Users should periodically run a pair of Window's built in utilities. By clicking on START - PROGRAMS - ACCESSORIES - SYSTEM TOOLS users have a collection of tools available. SCANDISK and DISK DEFRAGMENTER are two of the most useful utilities, though some operating systems, such as NT, may be lacking one or both of them.
Scandisk will check the hard drive for errors, offering two options, "standard" and "thorough". The box "Automatically fix errors" should be checked. The standard test will check the FAT or file allocation table for errors, and then check the area of the disk containing files and data. Usually taking no more than a few minutes, this Scandisk option should be run at least every week. The other option, "thorough" checks the entire hard drive, including areas of the drive that are empty. In addition to checking the file area, "thorough" will also check for damage to the surface of the disk, and lockout any bad sectors. This prevents future data from being written in these defective areas. Depending on the speed of the drive, its controller, and the capacity, "thorough" may take from several minutes, to several hours to complete. It is a good idea to run Scandisk in "thorough" mode at least monthly.
Disk Defragmenter may significantly improve the performance of the hard drive. A hard drive is made up of rapidly spinning circular platters of metal, glass, or other thin rigid material, coated with fine magnetic particles. A group of "heads" floats microns above the platters, and reads and writes the data by magnetizing the surface of the rotating disk. Data is stored on the platters in hundreds or thousands of concentric circles called tracks, with each track segmented like pieces of pie into sectors (the basic purpose of "formatting" a disk is creating these tracks and sectors). It is in these sectors that pieces of data are physically written. When the hard drive is new, and has lots of available space, the heads write the data in an orderly sequence, such as "ABCDEFG". As data is written, deleted, and rewritten, the data becomes disordered, and may be written to distant sectors of the disk, and out of sequence, such as "CFBGEAD". Instead of the heads reading the data efficiently in sequence, the platters must rotate additional revolutions, as the heads try to read the data in proper order. Running "defrag" reorganizes the data on the drive allowing it to be read faster and more efficiently. Defragmenting may also take minutes or hours, depending on the size and speed of the disk. One common problem while "defragging" is an error statement that the disk has started and restarted, usually 10 times. This occurs because something else is running that is reading or writing to the disk. All unnecessary programs should be stopped before running "defrag", with the computer rebooted, if necessary, after defragging. To stop most running programs, either right click on their icon in the system tray (usually at the bottom or edge of the screen) and exit the program, or hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE once to open a window in the center of the screen. Programs can be stopped by clicking on them, and then clicking "end task", repeating until only systray and explorer are left. Screen savers should be turned off, as should any other scheduled activities.
To reduce conflicts and lockups it is often necessary to prevent unnecessary programs from loading. With Windows 98 and ME this is an easy process using a built-in but poorly documented Microsoft feature. With Windows 95, and some other windows versions, one of many third party utilities may be used to perform these tasks. With 98 or ME, click on START - RUN and in the box, type MSCONFIG and then click OK or OPEN. On the top of the window that opens will be a tab labeled START or STARTUP. Clicking on it will show a series of checkboxes indicating programs that load when the computer is booted. Having too many programs loaded consumes system resources, slows the computer, and may create conflicts and lockups. By preventing unnecessary programs from loading, resources are freed, performance improves, and conflicts and lockups are minimized. Many programs when installed, like to have a part of them load when the computer is booted. Supposedly this is to quicken the loading process of that individual program, but often at the expense of all other programs running. This is a major reason why MSCONFIG-STARTUP should be periodically inspected, and corrected if necessary. One nice feature is that if the user unchecks an item, and later decides that that item was helpful, simply re-checking the box will re-enable the load at boot. Since there are literally thousands of programs that may load at boot, it is not practical to list them here; fortunately there are websites that have directories of the boot programs, with recommendations. My personal favorites, mostly used when readers or listeners to my weekly radio show (KLVI 560AM, 6-7PM Tuesdays) ask for help with this problem, are
http://pacs-portal.hostinguk.com/startup_content.htm and
http://www.pcforrest.freeserve.co.uk/streamlining_startups.htm.
