Well, a new year is here. It sometimes stuns me that 1984 is long past, and 2001 as well. Sometimes literature and science fiction can predict the future with uncanny accuracy, and sometimes not. We don't have Big Brother watching us (although some might argue that point) and we certainly haven't journeyed to the moons of Jupiter. I still wonder why we never even went back to the moon or Mars, but don't get me started on that topic!
One trend I notice in this new year is that the number of virus infected emails I receive and the number of clients with virus infections seems to be going down, and fairly drastically. This is very, very good news. All we had to do to beat the virus problem was to have everyone install and (properly) use anti-virus software. This seems to be happening - we all have finally gotten the message. Good for us!
A client asked me to load his copy of Office 97 on a new Windows XP computer. He had tried it, but it consistently failed. I was a bit surprised - although I do not recommend using that older version of Office, on XP, I believed it would still load and install OK on the new OS. But the install process failed consistently at the same spot.
I realized that the process was not very far along, and was in fact still just copying files from the CD to the hard drive. An examination of the CD revealed the problem - it was scratched and dirty.
The first thing I did was just to clean the CD with a normal glass cleaner. This is probably not recommended, but to do it once in a pinch is OK - just make sure the CD is completely dry before reinserting it. This enabled the install process to proceed a lot further, but still not to completion.
The next step was to try to remove the scratches. There are devices you can buy that claim to do this, but in a pinch sometimes toothpaste will do. I do NOT recommend that you try this yourself. But, even this didn't work.
So, I recommend to all of you that you go to Wal-Mart or your favorite store and buy some CD holders - the type usually used for music CDs. You can get cases that hold quite a few CDs. Then whenever you get a new program CD or CD of drivers for a device, remove them from the original sleeve and put them in your new CD holder. This keeps them all in one place and keeps them safe. And in the case of a hurricane evacuation, you can grab all your computer CDs easily. Make sure you keep the original sleeve itself if it contains any information, such as a product serial number.
If you need to regularly use a particular CD, make a backup copy of it first and use that.
Another bad trend that seems to be reversing is noisy computer cases. PCs generate a lot of heat internally, and the faster the PC's clock speed is, the more heat it generates. To handle the heat, PC manufacturers started to add more fans.
One of my clients received a PC with six fans in it - one in the power supply, one on the side of the case, two at the back of the case, one on the microprocessor itself, and one on the video card! But recent PCs I have installed from Dell, Gateway, and other national vendors are once again quiet as a mouse. This is a combination of both less (or quieter) fans, and choosing components such as hard drives and CD drives that make less noise. A welcome improvement!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).