* The news is that Windows XP is still running strong. Major manufacturers besides Dell are now again offering XP on their PCs, and I believe that in the "mom and pop" small computer store segment XP still predominates. Some companies, again such as Dell, are now not only offering XP for sale, but are offering system restore CDs that will install XP over an existing Vista system so that you can put XP on a PC that originally shipped with Vista.
PC World says that of the PCs that visit its website, only 10% are Vista.
Microsoft has agreed to extend the last sale date for XP and is even going to issue a new Service Pack for XP so that more user license keys are available.
What does this all mean? I think the bottom line is that users, both home and business, prize stability over function. Looking at that equation, XP is obviously much more stable right now (at least until the first Vista Service Pack), and the new function in Vista has generally been received with lackluster praise. And I agree. My XP PCs are very stable and do what I need them to do. Any protection that I need from malware can be obtained through third party software. But I have to admit that my one Vista PC is also running very well, although some of my clients are not having as good success with Vista.
* I and other computer service companies around town are noticing a fairly high rate of failures lately on serial (SATA) hard drives. I haven't seen any industry gossip about it, but sometimes it takes a while for that type of thing to flow through the pipeline. As far as the physical drive mechanism goes, there should be no difference between the old parallel (PATA) drives and SATA - the electronics and physical platter assemblies are very similar. The only difference is the cable interface circuitry and that may perhaps be more static sensitive than the PATA, although any serial interface has error recovery that should handle that type of problem.
But you need to keep an eye out for potential problems. Often hard drive errors start with small, recoverable errors which eventually worsen. There are some items to look for.
- Performance getting gradually slower and slower; this can also be due to excess malware on your PC but may also be a hard drive going bad.
- Small, inexplicable failures: you go to open a file on Word and you get a file read error, but you try it again and it works OK so you go on. You should not get any errors of this type at all, but if they seem to be getting worse over time, you hard drive might be on its way out.
- Random failures - things just tend to fail in a random way, not repeatable.
- Boot-up problems - your PC fails to boot but if you turn off the power and turn it on again it seems to run OK for a while.
You can also look for failures in the Event Viewer. This is where Windows keeps its log of system events and errors. You can use the Event Viewer by going to Start / Control Panel, selecting Administrative Tools and then Event Viewer. Click on System in the left hand pane, and then scroll through the log entries looking for disk related failures. But since the hard drive subsystem handles its own recovery, very often these problems are not reported to Windows unless severe or unrecoverable.
And, of course, the bottom line is to keep good backups. In the type of failures I am seeing on SATA drives, no data at all is recoverable by any means that I have. There are services that you can send the drive to for further recovery, but they are very expensive. So if you have to recover your data, a good backup is your only protection.
(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 questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)