Try these performance tips, and see for yourself if there is any improvement.
Terrorism or other acts of war, as well as the more common threats of fire, theft, and flood, create grave problems with our ability to process data as we as a society recover, and try to regain a sense of normalcy. Computers and peripherals may be destroyed or lost, and may be easy to replace, but the human capital and the data may be difficult and expensive to replace. New people can be hired and trained, but that takes time, and companies need to try to return to business as soon as practical. The data, however, may be quickly restored if it had been properly backed up and stored. In previous columns, I had discussed different backup technologies, strategies, software, and media. There is little need to reiterate much of that here.
What I had not mentioned in previous columns is the proper storage of backup media. Ideally, there should be two or more copies of critical data files. One popular technique is to recycle through multiple sets of reusable media such as tape or CD-RW. This way there are always at least two recent full sets available. If non-reusable media, such as CD-R is used, they should be appropriately stored. It is also imperative that the storage life of the media be considered. Tape may deteriorate after a year, and quality CDs may have a century shelf life.
For household use, a small fire resistant safe would be ideal, but not likely necessary. An inexpensive fire resistant storage box, placed in the house away from the computer may be adequate, but the media should also be protected from moisture, and kept in something like a sealed plastic bag or a large sealed glass jar. If the data is critical, a duplicate set should be stored off premises, at a distant location. For a fee, those with broadband Internet connections can set up a backup account at any of several commercial backup services. These services typically allow for the remote storage of data, almost like a distant hard drive or virtual private network. With these services an image of the hard drive is created on the remote site, and any new or changed files are stored remotely as a backup. While these services are generally good, it is still often necessary to keep a backup set locally. In addition to recovering a crashed hard drive or damaged computer, corrupted or accidentally deleted files can also be conveniently restored.
For business use, backups may be an utter necessity in order to help recover from a disaster. I have helped several local companies organize a backup system, ranging from remote backup, as mentioned above, to CD and high capacity tape. One local firm, where data is their lifeblood, uses a popular CD backup utility on each of their computers. Before leaving every day, each employee who has used a computer must backup to high quality CDs. Monday thru Thursday, they do an incremental backup, meaning only backing up those files that were new or changed that day. Even if the data is small in size, a fresh CD is used in each computer daily; while this may seem wasteful, the standardized routine has saved them much money and time when data is lost for any reason. On Fridays, before closing for the weekend, each employee makes a full backup or "disk image" on CD. High quality CDs, available for well under a dollar each, are cheap compared to the timesavings if data must be recovered. At the business, used CDs are stored in a fire and water resistant safe. Each Friday, a commercial storage service picks up the previous week's CDs, and stores them in a distant and secured location. With this schedule, at least a week's worth of data is available locally if needed. Because the CDs are relatively small and light weight, storage fees, even when a large quantity has accumulated, is often reasonable. The stored CDs can quickly be identified and returned if necessary. At an extreme, some large companies actually lease storage space in underground caverns or salt mines for their data.
Many companies of any size are now also using remote electronic storage and backup. One of the reasons for the invention of the original Internet almost 40 years ago was to have current data stored at multiple but distant locations, such that in the event of a nuclear strike, our data would survive. A similar tactic is used by many companies with diverse locations, where data is automatically backed up to the corporate intranet, and then stored at multiple locations, any one location capable of restoring data. If a company has no remote locations or intranet, the commercial online storage companies offer a similar service for a fee. If data needs to be recovered, accessing the Internet can quickly restore the data.
I hope and pray that none of us have to restore our data under crisis conditions, but recent events have taught us that unfortunately it may become necessary.
Consider office suites, containing a word processor, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software. Microsoft Office in its many versions, is the top seller, and often the most expensive, but is it necessarily the best for you? What is "best" is mostly subjective, but published comparisons show that some of the suite products have strengths, qualities and usability features lacking in the others. There are some excellent competitors to the market leader, Microsoft Office, that are often far less expensive, and according to many users of multiple suites, superior. It should also be noted that all of these products will read and write each other's data files to some degree, occasionally requiring some reformatting of documents.
