Computer Doctor of Hampden

I have come to appreciate the Apple Macbook Pro as one of the finest notebook computers I have ever used. I currently have a 2012 model that I run both OSX Mountain Lion along with Windows 7 Pro. From the fit and finish to the solid aluminum unibody construction, great backlit keyboard and excellent track pad the machine is top notch running Mac or Windows. That being said as with any machine they require maintenance and care and occasional repair. At our repair center Computer Doctor of Hampden we deal with both Mac and PC issues everyday. From liquid spills to broken screens, software glitches and hard drive repairs we see it all. First and foremost your Macbook Pro is hydrophobic! It does not like water, beer, wine, soda,coffee, tea, milk, dog urine or pickle juice and yes I have worked on all those scenarios! The adage an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure rings true even more with the base price for a Macbook pro @ the $1200 mark. Life can be hectic, you can bring your portable Mac so many places, think about the risks you run, from loss of the system, data corruption and at least a loss of productivity and repair costs.

Broken Macbook Pro Computer Doctor of Hampden Apple Repair

What is your back up plan? OSX has a very simple back up plan that can aid in both data and system recovery for the price of an external usb drive you can have peace of mind and the ability to find deleted files as well as recovering from a crashed hard drive . Please follow the instruction on Apples website to set up your back up plan sooner than later, consider it insurance for your digital life. Need help getting started? We stock external hard drives and can configure your back up plan as well as optimize your Mac for top performance and check for potential problems.

Given routine maintenance, reasonable care and proper usage your Macbook Pro can give you years of faithful service. Feel free to contact us with questions or submit a service request now.

Every year people line up at an obscene time of day to save a few dollars on whatever they need or want and to burn off a few calories after the Thanksgiving feast.

Often the door buster deals are the cheapest computer you can imagine, special models are sometimes put together just for these blow out events. Here at Computer Doctor of Hampden, we see these computer come in all year round, you may be lucky and have one fail during warranty but more often then not they fail catastrophically shortly after the warranty expires. Now some people look at computers and laptops as throw away devices, buy cheap and get a new one when it dies. That is great as long as you have an excellent back up plan, I recommend a combination of local and cloud based back up plans.

For those that plan on keeping their computers for a few years here are some suggestions, avoid the cheapest of the cheap, avoid Acer,Gateway, HP and Compaq laptops that you are paying under $400 for. We have a pile of these failed computers and laptops, we are seeing both motherboard and hard drive failures increasing as prices decrease. Cheap hard drives and poor cooling systems are a recipe for failure. If you do find yourself drawn in to these cheap computers, try to get one with an intel processor, they tend to run a bit cooler and make an investment in a cooling pad, for ~$20 you can help extend the life of your bargain basement laptop.

Where is my start button!

The year is 1995, no wait that was 17 years ago… It seems a lifetime since the quantum shift from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. What is my litmus test for quantum change? Stick a teenager on a Windows 95 machine and they will be able to get around, albiet begrudgingly. Put that same teen on a Windows 3.11 machine and depending on the crowd and their upbringing  a WTF will soon be issued.

This was exactly how I felt when I downloaded a pre release of Windows 8.  WTF? Where is my start button, what are these widgety things, how do I find my “real desktop” and come on Redmond this looks cool, but my desktop is not an iPad.

I get it, no I really do. Change is in the wind, the PC is a complex device capable of so many things and relied upon more and more everyday, by more people to do more things. So what is the problem? Market penetration is my guess. Call it simplification, or dumbing down or spoon feeding the masses, computing is not easy for everyone, so everyone doesn’t own one or two or three. Believe it or not there are people that don’t have a smart phone, tablet, laptop and desktop. But just imagine if a company could make a simple interface, sort of like an iPad that would work and look the same regardless of the device. Welcome to Windows 8.

It is a brave new world of technology and Microsoft is jumping into the future with both feet. The legacy desktop that greets us every morning is not the first thing you will see when you fire up your PC. You will however see smart tiles that portray basic information pulled from “apps” yes, I said apps not programs. The software model is too lucrative for MS to ignore. Selling small, purpose built applications available instantly from their store, MS wants to cash in on the short money sales. Easier to part with $2.99 than worry about plunking down$299 for office, especially when all you need is word and excel. I’ll take my software ala carte please…

So welcome to 1995 all over again. We will all beta test Windows 8 for MS, just like we bought Vista, you remember that buggy short lived platform that bought MS some time to get Win7 stable. I am sure Win9 will be out in Q1 of 2014 and be the polished, tweaked and stable version of Win8 we should be getting now.

Personally, I will get one of the new MS surface devices which will drag me into Win8, probably learn to love it and if it suits my fancy, it may lead to a Windows phone purchase. I am not planning to install Win 8 on my desktop anytime soon, I have little hair left to pull out these days and frankly just want things to work right so I can get right to work.

Want more info or a personal recommendation for new hardware? Feel free to contact me !

(written on my iMac)

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).

DV 6000 born to fail

The prices are way down on laptops and the failure rate is rising just as fast. The cost cutting is evident, I have seen sturdier plastic used in KFC sporks. They flex, snap and shed their bits of plastic and no one blinks. “Well I did get it at Walmart for $198.00 on Black Friday”

Thats just great, and if your only use for your laptop is to surf the web, have at it. Here are the caveats, cheap laptops have cheap hard drives, if you live on the web and all your data is stored in a cloud by all means run fast and cheap and replace it every 14-16 months.

If you use outlook or quickbooks or have a huge iTunes collection and 137 gigs of pictures of your uncle Wally’s trip to Disney in 1993, then please back it all up!

Back it up now and in 2 places, send it to the ether using one of the online back up services and then put it on a local external hard drive and keep it where your laptop doesn’t live.

You have been warned…