TCS - The New, the Best, and the Worst

The New, the Best, and the Worst

Collected by Pim Borman, Website Editor,
SW Indiana PC Users Group, Inc.
From the November, 2006 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Backup, Schmackup.

I can't pick up a computer magazine without being harangued about the urgent need to back up my hard drive(s) before the world is coming to an end. I have never been able to bring myself to follow that well-meant advice, although not without lingering feelings of guilt. On a few occasions I have used the latest hot backup program to store data folders to a compressed file on a backup drive. Then I wondered if I would be able to retrieve my data from that file if the need arose, and conveniently forgot to update the backup.

Last year I bought a 200 GB external hard drive to store backups. It came with a backup program that I used to back up those data folders I wanted to protect. After I was done I had about 199 GB of external disk space left. It dawned on me that it might be easier to just copy the data folders I wanted to back up directly to the external drive. No big deal and no worry about the integrity of my backup data .

After all, what is there that's irreplaceable? I edit our User Group's Web site, about 12 MB by now. After every update I publish the site to my external hard drive and two locations on the Web. Once or twice a year I also copy the whole thing to a CD-ROM that I give to our president for safekeeping. That's safe enough by any measure. I keep extra copies of photos and genealogy data on several hard drives, and annually copy them to a backup CD. Current financial and tax data I keep on removable storage with backup to CDs, as well as hard copies in a file cabinet. Personal email correspondence gets backed up occasionally, although I can't remember ever going back to letters from years ago. I might have to borrow a computer from the Smithsonian to recover my earliest correspondence, written in the late eighties with a Textra word processor on floppy disks that actually flopped.

During the past two Christmas seasons, while nostalgia was running high, my son Mike and I dug out some old 8-mm family movies, taken in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, for conversion to digital format. The old projector suffered from a broken drive belt, but thanks to Google I managed to find a replacement on the Web. I still had some splice tapes left to repair the brittling film as needed. We used a Vivitar UVC-1 All-In-One Universal Video Converter to funnel the images into Mike's digital camcorder. The converter is a rectangular box with an opaque glass projection window in the long side, and a condenser lens in the short side. The camcorder, on a tripod, is focused through the condenser lens and a diagonal internal mirror on the projected image. We needed to adjust the frame rate of the camcorder to obtain a steady picture. Mike then recorded the camcorder copy with a SONY RDR-GX300 DVD Recorder on DVDs for sharing with relatives and archiving. Now THAT is worthwhile backing up! The quality of the old movies is primitive by today's standards, but the contents are invaluable and irreplaceable.

If you run a business I can see the importance of regularly and completely backing up everything, making sure to keep extra copies off-site. But as a private individual, just use common sense and stop worrying. What is there to lose, really? And while you are at it, maybe you should look around the garage, the attic, or the basement for clutter that can safely be thrown away!

TV Tuner Troubles

We live at the edge of the city of Evansville, with a small, wooded area behind our back fence. That provides great privacy and a wide variety of interesting wildlife, from birds, squirrels, and raccoons to occasional deer. Unfortunately, over the past 50 years or so the trees have encroached on the overhead power line, and we suffer frequent power outages whenever a storm passes through the area. Naturally, that happens just when you are glued to the TV screen to follow the progress of the storm on the radar. I went looking on the Internet for an external TV tuner that I could plug into the USB port of my laptop when the power went off. As it turns out, there are several models available. I first chose a Hauppauge WinTV USB2 unit, about $90 online. Unfortunately, it didn't work as advertised. The picture was all right, but I could not get the sound to come on, and the software did not manage to activate the remote control. FAQs on the Hauppage Web site did not help and the latest drivers were identical to those on the CD. I tried the unit on my desktop computer with the same lack of success. The vendor, J&B Music, readily gave me a Return Authorization number, although I'm still out the shipping charges both ways.

Undaunted, I bought an ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 tuner at Circuit City, $80 with a $20 mail-in rebate. Same features but without remote control. Same problems too, except that this time I received no picture either. Checked their Web site's FAQs, downloaded and installed newly updated drivers. Now I didn't even get the black screen. Called support who referred me to a help file on the FAQ site. No luck. Returned the unit to Circuit City and got all my money back. Oh well... If you know of a reliable external USB2 TV Tuner, please let me know. It better be good this time.

Freespire

For those of you with an interest in the Linspire Linux distribution, there is now a free distro called Freespire. It is essentially the same as Linspire 5.1, without some help files, but with developers utilities. To quote freespire.org: “The regular, complete version includes legally-licensed, 3rd party codecs, drivers and software, to offer better hardware, file type, and multimedia support. Freespire includes turn-key, out-of-the-box support for MP3, Windows Media, QuickTime, Java, Flash, Real, ATI drivers, nVidia drivers, proprietary WiFi drivers, modem drivers, fonts, and so on.”

It has all the functionality of Linspire 5.1, including some new features forthcoming in Linspire 6.0. The expectation is that Freespire will function as a core around which volunteer programmers will add new functionality under the Open Source system, similar to other Open Source projects such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.org. Meanwhile, if you were thinking of giving Linspire a try but were unwilling to pay $40 for the program, you can now use Freespire for free and have essentially the same functionality.

Dell DeCrapifier

Dell stock has gone down more than 50% during the last several years. Many reasons are given, including the presumed ineptness of its CEO during the last two years, Kevin Rollins. Specifically mentioned are poor customer service and the loss of key personnel (The Wall Street Journal 8/22/06). There is no mention of the disgust of many new Dell customers when they find their new computer loaded with unwanted software and spyware that slows everything down and is almost impossible to remove. Jason York to the rescue! He has written a script called the Dell DeCrapifier that automatically detects and removes unwanted software from new Dell computers. If you have a new Dell you can find it at www.yorkspace.com. (PCWorld September 2006).