
automatically back up your computers to a Windows Home Server, it’s
nice to have a backup of the server, too—even if it’s a backup of critical files and not a full backup—to keep in certain, more protected places.

6. Use an Extra Drive As a Scratch Disk

If you have a FireWire capable drive and do any kind of video editing,
using it as a scratch disk instead of your internal drive can really
speed things up. Caching files to your internal drive can put quite a
load on it, because it’s constantly reading and writing from the same
drive. By shifting that cache to another drive
(connected with FireWire or something speedy), you can increase the
speed of your renders and exports, making you a happier video editor.

5. Swap the External Drive with Your Computer’s Drive

Sometimes, you’ll actually buy an external drive for one purpose or
another, but realize you don’t need the space. In cases like this, you
can actually open up the enclosure and replace your laptop’s hard drive with the better one,
and use your older, slightly outdated drive in the enclosure (you can
even buy an external drive just for this purpose—it’s remarkably
cheaper than an upgrade from Apple).

4. Use the External Drive’s Controller to Connect Other Peripherals via USB

External drives work by having a controller that converts SATA or IDE
connections to USB. If you have an old IDE optical drive that you only
need every once in a while, you can take the circuit board from an old,
IDE-based external drive enclosure and connect it to your computer via USB.
It’s remarkably useful for netbooks that don’t have optical drives, or
those really rare occasions you need to install something from CD on
your newer, IDE-less computer.

3. Back up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Drive

You love your Wii, but your discs are fragile, disorganized, and easily misplaced. By backing up those games to an external hard drive,
you can decrease your load times, protect those disc from harm, and
always have your games on hand whenever you have a hankering for some
Wii.

2. Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

If your music is the reason your hard drive always seems full, consider
moving those music files to an external drive. Not only can you do so while keeping your preferences and playlists intact, but you can then use previously mentioned iTunes Export to take the most important music and export it back to your space-challenged laptop.

1. Run XBMC From a USB Drive

If you don’t want to build a full-fledged XBMC computer, you can always put XBMC Live on a USB drive
and connect it to an already built computer for certain occasions. And,
while you could do it with a USB thumb drive, a larger, external hard
drive would allow you to store your movies and TV shows on it, thus
saving you precious space on your main computer.

To utilize your existing hard-drives, purchase a new one, setup a home backup, or help with any of the other things listed above please call 678PC for a free estimate – 678.404.1001

Cleaning the inside of your computer is just as important as getting your oil changed in your car.  

Get your PC or Laptop cleaned today for $50 – includes a free PC Tune-up

678-404-1001 or sales@678pc.com

Most of us are more concerned about the tidiness of our directories and files than we are about our physical computer. A dirty computer is a failure-prone computer, so let's dig in with some spring cleaning tips.

Your computer and peripherals love dust, dirt, grime, and germs. Computers are dry, hot, have fans blowing through them all day, and lots of nooks and crannies to catch dust, hair, and other tiny debris as it passes through. Peripherals fair a littler better as most aren't dust-sucking wind tunnels but they too suffer from being dust-attractants and having our greasy hands all over them—your mouse might not be dusty but it's slick with stuff.

The following roundup of tips and tricks will help you get your computer spanking clean for spring, running cooler, and less germ-laden than a rest stop bathroom. We'll start with the outer most peripherals and move in towards the guts of your machine.

Printers, USB Hubs, Scanner Exteriors, and Other Infrequently Handled Peripherals

The outermost computer peripherals are the easiest to clean. Electrostatic dusting products like the Swiffer are a bit of wasteful hype for simple dusting—like your dining room table—but they really shine when it comes to cleaning peripherals. If you don't dust with a dry dusting tool like a Swiffer before using a slightly damp cloth on more stubborn scuffs or stains, you'll end up turning the dust into clumpy mud. It's way easier to swipe it away with an electrostatic cloth than it is to scoot all the rolled up balls of dust and lint all over—balls that inevitably fall inside the printer or get stuck in the crannies of the device.

For 95% of the peripheral cleaning all you'll need is a quick pass with a dust cloth. For any odd stains or residue like a coffee drip or an inky finger smudge, you can usually squeeze by with using a damp cloth. For deeper stains, yellowing, or scuffs and marks that just won't come up, a Magic Eraser is a fantastic tool. When I pulled an old laser printer out of storage it was a little yellowed with age and a lot scuffed up—apparently everything black and rubbery had spent the last few years in the closet beating the poor printer for lunch money.

No amount of light buffing with a damp cloth would do anything about the yellowing of the plastic or the dark scuff marks. Less than a minute with a Magic Eraser and it looked sparkling new. The Magic Eraser is a brand name of Melamine foam marketed by Mr. Clean but Melamine foam is hardly a trade secret so you can save a bunch by buying the generic "dirt erasers" you see marketed right next to the brand names like Mr. Clean's Magic Eraser and 3M's Easy Erasing Pad. The Melamine pads are—no matter how microscopically—abrasive so make sure to test it out in an inconspicuous spot before going full bore on the front of your device.

