The importance of data backup

If you have been thinking of backing up your data do it now!

Its been quite a while since I posted anything here, fact is I had completely forgotten about this blog. It was from the days when I would blog about anything, but the pressures of work were just too much to allow me to even think about writing anything interesting. Since this blog brings back some memories from the past, I recollect an incident that reinforced the idea of always backing up your data. When my laptop crashed with a whole lot of important data that had not been backed up.

Today with all kinds of storage solutions available and prices coming down on a daily basis, its so easy to just store your data in your computer and forget about it, cloud computing is also opening up a totally new avenue of computing. But, I cannot overemphasise the importance of backing up your data.

If you have about 1gb of important data minus the music and the movies, back that up in a dvd or a pendrive and make sure you store them properly in a safe place. The price of a dvd or pendrive is ridiculously cheap now, and if you are not paranoid about privacy you can even store your files in your email as attachments, that way you will always have access to them (provided of course you are connected to the net). Gmail offers more than 7GB of free storage space, download and install a utility named 'gmail drive' this will show up as another drive on 'my computer' and of course you have to be online to be able to download or upload files from this drive.

With 1TB being the standard hard disk on home computers today, there is plenty of room to store anything and everything, but an average home computer user would not have more than 1GB of important data, in the form of word processor documents, spreadsheets, presentations or some other file format. The rest of the space is usually taken up by music, movies and other kinds of multimedia files. Always back up your important files and by important I don't mean music or movies that you can purchase again, but the critical files that would cause you a great deal of trauma and harm if they were lost.

I remember by Toshiba Satellite MX111 with a 40gb hard drive, 256mb ram, running winxp home, I was using this machine to edit a magazine. All the pictures that had been taken and edited were stored in the hard drive and were deleted from the camera, all the articles had been typed from hand written notes or transferred from cds and pendrives and also stored in the same hard drive and the work was almost complete. Those were the days of pagemaker and photoshop and eveyrthing was painstakingly compiled on pagemaker. I remember thinking that I should back up the data just in case, but I shrugged the thought away. Since the work was almost done I decided to take a break and started updating spybot an anti spyware programme I had installed, after a few minutes i remember a friend who was in the office asking me if he should restart the laptop as the update was complete, I told him to go ahead and then I heard him saying that, its not responding, after it failed to respond to all efforts the only obvious solution was to press hard on the power button and do a hard reset, never expecting that it would fail to start. Well that was what it did, then the panic started. The OS had crashed and there were too many system files missing, the recovery dvd that came with the laptop was designed to wipe everything and reinstall a fresh copy of xp which would not serve my purpose at all. To cut a long story short, I worked through the night and finally was able to carve out a 3gb partition from the 40gb hard disk using 'bootit ng' an excellent partitioning utility which I still use today. A fresh copy of windows xp was installed on the new partition which was used to access the files on the other partition and recover the all important unbacked-up files. I cannot explain the anxiety and fear of having lost everything, its definitely something that is to be avoided at all costs.

We've come a long way since xp but an OS will still crash, so if you are reading this, go ahead and backup that data, at least the important ones and save yourself the trauma and hair tearing.

THE BEST FREE APPLICATIONS FOR WINDOWS XP

Throughout my experience with the various windows operating systems i have searched, downloaded, used and experimented with a number of third party applications starting from antivirus and security solutions, multimedia applications like players that can play a variety of file formats, multimedia file converters and rippers, word processing/editing, photo editing, video editing etc etc... I have tried most of the free softwares and open source applications.

I have had all kinds of experiences in the course of my experimentation - some quite pleasant and some not so pleasant- one thing that i have found out however is that in most cases, the applications with a small download size and installation footprint were usually the best. However, some of the programmes which started out as very small and effective, have over the years lost track of their basic design philosophy and have joined the bloatware bandwagon today.

I have a list which i feel would be recommended for novice users, try them out and i don't think you will have any regrets, the list however is random and in no special order and is meant for Windows users. I have covered a list of programs for Linux users in another blog.

First of all to get started after a fresh installation of windows an ANTIVIRUS program is a must

there are any number of free programs available today and surprisingly I have found Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) to be excellent for the Windows environment, if however you desire to get something else you can take a look at  Antivir, AVG and Avast, you can get the latest versions at http://www.filehippo.com/

before you start downloading your programs I recommend you download the latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome  you can use internet explorer to download this from http://www.mozilla.com/ or alternatively from filehippo. Install this browser download the flash player plugins for this too and when you're done forget you ever saw internet explorer on your desktop and don't even think of using it again (unless of course you come across some weird website that firefox cannot open)

In addition to a good antivirus program I usually recommend that you install an antispyware and antimalware, but if you have installed MSE you probably won't need to do that. But, if you're the paranoid kind then download malwarebytes from http://www.download.com/ and spybot search and destroy, you can even take a look at some firewall programs like comodo, zonealarm, sygate or sunbelt all available at filehippo

For multimedia applications if you're used to using windows media player as your default player, download the latest version and also download Klite Codec pack this pack enables media player to play almost all popular formats which the player doesn't natively support. An alternative to media player, in fact a highly recommended one is VLC or video lan client player. This player can open and play almost any multimedia file format you throw at it. Winamp is also a very popular player and is quite adept at handling a big music collection.

