Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
October 17, 2005

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Volume 1, Number 18 -- Monday, October 17, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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6.  Shareware Pick of the Week

Program:   Goldwave
Publisher:  Goldwave, Inc.
Category:  Sound Recording, Editing and Format Conversion

My Shareware/Freeware Pick of the Week is Goldwave, a recording, editing and format conversion program for sounds. It can record any sound that plays via your sound card. At that point, you can edit the file and save it in any one of a number of sound file formats.

Goldwave will also allow you to open a file in one format, such as a .wav file, and save it in another format, such as .au. Of course, once you have opened an existing sound file, you can edit the sound file before saving it in any of the formats. Goldwave can save in .mp3 format if you install a third-party encoder.

So, what can you use GoldWave to do? Do you want to make music CDs or mp3 files of your old record albums or audio tapes? If you have a stereo system with a "tape out" connection, just plug that output into the input of your sound card (you will need a stereo RCA-plug to 1/4" stereo mini-plug cable or adapter. If you use separate audio components, just plug the output of your cassette deck or open-reel tape deck to the input of your sound card, play the tape and use GoldWave to record it. For record albums, the process is similar, but you will need a phono pre-amp to provide the proper electrical connection characteristics.

If you cell phone can use "polyphonic ringtones" and you have a Motorola phone, you can buy their "Mobile Phone Tools," which includes software and cable to connect your PC to your cdll phone. This way, you can create your own ringtone from your favorite music (it's just an MP3 file) and load your own ringtone into your phone -- without having to sign up for your cell service provider's expensive "data service." For Motorola phones, there are two different packages because of the phone connector change: Motorola C331(GSM), C332(GSM), C350 series, RAZR V3, V180 and V220 phones and other models. By the way, the phone tools also let you synchronize phone numbers with your computer. Other phone manufacturers probably have similar systems.

Read more about GoldWave in my Recording and Editing Music With GoldWave article.

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Creating a web site is fun.  Learning that others visit your web site is even better.  But, the web sites you can host for free at your Internet Service Provider are sorely lacking in space (10 MB limit?) and in functionality.

When you are ready for the next step, you need a web host that gives you plenty of space and plenty of throughput and no surprise charges.  I use Powweb for all my web hosting.

Powweb offers an extremely affordable web hosting package.    It's a great deal at $93.24 per year (average $7.77 / month).  The price even includes a free domain name for 1 or 2 year hosting period that you purchase.

Powweb's October Special -- buy 2 years and get 2 years free -- continues!  That is such a good deal that I bought a second package with this deal -- it is an average cost of $3.89/month.

How about a discount coupon code for October?  For use only with the "buy 2 get 2 free" special — You can get $5 off with the code "oct05" (without the quotes).

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7.  Primary Partitions, Extended Partitions and Logical Partitions

[First: What's a partition? It's a area of your physical hard drive that has been marked so that it can be formatted and used for an operating system and/or for data.]

Reader Ron Spruel wrote:

I just bought an 80GB Seagate Hard Drive to replace the one that Seagate Seatools software reported as bad. This is the 2nd hard drive in my computer and I set it up with 3 logical partitions. After I set the drive up, when I look at the drive using Windows/Computer Management/Disk Management, it show the 1st partition as Primary Partition. The 2nd and 3rd drive are shown as logical drives.

I called Seagate Tech Support and asked why Seagate Disk Wizard software did this when I just wanted a logical drive. With Partition Magic, I can change the drive to logical. Since I do not use this partition (or disk) for booting, which is best? Primary or Logical?

Does it matter?

Ron Spruell

Ron,
In the WinMe & prior days, Windows would only show one primary partition. XP, or maybe XP as of SP1, shows multiple primary partitions.

You can create up to 4 primary partitions with most file system software (if you are using BootIt NG, you can create a lot more primary partitions -- but your other utilities won't recognize them!).

Usually, a purchased computer system (such as a Dell or HP) comes with two primary partitions. One is small and is the recovery partition created by the manufacturer. The other is the operating system -- witj Windows, we call this C:.-- the C drive.

Having said that preliminary, let me say that there is actually an intermediate step required to create a "logical partition."

Windows and other common disk operating systems allow you to have 4 "primary partitions." One, and only one, of these can be an "extended partition." All logical partitions are created within the one extended partition. So, you could conceivably have three different bootable partitions (recovery, WinXP & Linux) as primaries (although Linux does not have to be a primary any more) and one extended partition with many more logical partitions created within it.

Back to the question at hand. The only benefit to making one big extended partition and creating all "drives" as logical partitions is if you are going to use resizing software (Partition Magic, BootIt NG, etc). You can move, shrink and expand the logical partitions. You can move, shrink and expand the primary partition(s).

BUT, you can not easily resize a primary partition and move some of its space into the extended partition (to add to a logical drive or create another one).

I used to always keep a small 200MB or so primary partition on a drive, formatted in FAT32, bootable, with utilities -- just in case I had a hard drive failure. With the conversion to Windows XP and when using NTFS, the FAT32 is no longer usable for booting and fixing the NTFS partition.

Bottom line -- Anything but my booting hard drive is set as one big extended partition, with logical partitions (logical drives) for any segregation of files or functions.

Bottom line #2 -- I have _never_ used the wizard software that comes with a new hard drive. I'm still leary from the old days when they would load "drive overlays" that worked with Windows but wouldn't work with anything else.

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8.  Recommend Terry's Computer Tips to Your Friends

If you like my  Terry's Computer Tips newsletter, you can help me increase the number of subscribers to my free newsletter.  Recommend it to a friend.

Feel free to forward the entire newsletter to a friend or friends that you think would be interested, including all copyright notices and any advertising.

Don't forget, the current issue and the newletter archives are available online at http://www.terryscomputertips.com/archives/, and, of course, via a link from the navigation bar on each Terry's Computer Tips web page.

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9.  Send me some email!

I always have time to read emails from you -- the readers of Terry's Computer Tips.  I can not promise a personalized response, but I reply to many of the questions, tips, comments and feedback emails.  I also may use your email in my newsletter!

Send me your comments, send me your tips, send me your questions, and send me your feedback!

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Back to Part 1   Part 2

Volume 1, Number 18 -- Monday, October 17, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Copyright © 2005 Terry A. Stockdale.  All rights reserved.