The number two seller in the U.S., but now far behind MS Office in sales, is the Corel Office Suite, also available under the name WordPerfect Office 2002. Corel is a Canadian company that has grown through acquisition, and has a reputation for top quality products. Corel or WordPerfect Office consists of WordPerfect, formerly the number one word processor but now #2 behind MS Word; Quattro Pro, formerly published by Borland and considered by many to be the best of the spreadsheets; and excellent database and presentation software. Recent reviews in some computer publications still rank WordPerfect and Quattro Pro as the best in their field. This suite is readily available wherever software is sold, and typically priced far below that of the Microsoft products. For corporate or organizational use, site licenses are available at prices considerably below that charged by Microsoft for their suite. For the record, even though I have all three of the top suites installed on my personal computer, I like Quattro Pro the best. I find it more intuitive and easier to use then the other spreadsheets, and it also has a superior graphics capability.
Third in sales is the Lotus Suite, also available as Lotus Smart Suite, and Smart Suite Millennium. Published by IBM since its acquisition of Lotus several years ago, the core of the suite is the Lotus spreadsheet, the former market leader in spreadsheets, which still has a tremendous following. Coupled with the classic spreadsheet is the excellent WordPro word processor, Approach database, and Freelance presentation software. Several other useful utilities like Screen Cam, which can save whatever is done on the screen as a video, are included in the suite. At home, I use WordPro for almost all of my personal word processing, even though I have Word and WordPerfect on my computer as well. I find WordPro faster and easier to use, often with more features and greater flexibility than its larger competitors. I have also found the Approach database the easiest to use, compared to its larger competitors. While all of the suite publishers do a lot of "human factors" research and engineering to make their software "user friendly", I find WordPro the most "user friendly" of the three word processors. As does its competitors, the Lotus suite can read and write most of their documents.
There is a "sleeper" suite available, originally developed in Germany, that is now distributed by Sun Microsystems. StarOffice is a full-featured, comprehensive suite that is explicitly intended to go head-to-head with Microsoft Office, and be almost totally compatible with it. Some published accounts allege that Sun purposely purchased the German publisher of Star Office in order to take market share from Microsoft, a current competitive enemy of Sun. They have been able to pinprick Microsoft by offering StarOffice at a far lower price than Microsoft, or any of the other major competitors. For those users with a broadband connection, a full version of StarOffice can be downloaded for FREE at http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice. This is a large download, ranging from 75 to 105mb, depending upon the features and options downloaded. Support is available from Sun, as well as an online support group at http://www.staroffice.com. For those who would like the software, but without the huge download, StarOffice is available on CD for purchase online from Sun or Amazon, or from several of the retail software stores, at a suggested retail of only $39.95. Even at full retail, StarOffice is only about one-tenth the price of Microsoft Office, without any significant reduction in features or usability.
Unless there is some explicit reason to use Microsoft Office, I suggest that users consider the alternatives to that highest price suite. Read the specifications, reviews, and features on the Corel, Lotus, and Sun websites, and do some comparison-shopping, both for features and price. Keep in mind that the competitors are quite good at reading and writing most documents done with Microsoft Office, minimizing any problems exchanging documents among different suites. If it is necessary to exchange documents among different word processors, there is an easy way to preserve fonts and formatting. A U.S. Navy developed standard, referred to as "RTF" or "Rich Text Format" is required on any word processor purchased by many Federal agencies. This insures the near flawless exchange of documents between different products, preserving the original formatting, fonts, etc. Many email programs, such as Outlook and Outlook Express also support RTF internally. To use RTF simply save the document in RTF format, a choice available almost universally. Any other word processor opening the document will see the original document as the author intended.
Save your money, and shop around. The most expensive and the top seller may not necessarily be the best for you.
It is not just the office suites where the top sellers have competition, but other software products as well.
