Personal Computing Demystified.
Personal Computing
`Tis the season.. but don't donate that PC yet.
2792 days
With the release of Windows 7 in time for the holiday buying season I’ll bet that more than one of you plan to purchase a new PC this year.. and you may already have. Congratulations! You’ll certainly
Photo by ercwttmn
enjoy better performance and increased efficiency from your new system, no doubt. So, what do you do with your old system? You could pass it down to a family member – many folks do that. You could keep it and use it for the kids. You could prop a door open with it. The list goes on and on. If you’re like most folks though.. you’ll gather up that old PC and take it down the street to your favorite charity and donate it for the good feeling and the tax writeoff. If this is your plan, STOP! Charity is a great thing.. but you need to think this through. You have personal data on that PC. You’ve done your online banking on that PC. You’ve probably allowed your browser to save some of your passwords on that PC. Just a few of the above items are more than enough information to allow someone to gain access to your entire electronic life at your expense. Did you attempt to delete the data? That delete key on the keyboard probably doesn’t work the way you think it does. For example.. say I keep a Word document on my hard drive that has all of those passwords that I don’t want to forget in it. I’ve decided after some time that I’m going to sell my old computer at a yard sale, so I go to “My Documents” and delete the file before I sell it. The file doesn’t show up in “My Documents” anymore and I’ve emptied my recycle bin, so it is gone, right?
Wrong. Very Wrong.
What really happened inside the guts of your machine is this: your operating system marked the spot where that file lives on disk as “overwriteable” so the space on disk can be used later. The file is still very much there, only hidden. Theoretically.. I could purchase your machine, take it home, remove the hard disk and plug it into my already-running PC with an adapter. I can run one of several programs I have for examining your old hard disk and “undelete” those files.. and Voila! I have your password file.
I’m going to do a little experiment. I’m going to head to my local donation center and purchase a used PC. I’ll bring it home and do just what I illustrated and see what I can see. I’ll chronicle the experience here to illustrate what I’ve been talking about and I’ll then properly destroy what I’ve found. Stay tuned!
PS.. by now you know that I support my little blogging habit with affiliate advertisements. Basically.. if you click a link or ad on this site and make a purchase I get a small cut. Please take a look at the ads.. there are some big names there. If you plan on making purchases with those advertisers anyway I’d appreciate it if you’d click on my ads to make those purchases. Thanks!
The best things in (computing) life can be free.. sort of.
0801 days
by Neilster1
in Personal Computing
Over the past few weeks a few friends of mine have asked for my advice about different types of software. Each of them have a need and the software industry has the solution.. but that solution is horribly expensive. The good news is that there are tools for these needs that don’t have a retail price tag attached to them – the software we’re talking about is open-source. Open source software is generally written by individuals or small groups and is intended to be free to use – but donations are gladly accepted by the authors to help fund continued development. I’ll stand up for the open-source community right now and tell you straight up – if you use open-source software you should by all means donate! The quality of software that is out there is often far superior to its retail competition – support is done by the user community and the release/upgrade cycle is usually much shorter than retail products, which means that new features show up much more quickly.
Here’s a few selected OSS selections that are quite appropriate for the holiday season:
GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP)
Image by Al Brown
If you need to do serious photo editing – say, for instance you decide that picture you have of your friend Eric wearing his full-face MTB helmet just needs some creative editing to make it pop. Just fire up your favorite photo-editing software and, voila! Eric now has Darth Vader’s body! Hilarity ensues – especially if you post the picture where all of Eric’s friends can see it. Everyone has heard of Adobe Photoshop.. that brand name has become synonymous with photo editing and it is indeed a powerful program.. but it is almost prohibitively expensive for the home computer user. A great alternative that is equally powerful is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or The GIMP for short. I haven’t found anything that I can do with Photoshop that I can’t do with The Gimp. You can get The GIMP from here.. and if you like it, please donate.
I’m greatly annoyed by the fact that until recently you had to use a third-party program to perform what I consider to be basic operations with your CD/DVD burner – for instance, creating an .ISO image of a CD/DVD. If you still use Windows XP you’re still stuck in that spot without third-party software. You could go buy Nero or Roxio to perform those tasks.. or you could go download a copy of InfraRecorder. From InfraRecorder’s site, here’s some of what you can do with it:
Features
- Create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images.
- Supports recording to dual-layer DVDs.
- Blank (erase) rewritable discs using four different methods.
- Record disc images (ISO and BIN/CUE).
