Computer Tips -Tech Info

Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or […]

George Ou had a good article on upgrading a laptops wireless to a multiband adapter. It looks like a fairly straightforward process. Personally, I’ve not risked much with regards to laptop repairs. (Keyboard replacement, battery replacement, hard drive replacement and memory have been the typical laptop repairs I’ve done – throw in optical or floppy […]

Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive that I […]

This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (saving all changes to a temporary file so the original structure of the disk/drive image is not touched.) […]

There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some of those […]

I’m such a sucker for technology sometimes…. I’m into too many things it seems. I do computer repair which can keep things fairly busy, I keep up with this and a slew of other websites which is another job in itself. (Not to mention the genealogy hobby (or addiction/affliction?)) We’re fairly involved at Church… and […]

I’ve been out of town for several days (about 4) and came back to a dying hard drive and a two day project, so…. I’ve not been able to get any updates here for a bit. So, hopefully I can start playing catchup this morning. Although, I likely won’t get through everything that I’ve saved […]

What follows are some notes that I’ve taken on the Vista beta that I installed into a VM. I’ve got a lot of toying around yet to do with it (and at least one Internet Explorer bug I want to mention.) But… I’ll go ahead and post this. [warning – rambling and long text…] A […]

How often do I get to talk about this? Yahoo News has an article on a couple who, a year ago, took their PC to Best Buy to have the hard drive swapped. Best Buy assured them that the drive would be destroyed…. Recently they got a call from a guy in Chicago that had […]

This is going to sound familiar to those that have been here before, but I’ve just had a once over of a batch of machines that are going to get thrown away tomorrow and felt compelled to make a list of the top ten things to do before you throw away, give away, pitch or […]