Computer Doctor of Hampden

Deep in the bowels of your iMac

Hard drives fail. All of them…eventually.

I love my iMac, It is a finely crafted piece of aluminum that greets me everyday with a beautiful bright glow and serves me well, even when I force it to run windows on occasion. For many it is the central hub of their home and/or professional computing universe. If you are not backing up your system with Time Machine you are really playing with fire. For the cost of a cheap terabyte external drive (usually less than $100) you can recover from the inevitable hard drive crash, quickly and with less expense.

For those that like to throw caution to the wind let me paint an all too familiar scenario. “Good afternoon Computer Doctor, how can I help you? Oh hi, I have a problem with my mac, for the last couple months it has been really slowing down, updates don’t work and every once in awhile it freezes up, this morning it won’t start at all. All I see is a grey screen with a folder with a question mark. In response I ask if they have a back up. No, I have been meaning to get one of those, I really should one of these days.

From there it can go from bad to worse quickly. Replacing the hard drive on an iMac requires removing that glorious screen and digging deep into the heart of the system, this in itself is not for the faint of heart… Once replaced if there was a back up, the system could be restored to the last place in time where it was functioning correctly and all your pictures, movies, iTunes documents will be right back where you left them.

Without a backup, What can happen if your lucky, is a piecemeal recovery which can be very time consuming, followed by a new installation of OSX and then all your apps. That is if the drive is intact enough to extract data. If it isn’t there are techniques to coax the data out and some very expensive recovery solutions that require a clean room and a pocket full of cash.

If you are in the greater Bangor, Hampden region and are experiencing crashes, freeze ups, shut downs, grey screens and the “spinning beach ball of death” Call or email me @ Computer Doctor of Hampden, sooner than later and we can get your beloved iMac back in great shape. If it is running fine, please stop on the way home and pick up an external drive. You will thank me later!

Let’s face it, the data on our computers for most of us is much more valuable than the computer itself. At my business Computer Doctor of Hampden we do data recovery on a daily basis. There are many possible points of data corruption, the ones I see most frequently in order of frequency are:

1. Deletion/corruption secondary to computer virus infections.
2. Logical corruption of data from a failing hard drive.
3. Mechanical hard drive failure.
4. User error, either deleting or formatting files or partitions.
5. Raid 0 failure, either disc or controller.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Independent) Disks.

On most situations you will be using one of the following four levels of RAIDs.

• RAID 0
• RAID 1
• RAID 5
• RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0)

This article explains the main difference between these raid levels along with an easy to understand diagram.

In all the diagrams mentioned below:

• A, B, C, D, E and F – represents blocks
• p1, p2, and p3 – represents parity

RAID LEVEL 0

Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 0.

• Minimum 2 disks.
• Excellent performance ( as blocks are striped ).
• No redundancy ( no mirror, no parity ).
• Don’t use this for any critical system.

RAID LEVEL 1

Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 1.

• Minimum 2 disks.
• Good performance ( no striping. no parity ).
• Excellent redundancy ( as blocks are mirrored ).

RAID LEVEL 5

Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 5.

• Minimum 3 disks.
• Good performance ( as blocks are striped ).
• Good redundancy ( distributed parity ).
• Best cost effective option providing both performance and redundancy. Use this for DB that is heavily read oriented. Write operations will be slow.

RAID LEVEL 10

Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 10.

• Minimum 4 disks.
• This is also called as “stripe of mirrors”
• Excellent redundancy ( as blocks are mirrored )
• Excellent performance ( as blocks are striped )
• If you can afford the dollar, this is the BEST option for any mission critical applications (especially databases).

Microsoft seems to hit the mark with operating systems about 50% of the time. Going back to when I first installed windows, Windows 3.1 worked remarkably well and having just repaired an old 486/dx33 computer running 3.11 last week , it was amazingly fast. I was lucky enough to attend one of the Microsoft launch conferences for Windows 95, while it was the biggest GUI leap to date, it was not without it’s bugs and performance issues. By the time the Windows 98 Second Edition came along the operating system was a stable and well supported platform.

The next release for consumers was Windows Millennium, this version was also very short lived and plagued by driver issues and continual freeze ups. Microsoft hit it out of the park with Windows XP, by utilizing the core file system of Windows NT the NTFS file system the OS was more stable and user friendly. XP is like an old friend, still deployed in millions of computers world wide the OS will no longer be supported in 2014, once that happens it is pretty much useless. Keep that in the back of your mind if you are still clinging to XP.

Microsoft’s next faux paus was Windows Vista, responding to the increasing market share of Apple OSX, Microsoft tried to incorporate the “eye candy” of OSX and a layer of security by adding the user access control layer, all those wondefull little pop ups that ask you if you want a program to do something. What Vista brought along with it was a huge jump in system requirments, both processor and ram. If you are running a Vista system with anything less that 2 GB of ram you are really dragging your heals. Along with the elegant Aero interface  Vista brought along extened start up times, unforeseen freeze ups, failed critical system updates which can render the system useless, the “black screen of death” is much more lethal than the XP “BSOD”.

So my theory is that everyone who purchased a computer with Windows Vista was no more than a beta tester for Windows 7. As we ponied up the cash to buy new laptops with Vista, we logged complaint after complaint about it’s short comings and Microsoft had all the feedback it could ever want to put together the next version, which really could have been Vista SP4,

the one that actually works. Instead of fixing it’s Vista mess Microsoft sold us Windows 7 and we seem to finally be back to a stable operating system for the moment.

Good news is that if you purchased a laptop with Vista, it should run better with Windows 7. Hardware wise the operating system manages resources better so it can breathe life into your relatively new Vista machine.

