Wednesday, June 18, 2003
PC World - July 2003
Looking for a free web site? PC World lists the 100
Best Free Web Space Providers. I use Geocities, which was purchased by Yahoo,
for a PTA web site that I manage (sporatically) and I am happy with it, but
there are LOTS of other providers. [p. 47]
Do you backup your PC? I have used a program called Retrospect
for more than 10 years to backup my various computers. At first I used a tape
drive to backup up all the Macintosh computers, especially mine, at the university
I worked at. In the IAC at UM I put Retrospect on one computer and used it to
backup all the workstations onto a large harddrive. Now I use Retrospect on
my PC to backup to an external hard drive. (I would prefer using an internal
HD, but that isn't an option on my portable.) Different people have different
backup goals. My primary goals is to be functioning productively in less than
a day if my HD fails. That means that I need to be able to do a full backup/restore
of EVERYTHING, not just my data. Retrospect supports that capability. With my
system, which is overloaded with applications, it takes about an hour to update
my backup with the new and changed files. But PC World ranks Stomp
BackUp MyPC as the best backup software. It is probably worth checking out.
[p. 88]
I am not paranoid about my on-line privacy but I see no need for people to
keep track of where I go on the net. Thus I use a tool to remove the "spybots"
that keep track of what I do and report back to various services. PC World rates
Lavasoft Ad-aware Plus 6
(free/$27) and PepiMK Software Spybot Search
& Destroy 1.2 (free) as (currently) the best
anti-spyware programs. You run these programs on your computer and they identify/remove
(at your option) all of the software that reports on your internet activity.
You might want to take a look at one of these. Don't be surprised if you find
LOTS of things on your computer that it wants to remove. Most are benign cookies
and such, but some are really pests, in my opinion, like Gator and CommonName.
[p. 114]
I really need a way to manage my cell phone's directory on my computer. For
one thing, my wife and I have the same phone and I have set mine up but not
hers. I would love to be able to export my directory and import them into her
phone. Some phones make this easy. Ours don't. But it appears that DataPilot
might handle my problem. [ad, p. 136]
It is possible to create a shortcut that will do things like defrag your hard
drive and then shutdown your system. This
article tells you how. With Windows XP there is no shut down command, but
there is a free program, Kill Win,
that can do it. You will still need to write a little batch file with something
like "defrag c:" on one line and "c:\killwin\killwin.exe /s"
on the next to defrag and then shut down. There is a separate article about
the commands to defrag automatically.
[p. 156]
