Posts tagged computers
When will people learn to backup?
Dec 11th
Had another friend lose a hard drive today without a proper backup. Pain!
I now have at least 3 copies of everything with staggered backups to different hardware. For the digital signage software I manage there are two copies on the servers locally and another copy in the cloud on Amazon’s S3 storage which is itself replicated multiple times.
The basic concept that people need to use is “SHARED NOTHING”.
RAID is NOT the answer to data security, it’s a convenient recovery mechanism for failed hard drives but if your data is on two drives connected to the same RAID controller card on the same computer in the same room you have plenty of opportunities to lose it all.
Backups should ROTATE. Backing up to the same location risks a failure in the backup that could wipe both copies, or copy bad data over good before the mistake is discovered. For really critical data I have a daily backup, a weekly backup, and a monthly backup. I also have two backup schedules, morning that copies to one set of drives on controller A and an evening backup that copies to a different set of drives on a different controller.
Core duo desktop machine runs cool
Jun 29th
So, the new Core Duo desktop arrived and I’ve begun to get it setup.
What a pain it is to have to do all those dumb Windows settings over and over every time I get a new PC – yes, I do want to see file extensions, and the contents on my C:\ drive and no I really don’t want MSN butting in whenever I mistype a URL, … shame there isn’t a one button ‘Expert’ mode that turns off all the dumb options.
Anyway, as far as the actual PC goes …. I’m impressed. It feels every bit as fast as my dual Xeon 3.2Ghz but is clearly consuming way less power. The air coming out the back is cool. It has a nice temperature gauge on the front which claims the CPU is running at between 22 and 26 degrees celsius. That’s barely above room temperature in my office today – thanks largely to the Xeon which is running at 57 degrees on each CPU and pumping out hot air under my desk.
Based on my experience so far I thoroughly recommend you check our a Core Duo desktop for your next PC purchase …
And this still seems to be the only place to get one pre-built: http://www.gcworkshop.com/parts/intelcoreduopc.htm
It was interesting to see an article this week about how some major PC manufacturers are cutting down on their use of bad chemicals used in PC construction and how they will do more recycling. If they really cared about the environment you’d think they’d sell a core duo desktop!