My chimney would have had lesser soot

President's day long weekend - after my gramps left for India, I decided to take a look at my PC and fix it. I had to do it asap as the pressure for delivering DVDs of the temple activities was mounting. So I start to open the cabinet and remove the existing hard drive. The moment I opened the cabinet I felt a sudden rush of blackness into my eyes from no where, like a bolt from the blue, err black. I saw that my power supply, motherboard and the cables were all dirty with black soot all over them. How in the hell did black soot get over to my system? I wondered. Then it struck me like lightening - Mansion Grove apartments. The time when the apartment in Mansion Grove started to get black soot deposited from the faulty Electrical heater system the management people have installed in the apartment. The black soot from that apartment has been living in my computer since then. Probably my chimney would have had lesser soot than what was there inside the cabinet. I had to clean it before I start to put the cover back onto the cabinet. I thought for a moment - "why don't I just try and put in a new hard drive and try to reinstall my windows first and then try all these tricks of cleaning it." So I tried. You want to know what happened? Check out my next blog...

Acronis: Have you backed up my disk yet?

My computer had broken down and I was using my Grand dad's laptop until the day came when he had to leave for India. My gramps were scheduled to leave on Feb 17th and I was wondering what I should do - I have to really fix my computer and I was in no mood to do it. Basically I was sick of it. Every year just as how the tax season comes by and wreaks havoc, similarly my computer always has some breakdowns every year. I was talking about this to Harsha and during the course of the conversation I mentioned that I had to reinstall my Windows and all the applications once my computer is up and running. He gave me an idea - Acronis. Yes, not Norton, but Acronis. First of all this was a company I had never heard of - but this guy (Harsha) always seems to dig up something good and keep it there for nerds like me who have no clue what SW to use.

Anyways, he mentioned to me about this SW called Acronis TrueImage 9.0 that would solve all the problems of backing up and restoring Windows. I asked him how it was different from Norton's Ghost - his answer was that this product works and it delivers the results. So here I was - downloading the trial version of the SW from www.acronis.com and somewhere in my mind I was kind of excited. I would get to try it out on my gramps laptop before I buy it for myself. I did try it and it rocks.

The most important feature I found interesting in TrueImage was the Acronis Secure Zone. TrueImage allows you to activate a secure zone on your hard drive thereby giving you an option to backup your data on the secure zone. Why secure zone, you would ask? - Because this secure zone is created from your free space and is hidden from regular windows explorer. Unless you are Peter Norton or a hard disk dissector, you will not be able to tamper with this zone. But think about what happens if your hard disk crahses and you will not be able to recover your secure zone -Ha ha ha, dont think about it now.

Once the zone is created, you can create backups in 3 different ways:

[1] Full backup - as the name suggests it will perform a full backup
[2] Incremental backup - much like how version control systems maintain differences between file versions, this backup methodology backs up only the changes since last backup
[3] Differential backup - it maintains the difference between 2 backups

While booting, you can press F11 to show the Acronis boot menu and it will give you choices as which image you want to restore to your hard drive. This is much better than reinstalling Windows, search for drivers, reinstall all the applications and programs. Anyway, I use the first 2 options of backup commonly. Apart from all these, TrueImage has task schedulers. You can schedule tasks such as backing up a folder or a drive at certain times. This feature helped in automating my gramps laptop so he can take it back to India hassle-free. This SW is a definitely Yes from my side. I cannot wait to install it on my machine - if only it can get up and start running, at least walking...