A maintenance tool that can help you remove junk files, clear your browsing history, clear your usage history and help you with your registry is ccleaner, this is an excellent tool, it will make things so easy for you.

windows xp installation on CQ40 133TU

If you have reached my post obviously you have tried to install win xp on your compaq laptop cq40 but you must have reached the point where it blanks out or rather blues out into that famous blue screen. I'm not going to ask why you want to downgrade to xp you obviously have your own reasons.

Lets look at the list of things you are likely to need.

1. Laptop

2. WinXp Installation Disk (with SP2 or SP3 integrated)

3. Another desktop or laptop computer with an active internet connection and a CD or DVD Writer

4. A lot of patience...

First you will have to integrate the necessary drivers into your xp installation cd, the best way u can do this is by using a software called 'nlite' download the software from the net, before you install it make sure u have dotnet installed on your computer, if you don't go to the microsoft website, download and install it.

The next step is to integrate the sata drivers into your windows xp installation cd, now you will be thinking, how the hell do i do that, you cannot copy and paste it on to your cd obviously and i don't plan to cover integrating drivers in this post. Do a google search and find out how to integrate sata drivers onto your installation disk using nlite...

After u feel confident enough of venturing into this you will have to find the relevant SATA drivers for your particular machine, this again you can do by searching on the net, and you will most probably get the relevant drivers from the manufacturer's website, after you have downloaded the relevant SATA drivers for your laptop model, extract them into one folder and later u can get them inside ur xp installation disk using the insert function in nlite.

Once the integration process is done you can burn your integrated disk as a bootable cd when this is done you can now use your cd to install a fresh copy of win xp on your CQ40 series laptop.

But this is just the beginning or ur problems

getting the drivers for windows xp for this particular laptop is a big pain, I have posted the drivers in sky drive, when you click on the links you will be taken to the skydrive site and you can download using the download button on the right hand pane of the window, if you are taken to the filefactory website you do not need to pay or get a premium account, you can log in as a free user and download the files for free.

The sequence for installing the drivers is: chipset, uaa, audio, graphics followed by other drivers

• First install the Chipset driver, you can get it from here

• The chipset driver will be followed by the Audio driver (DO NOT install the graphics driver before the audio driver)

If you have slipstreamed your Windows XP installation CD with SP3 you will not need the Universal  Audio Architecture, but if it is not slipstreamed with SP3 then you will have to install the UAA first before proceeding with the Audio driver. You can get the UAA from here

• After installing the UAA , download and install the audio driver from here

This will create a swsetup folder in C drive ("C:\swsetup\sp34200")

Installing this driver may result in an error. However, you can continue with the following steps to get the audio driver to work. 

• Go to Start and select Run. In the Run box type devmgmt.msc and press enter 
• Right click on "Audio device on High Definition Audio Bus" then click update driver
• Select "Install from a list or specific location" 
• Click Next, then select "Don't search, I will choose the driver to install"
• Click Next and select "Sound, video and game controller" from the list.
• Click Next and then click Have Disk
• Click Browse C:\swsetup\sp34200 folder and select the .inf (wis30b2a) file and click open and Continue with the onscreen instructions

At this point DO NOT RESTART click cancel if it asks to be restarted

• The next step is to install the graphics driver download it from here
• You can also install the driver for the modem now (although nobody uses a modem anymore these days) for modem driver click here

You can restart the machine at this point and XP should be able to keep the audio driver and you will be able to hear XP's familiar welcome sound.

For webcam driver click here

For ricoh 5 in 1 card reader driver click here

For LAN driver click here or here

In case u have any particular problem concerning this laptop u can post a question and i will try to answer it for you.

As usual this was a case where someone wanted a downgrade from vista to xp and it turned out that this machine was a samsung SENS Q45 laptop preinstalled with vista with the korean interface, it was a core 2 duo machine with 1gb ram 12.1" screen, bluetooth, wifi, lan, modem, 1.3 megapixel webcamera and 120gb hard disk drive. I had to make sure i would be able to get the necessary drivers before i formatted it, creating a recovery disk for the vista was another headache because everything was in Korean and I haven't had the time to learn Korean yet.

The first task was obviously to search for the drivers, the model number on the bottom of the laptop mentioned it as NT Q45 but on further research I found that samsung referred to it as the NP Q45 and I had to look for the appropriate drivers, after a bit of a tedious search i reached the official samsung site here offering multilanguage option for the windows xp operating system.

After this it was smooth sailing with the usual clean install from a windows xp disk integrated with sp2.

After the installation was done the first driver to be installed was the chipset driver followed by the graphics driver and then the sound.

If you have the Win XP with SP2 integrated installing the sound driver can be a bit tricky and u will have to install the high defintion audio driver package before installing the realtek driver, after that everything went smooth except for the modem which is not yet working.

If you have the Win XP with SP3 integrated you won't have to install the hi-def audio driver package.

This had to be followed up with installing the korean language pack to enable the machine to be used for Korean language input both for internet usage and word processing using MS Office 2007.

I'm too tired to post all the details will do that in a few days...

if you have any queries feel free to comment