Monitors, Web Cams, Scanner Interiors, and Other Don't-Scratch-Me Peripherals

If you get a little overzealous cleaning your printer and scuff it a bit you'll likely be the only one to notice. If you scratch the crap out of your monitor not only will you have to stare it it every day but you'll always be explaining to passersby how exactly your monitor lost a bloody gang fight with a Scotch Brite pad.

Start off giving your monitor the same electrostatic-cloth treatment you gave your peripherals. Unless you have the bad habit of poking your screen with your fingers—or a cat that enjoys putting their nose right against the mouse cursor—you should be able to skirt by for long periods with just a light dusting.

Remove fingerprints, smudges, and the like with a very lightly dampened cloth. Don't use paper napkins or towels as paper products can scratch delicate LCD coatings. Stick to a 100% cotton or microfiber dust cloth. Never dampen the monitor itself with any solution.

Always—always!—lightly dampen the cloth itself. LCD manufacturers recommend strongly against using cleaning products on your monitor including ammonia-based window cleaner, alcohol cleaning sprays, or the like. If you run into a smudge that just won't come up and your efforts with just water and a dust cloth seem only to move it around the screen, you can try something a little stronger. Dilute white vinegar in water in a 50/50 mix—or even weaker if you'd like—and use that to break up the oil. It's better to use a little bit of vinegar to lift a heavy smudge than it is to keep buffing away at it, applying unnecessary pressure to the screen.

Keyboards, Mice, and Peripherals so Germtastic Scientists Can't Tell Them From Toilet Seats

Unless you've recently given your keyboard and mouse a good cleaning—I love the smell of alcohol in the morning, smells like sanitation?—it's dirtier than a toilet seat. All day long everything you touch between hand washings ends up on your keyboard. Germs from the office front door, that hygiene-challenged guy two cubes over that insists on shaking hands, the quarter you found in the grime in front of the vending machine, they all sneak their way onto the most touched things in your office. We're hardly germaphobic, but if you're going to be touching something all day, every day, it's worth making sure that a swab-sample taken off it wouldn't be potent enough to get the Department of Health in your business.

If you want to be extra cautious, you can boot down your machine and unplug your peripherals before cleaning them—I've never done this and have yet to harm a mouse or keyboard in anyway with a cursory cleaning and sanitizing. It's easier to leave everything plugged in and just lock up the inputs while you're cleaning. Download BlockInput for Windows or Keyboard Cleaner for the Mac to lock down your keyboard for the next step.

Sanitizing wipes like Clorox Disinfecting Wipes or the like are perfect for this job. After unplugging or locking down your keyboard, give it a good firm wipe down with the disinfecting cloth. You'll be amazed how much grime comes up, even the most benign looking stock-black keyboard can darken a couple wipes with finger oil and dirt. Repeat the same process for your mouse making sure to wipe it down all over—pay special attention to the trackball on trackball mice, you'll want to give it a good spin and wipe it all over. If you're using an old ball-based mouse or a track ball, remember to take the ball out and clean around the contact points (not an issue if you're using a laser mouse).

If you've gone so long without cleaning your keyboard that it's extra filthy—or you just enjoy eating lunch directly over the keyboard—you may want to get even more drastic. You can clean between the keys with an old mascara brush or even go so far taking the keyboard apart to get at the grime under the keys.

Deep Cleaning the Inside of Your Computer

While the above cleaning tricks are great, the biggest return on your cleaning-time investment is to clean out the inside of your computer. Heat is the enemy of electronic components and compared to a solid-state device like a calculator your computer is exceptionally heat-sensitive and finicky. How finicky? Researchers examining the effect of server loads and heat on hard drive life write:

The reliability and durability of HDDs depend on operating temperatures. Increasing HDD temperature by 5°C has the same effect on reliability as switching from 10 percent to 100 percent HDD workload. Each Centigrade degree drop of HDD temperature is equivalent to a 10 percent increase of HDD service life.

Dust is an insulator. When you crack open the case of your computer and it looks like the photo above you're looking at a computer that's facing a radically reduced life span. Every inch of it is covered with a blanket of insulating dust that raises the temperature of components across the board. Your computer might not be that dusty but given how easy it is to clean out a computer, it's ridiculous not to. Not taking the time to dust out your computer once or twice a year is like being too busy to get your oil changed.

Fortunately we have a guide to opening your computer up, vacating the dust, and even giving your system fans a little boost. We're not going to recap the already awesome guide but we are going to stress that you need to do it sooner than later. The cake of dust inside your machine is a slow-working vampire, sucking away life from your graphics card, processor, and most importantly—as we emphasized above—your hard drives. Data is too precious to leave it smoldering in an insulated jacket.