Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
October 1, 2006

Terry's Computer Tips Newsletter
http://www.terryscomputertips.com
A computer tips newsletter for users of PC's.

Volume 2, Number 16 — Sunday, October 1, 2006

Part 1  | Part 2  | Part 3 | Part 4

IN THIS WEEK'S ON-LINE ISSUE:
   1.   Backing Up Your Hard Drive
   2.   Updates Last Week
   3.   Phone Upgrade Time
   4.   More about Acronis True Image 9.0
   5.   Why Not Just Use File Backups?
   6.   My Computer Security Software Recommendations
   7.   Dave's Computer Tips
   8.   Recommend my Terry's Computer Tips Newsletter to Your Friends

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1.  Backing Up Your Hard Drive

One of the easiest ways to back up your hard drive — whether you have one big C: drive or several partitions — is to use a program that does image backups.

For years, I used a program from PowerQuest called Drive Image. It saved me a lot of time, both in migrating from old hard drives to new hard drives and in recovering from massive problems. I remember that I could copy the backed-up image of a fresh Windows 95 installation, including WordPerfect, Netscape, network card drivers, video drivers and such, onto one CDROM. To restore the hard drive took less than 10 minutes — as opposed to the hours of Windows installation, looking for diskettes, installing programs, etc.

But, backing up my hard drive this way became much more of a bother as the drives became bigger and bigger.

For various reasona, mainly because they seemed to be moving to a Microsoft-only world, the last version I purchased was Drive Image 2002. The last PowerQuest vesion as v7. Symantec bought them and marketed Norton Drive Image before changing the product's name to Norton Ghost 9 (and scrapping the earlier Ghost program).

After hearing from friends for years about the imaging program they were using, I finally broke down this week and bought a copy. I mentioned it in last week's newsletter — Acronis True Image 9.0 Home — but I found a much better price on True Image 9.0 than the one to which I linked last week. Note that this is a download product at this price -- the packaged product is regular price.

This week, after installing Windows and getting partially installed on my programs after a lot of hours, I decided to upgrade my notebook's hard drive from 60 GB to 100 GB.

I briefly considered starting over with reinstalling Windows. But, that thought quickly died. I looked again at Acronis's site , but found a better price.

Once I installed Acronis True Image, it only took me about 2 hours to get the new drive fully operational — instead of hours upon hours of Windows and program installs. The only reason that it took so long was that I have a notebook computer and had to do a two-step -- image the old drive and then restore to the new. If I had a desktop, I could have "cloned" the new drive from the old in one step.

[more later in this issue]

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2.  Updates Last Week

Microsoft (operating systems, email, web browser, office suites):
Microsoft releases almost all updates once per month, on the second Tuesday. The next scheduled Patch Tuesday is October 9. This week, however, Microsoft made an early release of the patch for the newly discovered VML security hole in Internet Explorer. The hole was being actively exploited by malicious sites.

Security Update for Windows XP (KB925486)
A security issue has been identified in the way Vector Markup Language (VML) is handled that could allow an attacker to compromise a computer running Microsoft Windows and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Firefox (web browser, http://www.mozilla.com, free):
No update last week. Firefox v1.5.0.7 was released on September 15th.

Opera (web browser, http://www.opera.com, free):
No update last week. Current version 9.02 was released during late September.

Netscape (web browser, http://browser.netscape.com, free):
Version 8.1.2 was released last week.

SeaMonkey (web browser, email, HTML editor, newsreader; http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey; free): No update this week. Current version 1.0.5 was released on September 14th.

Eudora (email, http://www.eudora.com, options: paid, sponsored or free/lite):
No update last week. Current version 7.0.1.0, released 12/21/05.

Mozilla Thunderbird (email, http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird, free):
No update last week. Thunderbird version 1.5.0.7 was released September 14th.

OpenOffice (office suite — spreadsheet, word processor, presentations, graphics, web design; http://www.openoffice.org; free):
No update last week. Version 2.03 was released during late June.

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Part 1  | Part 2  | Part 3 | Part 4

Volume 2, Number 16 — Sunday, October 1, 2006

Copyright © 2006 Terry A. Stockdale.  All rights reserved.