- Fixate discs (write lead-out information to prevent further data from being added to the disc).
- Scan the SCSI/IDE bus for devices and collect information about their capabilities.
- Create disc copies, on the fly and using a temporary disc image.
- Import session data from multi-session discs and add more sessions to them.
- Display disc information.
- Save audio and data tracks to files (.wav, .wma, .ogg, .mp3 and .iso).
If you need these functions, go here to download InfraRecorder. If you like it, please donate!
Have any OSS suggestions you’d like to share? Leave a comment!
From @ComcastBonnie: ComcastBonnie Happy Fun-Time Learning Series GO!
0811 days
From time to time I’ll post content here authored by other bloggers. @ComcastBonnie is a member of the Comcast Cares! team at your favorite giant content provider and has provided great help to me in the past. Below is a great post on self-troubleshooting Internet access issues with your cable connection.
ComcastBonnie Happy Fun-Time Learning Series GO!
By: @ComcastBonnie
(I was originally going to post this back in September. Oops!)
Since the new school year has begun, let’s learn some fun stuff about your internet connection and how to fix it! Prepare to amaze and awe your neighbors, family, and friends who will suddenly deem you as their tech support person 
OK, class! Let’s begin…
Today, we’ll start off our fun learning series with the simple stuff. When I see problems, the very first thing I’ll ask is: Have you reset your modem? If the answer is yes, then I’ll ask: Do you have a router? This isn’t because I’m trying to blame any particular piece of equipment. You’d be amazed at how many times a router will get “out of sync” with a modem, and vice versa. To fix this…
- · pull the power from both the modem and the router
- · Next, plug the power into the modem ONLY.
- · Wait for the lights on the front to calm down. On Motorola modems, you need four SOLID green lights. (Scientific Atlanta/Webstar needs a SOLID cable light. RCA modems need the Cable Link and Internet light SOLID. If you have a modem not listed here, chances are you bought it or it’s an end of life modem and should be replaced)
- · Once this is done, go ahead and plug the power back into your router and wait for it to finish up it’s startup sequence.
Easy enough, right? If you’re still unable to connect, try moving on to the slightly more complicated steps below.
For a direct connection to the modem:
- · PC’s: Go to “Network Connections” in your Control Panel. Right mouse click on “Local Area Connection” and click Status. Click the Support tab in this window, and check the IP address.
- · Macs: Finder>Applications>System Utilities>Network Utility This will display your current IP address.
- · Does the IP start with 169.254? If so, your computer is not getting a connection from the modem and you should probably give us a call. If you see 192.168, you’re connected to a router, have your IP set static, or something else is going on with the modem. Again, something you might want to call us up about.
For connections using a router:
- · Make sure your router is obtaining an IP address by going to its home page at http://192.168.1.1 (login required in most cases). You should be able to check on the router’s status page and see if you are getting an IP. If you see a 169.254.xxx.xxx address, your router is not connecting to the modem. This could mean that it was not powered on in the right order OR the modem is not assigning IP’s.
- · Make sure your computer is receiving an IP address from the router by following the steps above. A 192.168.x.x of 10.x.x.x address should show. If not, your router has a problem!
- · Make sure you’re connected to your own wireless network. I get more of this than most people think. Be sure to put your wireless network as top priority over others in your network preferences.
For the super geeks out there:
Speaking of modem’s not handing out IP’s… I see this little problem all the time. The geeks out there seem to notice this the most, and take extraordinary measures to correct the problem. I’ll see folks spoofing their MAC Addresses to get the modem to talk to the equipment on the other end. Guess what? You don’t need to do that ANY TIME you connect something in to your modem, you will need to reset the modem. Otherwise, it will still consider the original device connected, and hence refuse to work with the new device. Easy fix, right? Make sure you’re not overlooking the basics above, since it’s easy to forget the most obvious things sometimes. I once troubleshot a modem for well over an hour, and then discovered it was in standby. The lights on the modem will tell you a lot about what’s going on.
I hope this gives you a little insight into the basics of troubleshooting. Next week, we’ll move on to checking out your internet signal from the comfort of your own home
Got a topic I should cover? Let me know in the comments! Got a question about any of the stuff above? Ask away! Let’s keep comments about the lessons on-topic, so we can all chirp in about each thing
About @ComcastBonnie:
Your friendly neighborhood Comcast Ninja here to answer questions, fix problems, and make the world a better place for our Customers. Got a question? Ask me!
@ComcastBonnie‘s blog can be found at http://comcastbonnie.blogspot.com
