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Failed Hard Drive: Anatomy of the Trobleshooting Process
Troubleshooting: in computers, no one can go very long without being forced to do at least rudimentary attempts, but I've found few books or other resources that help teach the mental process. After almost two decades of working with computers, since my first IBM XT at the ripe age of 15, I've been dealing with problems of every type. Most of the computer jobs had a large helping of troubleshooting, which was great for me. It's something I've always enjoyed. I thought I would take the opportunity of my girlfriend's hard drive crashing to walk through one real-world example, and hopefully provide some insight into this sometimes archaic process.
The Symptoms
So the other day my girlfriend tells me her pc has been locking up at odd times. It's one she built herself a couple years ago, and has been running well for that time. I asked her what kind of lock-ups they were; typically hardware failures cause things like an instant reboot or power off, or the entire screen locking up and being completely unresponsive. That's a 'hard lock'.
The Google PC - Oh It's Coming
Now i'm not the first to predict that soon we'll be seeing pcs with an operating system made by Google, and there's still quite a bit of debate on the topic. Officially Google denied it, but in such a vague way that it's not even an answer. For those of us who don't balk at speculation, let's see what we can come up with:
Why Google Won't Be 'Jumping the Shark' Anytime Soon
For almost as long as I've been aware there was a Google, I've heard people foretelling its imminent demise. Historically this is a smart bet when it comes to search engines - Over the short lifetime of the World Wide Web, quite a few search engines have come and gone. A number of them - Webcrawler, Altavista, Lycos - were the kings of search in their heydey, only to end up losing market share, dwindling in search volume until someone bought them up. They now live out their technological lives on the sidelines, as 'out to pasture' as a company can be and still exist. So it's not hard to see why man people think Google's time has come. A many search for google jump shark returns almost a million pages - that's a lot of tongue-wagging.
AVG Anti-Virus for windows reviewed
One reality that every computer user has to face is the need for a good anti-virus client for their machine. Almost everyone gets online or shares files with someone, and that opens the door for viruses. It used to be that viruses would rewrite your motherboard's BIOS or delete data, but nowadays the vast majority of viruses just want to replicate themselves and install adware. So the good news is many viruses won't really hurt your computer much. The bad news is that they are very good at propagating around the 'net, and you can expect to come across virus-infected files in email and on web sites quite regularly, especially once you've got on a few spam lists.