To maximize the upgrade, I recommend doing a clean installation, this means backing up your data, formatting the drive, installing the operating system, applying updates, reinstall your programs and transfer your data back. If you would like to rid yourself of the Vistas nightmare, Computer Doctor offers an upgrade service, the process can usually be completed within 24 hours. We can also evaluate your current hardware and make recommendations if you are ready to upgrade.

Here is something to think about, generally as long as the computer is working, we don’t give it much thought. When a virus strikes many jump into action as their data may not be backed up and they run the risk of losing pictures, music, video, documents, spreadsheets, tax info Quickbooks, you get the idea. Something else to consider is disk space. Modern computers generally come with much larger hard drives then those we say even 5 or 6 years ago. As the computer becomes the catch all for our memories and in some cases business life we need to keep an eye on how much storage we have. Windows itself, takes more and more space with each update, compound that with the files that may get stored from emails, programs you install and may never use space disappears rapidly. If you have large video/music collection that is stored on your main hard drive and/or have an older XP machine that may only have a 40-80 GB hard drive you run the risk of running out of space.

What can happen? On older machines with limited physical memory (RAM) as you open more programs windows needs more resources to keep things going and it tries to use hard disk space (swap file) to execute your commands. When this is limited windows grinds to halt, some folks will delete a few files here and there to try and keep things going, what happens is the drive becomes more and more fragmented, slowing you down even further. I recently ran into a situation that required extensive data recovery due to file system corruption from running out of space.

What are some of your options?

• When purchasing a new computer go for a big hard drive! Setting up a second partition for data files can simplify things for data management and if you need to recover files.
• For desktop computers there is usually space and accommodations for multiple hard drives.  Hard drives can be “cloned” to the larger drive to increase space or transfer the data files to the new hard drive.
• Laptops generally have space for one drive, again we can clone the drive to a larger one, or set up an external drive or network storage drive to store the files.
• Cloud storage is an inexpensive way to back up or store data files.

A good rule of thumb is when your free disk space is less than 30% of the total drive it is time to start looking into options.

Need help? Call, email or check our website, we have a live chat feature and can help find a solution that works for you.

Mac "Rogue Antivirus" Malware

While virus’s for mac’s have been around for along time, they are generally few and very far between. I have said on countless occasions one of the best ways to prevent a Virus infection on your computer is to use a Mac. While I still stand by this, for now, the tide may be turning. Mac Defender is rogue antivirus program which has been running rampant as of late. These programs have been infecting PC’s for years and work by trying to get you to purchase a fake product and enter your credit card info. Your information is compromised, the program is now embedded in your system and can cause a host of issues, from performance issues to hard drive corruption and data loss.

There is nothing I have found as of yet that will offer 100% protection from all virus infections, barring of course staying off the internet and never connecting a usb drive or installing any software or sharing files. Given the connected nature of business and the ever growing social aspect of inter connectivity staying off the web is out of the question for most of us.

So what are we to do? Look before you click! Question everything! Read the URL for your search result, crank up your spam filter. Keep your antivirus program up to date, your windows/mac os updated and the nagging adobe and java updates, just do them…

This is a wake up call, back up everything you don’t want to lose, put data on a separate drive, not inside the computer! Use an online back up service such as carnbonite or mozy and once again, there is no such thing as a free lunch, free programs exact a toll on your system, whether poorly written, or worse, being laden with spyware or carrying a keylogger or virus. Your browsing habits are valuable, as is the information and business you do online. Be smart and when you run into problems. Call me…

So your hard drive just died, and you didn’t back it up. I’m so, so sorry. You can expect to go through the following five stages once you discover that all of your photos, files and music are gone forever.

Stage one: Denial
“No. No, there’s no way. This is probably just a software issue, maybe if I try rebooting again it’ll work. I’ve only had this hard drive for two years, there’s no way it just died. I’ll get all that stuff back. This silly computer always freaks out but is fine after a reboot. Even though I’ve tried rebooting five times and it sounds like a fork is stuck in a garbage disposal in there, it’s probably just the CD drive.”

Stage two: Anger
“Are you kidding me, Western Digital? I’ve lost everything! I trusted you, and for what? How does a company that sells such crappy products stay in business? I will murder the first WD employee I see. And what the hell is wrong with me that I didn’t back this stuff up? I am the biggest idiot in the world and I want to punch myself in the face. I hate myself and don’t deserve to be happy.”

Stage three: Bargaining
“OK, so maybe I can download some software and boot this drive as a secondary drive and try to recover some stuff. I mean, I’ll have to go buy a new hard drive and install it and then figure out how to hook this one up as a secondary drive, and I’m not sure where my OS discs are, but hey, I’m a smart guy, I can figure this stuff out, right? Or maybe professional data recovery services have gotten much, much cheaper lately. Yeah, I’ll bet they’re affordable now, they’ve gotta be.”

Stage four: Depression
“All those photos. I’ll never, ever get them back. I’ll never see those faces again. And my essays from college, I was going to share those with my kids someday. And man, all that music, it’s taken me years to collect all that. Why did I even bother? It’s like the last ten years of my life have just been erased.”

Stage five: Acceptance
“Ah, none of that stuff was that important. Most of it was uploaded to various sites like Flickr, anyways. At least the really important stuff. Regathering all that music will be fun, too! And hey, you know what? Maybe it’s good to start fresh every once in a while. And man, hard drives have gotten a lot cheaper since I last bought one. This is really just a good way to put things in perspective; none of this stuff was all that important. Except for those photos. Why the hell didn’t I back them up?”