Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
October 1, 2006

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

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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3.  Phone Upgrade Time

This week, we upgraded my wife's cell phone from the older TDMA service to a GSM phone — and got one of the cool, new Motorola Razr V3 models in a deep blue color. We use Cingular for our cell phone service and wanted to stay with Cingular for coverage reasons in some of our travels.

Previously, I had looked at the Cingular web site a number of times. While it looks good on the surface, it seems very klunky and counter-intuitive, requiring the reentering of data a number of times. Also, as I told them, their button wording for "upgrades" always implied that I was actually taking action. In reality, nothing happened to the account until the final "checkout" step where I had to click a checkbox saying that I agreed with the terms and conditions and then click on an check-out-now button.

In contrast, dealing with the Cingular sales people on the telephone was a great pleasure.

Did I write that? Yes, I actually did -- and I told it to them, too.

Over the last couple months, I had made several visits to both Cingular affiliate stores and Cingular's own store in Baton Rouge. I had also been Cingularly unimpressed. <Pun Intended>

However, I still intended to stay with Cingular, even though I could have switched to another service for $0, and still gotten a Motorola Razr V3 for free, with another service. This type of deal is almost always through one of the affiliates like Let's Talk , who offers super phone deals on Cingular, Verizon, T-mobile, Sprint and others.

I checked out T-Mobile phones at Let's Talk, whose been doing a lot of television ads lately. They had pretty good deals, too. But, for Cingular cell phones, those deals were mainly for people who were changing from other cellphone companies or for people adding additional lines.

Before placing my upgrade order through the Cingular web site, I talked a Cingular sales person named Robert to check a few things. While I expected to lose all my bank of "rollover minutes" when I changed my individual plan into a family plan, I actually got to roll in 550 rollover minutes (which matched my monthly allowance of 550 minutes). The sales rep — a real Customer Service rep — ran me though some options and also told me that the best prices were on the web in their Upgrade My Phone section. He was right.

Cingular surprised me another time with great service. Although the web site showed that the phone would come by regular mail delivery, they actually shipped it FedEx and it got here overnight, even though it was late afternoon when we ordered it.

After getting the new phone, I called in to activate the new phone and to change my two individual plans to one family plan. This time I talked to Erin in Customer Service and was again very impressed. Activation of the phone went smoothly. She then noted that she had notes that I wanted to convert to the 550 Minute Family Plan, and did I still want to do that? I confirmed, and Bam!, it was done.

My wife's happy with her new phone and all is well with the world...

Whoa! At September 29th, Let's Talk has the Motorola Razr V3 with a single line plan or a family plan from T-mobile, not for the $99.99 I paid (upgrading within Cingular), but for $0 and then I could get a $50 rebate! That's $150 better. Plus, their T-mobile family talk plan includes 700 minutes for the same price I'm paying Cingular for 550 minutes. Hummm...

It's a shame that the really sweet deals are for people who switch services. Of course, in the old days, we had to lose our phone number if we did that. Now, on the other hand, Federal law allows us to take our phone numbers with us to another carrier. That makes this competition all possible.

The process of updating the phone to all her phone numbers was easy, too. Or, it would have been if I hadn't had to replace the hard drive and reinstall everything again. In this case, I used the Motorola Phone Tools, which are a great little package.

Motorola phone tools will let you back up and restore your phone books. You can also synchronize the phone book and the phone's calendar with your Outlook contacts list and calendar.

Fortunately, Motorola treats Motorola Phone Tools as a "buy once" program, since my old version was something like v2.0. Using the program's built-in live update function , I could update all the way to the current version 4+. This took a lot of download, install, reboot, rerun, download install, reboot, ... cycles.

Of course, I had to update in order for the program to recognize a Razr. I knew the function was there (because I had updated years ago), but had trouble finding the function.

I finally found that the live update was activated by the program's user interface, which is designed like your phone. If it doesn't recognize your phone, it will default to a standard form. Just press the Menu button on the "phone" and you can trigger the live update.

By the way, the easiest and by far the cheapest way to put screen images and ringtones on your phone is with the Motorola Phone Tools software. Of course, you can use the connection in the other direction, to download pictures you take with the camera to your computer.

At this point, Amazon seems to be out of the program -- and the price has dramatically fallen. Amazon reports that Motorola Phone Tools 4.0 will be "in stock soon." Amazon Merchants, have very low prices, such as $3.94 from DLN Enterprises (Sept.29,2006). In Amazon.com's merchant system, Amazon actually processes the financial transaction. Then, it passes shipment instructions to the Amazon Merchant to make the delivery.

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4.  More about Acronis True Image 9.0

In the first article, I talked generally about image backups and a little about the specific situation of upgrading a notebook drive.

Before settling on Acronis True Image, I looked at doing the migration with my old Drive Image version. I also thought about using the free tools available under Linux, especially with the Recovery Is Possible Linux (RIP Linux) cdrom. While I could have done the job with RIP Linux, there would be a learning curve process with this and also. I also read in some of the information about the PARTIMG program that images the partitions, I would not be able to use an external hard drive in that process.

So, I decided to do it the easy way, with Acronis True Image. The download was an easy process, although a little over 70 MB. Installation was clean.

My number one dream, though, failed. I planned to put my new notebook hard drive into the special "Media Bay" holder for my Dell Inspiron 8600. That went smoothly. While Windows waa running, Windows was able to find the new drive.

Unfortunately, the "Clone" process required rebooting windows to a "pre-Windows-boot" condition. Also, unfortunately, in this mode, the program could not recognize the drive in the Media Bay. Dell actually operates the Media Bay via an internal USB connection, so any DOS-level boot in Windows does not have the USB drivers available. I had run into this problem before with the pre-DriveImage version of Norton Ghost, when I tried it.

So, that left me with the double shuffle. First, I would do an image backup of C: onto my external hard drive. Then, I would replace the notebook's hard drive with the new hard drive. The final step was to "restore" the image onto the new drive.

All this was easy and straight forward. Although Acronis provided a .pdf manual, which you can download and read ahead of time from their web site), it wasn't really necessary. The screens were self-explanatory and the process was split into easily-understood steps.

As I wrote before, this whole process took maybe a couple hours. Then, I was fully operational on the new hard drive.

One of the big advantages of True Image 9.0 is that the steps can be scheduled for unattended operation. Of course, I wouldn't want to do a restore if I wasn't there, but backups are another thing entirely.

Acronis True Image, when running under Windows, allows you to back up your Windows partition while it's actually running. Although you can not use Windows Explorer to copy a lot of files while they are in use, Acronis True Image is able to use a Windows "shadow copy" function to successfully copy the data.

Apparently you can actually do the backup while you're using the drive, but I recommend against that. Just schedule True Image to do the backup during the night...

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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

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