Clean slate

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 26th, 2010 | 0 Comments

Over the last 24 hours I have been busy with getting my computer into a good performance level for this summer. To do this I decided to fully format my computer and start fresh. Since I have a lot of files on my computer, I knew the longest part of this would be backing up what I need. That took a while, I ended up keeping about 90gb of files, this included some programs that I needed. I also had to backup my iTunes library this was really simple, I just copied my music folder and then exported the iTunes library file and that was it done! Since I am working on a few websites, some for myself and some for clients I backed up those files into a few different places just in case the hard drive I was using to back up the files managed to fail, it would be just my luck that it would and I would have to work my ass off to recover what I lost! I backed up all my files onto an internal hard drive which I actually keep outside of my computer, it is just a spare hard drive I have lying around that comes in useful for doing just this thing! To get my files onto it I used a set of cables I bought a while back which provide power to the hard drive and also has a usb cable for transfer! The next step was just to format the hard drive, I always worry after I just push that format button, in case I forgot to back something up, it would be lost forever, luckily it hasn't happened to me yet, and hopefully it never will! I reinstalled Windows 7 onto the computer once the format was complete, it took about 20 minutes which is not a bad time for installing it but usually I would install it from a usb key, which only takes about 10 minutes, that is a much faster way of doing it however I didn't have a spare usb key to put Windows 7 on so I had to do it using the disc. I worked on this from 11pm last night to about 2am, in that time I backed up all my files, formatted and reinstalled windows and then once all that was done I started on getting all my files back onto the computer. Putting the files back onto the computer was actually pretty fast and while the files were copying back on, I installed a few of my programs including my anti-virus suite (Pc-Tools Internet Security), iTunes and Tweetdeck. Once the files were back on the computer I organised them into a better order than I had them before. I used to have my pictures, videos and documents all mixed together, now I have them in separate locations, that should help me find things quicker in the future! I decided that was enough for one night, which was actually the bulk of the work complete. Today I just added on the last of the programs I use regularly, such as Microsoft word, FileZilla (ftp program), Gtalk, msn, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. The reason I wanted to reinstall my operating system was because over time your computer tends to become slower than usual and doesn't perform to its best abilities, this can happen from parts of programs being left behind when you uninstalled a program, it also frees up space. Also any entries in the registry that are not needed are completely gone now so the registry is smaller now since there is basically nothing on the computer. Now my computer is working much faster, I do notice the difference. The boot speed has drastically increased, which is great! :)

Hard drive failure

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: February 12th, 2010 | 0 Comments

This week I have been asked to fix a computer by someone that I know, he has the computer a little over a year now and it has suddenly stopped working for him. Once the computer starts up you see the manufacturers splash screen, then nothing! It just stays there.

I thought it was a bit strange after a while of looking about I saw that the computer was not recognising the hard drive that was in the computer! Next I popped open the computer and with great difficulty I managed to get out the enclosure that holds the hard drive in place.

This was now the perfect time to use my external hard drive cables that I bought a while back, I connected the cables up and into my computer and turned the power on and the drive begun to spin, but no usb drive was detected. I thought that was a bit strange because every drive I connected before always got picked up by the computer.

So my last test was to power down my pc, disconnect my hard drive and plug in his hard drive, when I did this I got the same problem as his computer, it would boot to the manufacturers splash screen and go no further, this is when I knew the hard drive had failed. So I reconnected my hard drive and after a bit of online searching I found that the make of this hard drive had actually being given an unbelievable amount of problems, everyone had the same problem as the hard drive I have.

It turn out this hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) would work perfectly one day and you would shut the pc down normally and the next day it would just not work. So basically the hard drive is bricked. The problem apparently was to do with the firmware on the hard drive itself, there is now a fix released for the hard drive which will prevent this from happening, however if your hard drive has already been bricked then there is no way to flash the new firmware onto it.

There is a way to fix these hard drives, someone found this hack that would work involving getting a Nokia Mobile cable and connecting it to the hard drives pins and using HyperTerminal or putty to send commands to it, I think it looks a bit complex so decided not to give it a go.

After a while of looking for a new hard drive online I quickly realised how expensive some people are selling them for. I decided I would go for a Western Digital hard drive as they are the most reliable.

Most hard drives I looked up cost around €70.00 , The current hard drive in the computer had a capacity of 500gb so I asked him if he wanted more space, and since he does a lot of multimedia work he said he could do with a bit more, so we went to the next available size which was 640gb.

The cheapest place I found this hard drive was on Komplett where it was just €54.78, not bad so before I ordered it I said I will have a look in Pc world here in town and the price was just mental, they were selling a 500gb hard drive for around €140.00! Not a chance I was going to buy it from them, so I ordered it from komplett.

The funny thing is that the UK PC world are selling the same hard drive as the Irish PC world for only €70.00! It is ridiculas the way they can have such a huge difference in their prices, so much for a chain store, I thought they all kept their prices the same!

Connect to a internal hard-drive via USB

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: November 16th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Back in August of this year I bought a kit for connecting hard-drives to a computer via a USB cable. This is really useful especially if you are regularly fixing computers and need to get access to a hard-drive.

I have been using this a lot since I bought it. If you cannot access a hard-drive for reasons such as it is taking far too long to load the operating system or if the windows operating system has crashed and is no longer accessible then these cables will definitely be very useful.

In order to access these hard drives all you have to do is remove them from the laptop or pc and then add in the connector that is in the kit and then use the usb  and power cord to get into the hard drive, it’s that simple!

A lot of times people have issues where Windows has crashed and they think all of their data is gone! I have found that once the hard drive is taken out and connected to your computer via USB you can still browse through the files and save all the files that they think they lost :D .

When I bought this back in August it cost me €17.98, which is really cheap and I think is definitely worth the investment. Also these cables can be sued for a lot more than just hard drives, if you have an old internal disk drive you can use these cables to power up them too! This is really useful for Netbooks which have no disk drive.

For anyone looking to buy a set of these cables they are: USB to IDE & SATA Adaptor Cable 2.5 3.5 Inch Hard Drive

So what’s in the box?

• USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter
• 2.0 Amp AC Power Adapter
• UK Mains Cable
• User Manual

And here are the features of the product, and it fits basically all hard drives! :

• Compatible with any 2.5", 3.5", 5.25" IDE or SATA drive!
• Dual Output Switch with LED Power ON Indicators
• Hot swappable and truly Plug and Play
• No driver needed
• Supports IDE & Enhanced IDE 3.5" Hard Disk
• Supports ATA/ATAPI-6 Specification 1.0
• Supports SATA I and SATA II

These cables are also compatible with both PC and Mac! I bought mine with the UK Mains adaptor, however these are available with other mains adaptors such as US mains. If the images are too smallm just click on them to see a larger version! :D