Fix Your WiFi

For many middle and large sized companies wireless connectivity has become an adopted technology. No longer are the requirements of a hard line connection or worries of connection breaches. Encryption has taken care of that. Here are a few tips to improve your wifi network.

Upgrade. Dump those old b routers and go with the latest and greatest wireless n technology. If you can't, then try for g routers. Even investing in a high gain antenna is a good solution. Check for the latest firmware for your model. Sometimes those frequent drops can be fixed with a little software upgrade.

Placement. If you don't want to spend any money do a bit of rearrangement of your routers. In the center of the office and not in the corner without obstructing furniture near it. Treat it like a satellite where people should be able to have line of site to the access point.

Security. Ensure that all of your routers have changed from the default admin factory password. As well be sure to check that a uniform encryption protocol is being used by all of your wireless network. Passwords should be a minimum of 8 characters involving letters and numbers (upper and lowercase if you want to get fancy).

Moving Parts

Of all the components within a computer the hard disk is the most vulnerable to failure. Believe it or not a standard hard drive has many internal moving components. The motor within a hard drive spins at 7,200 RPM, much faster than the cpu cooling fan. Some enterprise level hard drives spin as fast as 15,000 RPM.

Aside from spinning a hard drive generates heat and a lot of it. Faster drives create more heat because of (you guessed it) all of the spinning. Most drives have a limited shelf life (3 - 5 years) which can be shortened proportional to the amount of activity that occurs. A hard drive failure should be expected in one form or another within that time period.

Electrical fluctuations or outages can cause hard drive failure. A sudden loss of power is like shutting an engine off in mid rev. If data was being access during the halt then the result can be data corruption. The most active files are usually the ones affected. Data corruption can be a major problem to current files and databases.

A corrupted master boot record (MBR) is a relatively simple problem. All that is required is having the correct software tools to skip sector '0' and having the ability to access the data beyond that point. In most cases a corrupted MBR cannot be repaired. Within this essential sector a hard drive cannot be accessed through normal methods.

Recovering the essential data is the focus of any hard drive manipulations. Given the affordable cost of storage mediums a hard drive is useless if the data it contains is not safe. Part of any data continuity plan should be a backup routine. Ensuring that business practices are minimally impacted should be of the utmost importance. Even end users can do their part by simply copying important files to another storage device.

Code causes a fuss

It looks like Twitter is working again. It's funny how a javascript exploit posted by a 17 year old Australian boy could cause so much trouble. The mouse over problem took down a Whitehouse twitter feed as well as showing up in the wife of the UK Prime Minister's feed. The bug mostly caused a minor inconvenience for users redirecting them to porn sites but developers at Twitter quickly patched the security hole later in the day. There have been no reports of accounts or password information that have were stolen during the exploit. So go ahead and tweet away safely.

Questions to ask

before choosing the right computer repair company.

Do you employ any special techniques or tools?

What is the privacy policy?

How long have you been in the industry?

Do you have any areas of expertise?

Is there a success or service guarantee?

Next consult the better business bureau.

Good luck!

Ok, now what?

Find yourself in a kerfuffle? Not sure how you got here? Clicked a bunch of things, installed another, and now nothing works? Fixing the problem is never as easy as getting there in the first place. Diagnosing and then finding a solution provider can be tricky. At some point you realize that you've gone too far and should not attempt to do it yourself. When it comes to hard drives that are fragile you should handle with extra care. This is when a trained specialist can help recover your data.

Be sure to get an evaluation performed first, at no cost. Then determine whether the value of the data outweighs the time and effort required to re-do the work. Most of the time the sticker shock will make your decision for you, however when you reconsider the amount of effort required to recreate the data, you may change your mind.

The next option is the cheaper solution. Hair brained schemes like putting the drive in the freezer, taking out the platters, and pcb swaps. This is definitely the fastest way to ensure your data will be lost forever. In some situations where you've gone to far, no recovery technician can undo the damage you have done. Good luck.

Little guy still fighting Microsoft

We've all heard the story of David vs Goliath. i4i vs Microsoft is the modern day version of just that. The legal battle still continues even after i4i was awarded a legal victory a few months ago. The dispute is over a patent infringement in which Microsoft Office utilized the code in question. A lower court ruling awarded $290 million in damages to i4i. The controversial decision is a long line of patent lawsuits that have happened over a few years, yet in this case the small Canadian company came out on top. The whole patent system needs an overhaul and hopefully US lawmakers will finally act.

New pcs and first steps

Love that new smell ... of computers. Once you get over the initial rush there's a lot people should do before getting started. First get rid of all the bloatware. That's right, uninstall the trial programs, the so called "free for 30 days" and other garbage like that. Once you clean things up a little you can get started with the stuff you really need.

Anti-virus, firewall (the Windows firewall is ok), productivity software, browser, music program, video player, and so much more. Avast for anti-virus. Open office for productivity. Firefox for your browser. VLC media player for music and video. Image burn for DVD/CD recording. And whatever free software or open source software you like to use. Don't forget a torrent program.

Whether your latest purchase is for business or pleasure it's not quite ready to use right out of the box. Don't even get me started on data recovery services and off-site backup. You may want to turn off the laptop and never boot it up again if you worry all the time about the dangers of the Internet.

Regardless of whether you like to admit it or not, your data is important and everyone needs to backup their data on a regular basis. Trust me, a little hassle now to save you from a huge hassle later on. External hard drive, flash memory stick, CDRs or DVDRs, or other storage media will be your best friend. Don't ever perform a system restore until you have verified your data is backed up and in working condition (IE accessible and files fully working).

While computers and laptops are primarily used for entertainment most will agree that saving important files require attention. Ensuring that you and only you have access to your data. If it has been collected over many years it makes the data that much more irreplaceable. Memoirs or photos, the value of a lifetime of work should never be underestimated.