Looking back over my recent articles, the most common single topic covered was viruses, and other related threats. The top selling retail antivirus titles are Symantec's Norton Antivirus, and McAfee's VirusScan. Both titles are excellent, reasonably priced, and very widely available where ever software is sold. While Norton and McAfee are probably the most widely available, they may possibly not be the best, according to many published side-by-side comparisons. I have used McAfee on most of my family computers for several years, with one computer using the former freeware CAI InoculateIt, and one older computer had Norton Antivirus.
Recently, I have had the opportunity to try some of the lesser-known competitors, and after trying them, and reading their published reviews, I have been favorably impressed.
On my home computer now, I am running Panda Software's Panda Antivirus Platinum. Published in Spain, but with excellent 24/7 365 day American technical support, Panda is one of the top sellers worldwide, currently available in 37 countries. Available online at http://www.pandasoftware.com for $29.95, retail packages are also locally available in limited quantities at some of the major office supply stores. Some of the things I like about Panda Platinum, are the automatic "Intelligent Update" feature which ensures that the virus files and program software are the latest available (often updated daily), the speed of its scan engine, the lifetime free updates of the virus data files, and the more efficient use of system resources than some of its larger competitors. From a qualitative viewpoint, the Panda Platinum has been certified by several independent testing laboratories as 100% effective in the detection and removal of viruses, with more quality certifications and a higher success rate than its largest competitors. In my own non-scientific test, I scanned "all files" on my hard drives with my fully updated McAfee Antivirus, uninstalled the McAfee, installed the updated Panda Platinum, and scanned my hard drives again. Fortunately neither found any viruses, but the Panda scanned my drives much faster than the McAfee. Another feature I like about the Panda is the fact that its default configuration includes virus protection from all points of entry, including websites, email (compatible with all major email programs), floppies, scripts, ActiveX, hostile Java, and other sources. McAfee defaults to a system scan when installed, and many users are unaware of the McAfee "wizard" used to activate the email, download, and web protection features, without which a computer may be vulnerable. Panda, when installed, closes those sources to infection by default.
My experience with Panda Platinum was confirmed in a recent issue of PC WORLD magazine, where they said, "Panda Antivirus Platinum emerged the victor in our virus catching and killing tests… Panda is also very easy to use… Panda is a bit more expensive than some competitors, but this stellar performer is worth the price… Of the seven products we tested for our September review, only our Best Buy, Panda Antivirus, scored 100 percent for both the on-demand and on-access scans while also avoiding any false positives"
Panda has recently released a lower priced, but faster antivirus product, Panda Antivirus Titanium. While I have not yet tried Titanium, published reports indicate that it is 30% faster than Platinum, and that has met the certification requirements of all of the major international virus software testing services. In published tests, it was about 50% faster than Norton, and about a third faster than McAfee in its scan speed. One unique feature is the "SmartClean" technology that actually repairs the damage caused by many viruses, Trojans, and worms, a feature not currently available with Norton of McAfee.
Available from the Panda website (above) for $24.95, Titanium may be an excellent choice for any PC user looking for the best in protection.
Free trial versions of both Panda Platinum and Titanium are available for download from the Panda website. Also on the Panda website, in the "Publications and Encyclopedia" section, is a comprehensive virus information library, a broad selection of free virus killing utilities, and Panda's "Active Scan Free Online Virus Check".
Another "Giant Killer" antivirus product is Trend Micro's PC-cillin 2000, available for download from the Trend website at http://www.antivirus.com for $29.95 (a free 30 day trial version is also available), and in many of our local computer and electronics stores. Trend, a Tokyo based company, also offers some excellent information on their website, including a comprehensive virus information library, and many free utilities designed to kill individual viruses.
Many of my readers and radio show listeners have told me that they do not have antivirus software on their computers, but fear that they are infected. Trend offers their free online virus scan and repair "Housecall" at http://housecall.antivirus.com. While very good at detecting and removing viruses already on a computer, it is no substitute for having a good antivirus program installed, configured, and updated that can prevent infection.
A variety of other antivirus products are available, many of excellent quality, and competitive in price to the market leaders. As I have said in this column many times, doing a little research may save you some money as well as provide insight on potentially superior products.
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