ICE Computer

A few months ago, (before the Thailand floods and hard drives prices went through the roof), I purchased a new 500GB 7200RPM 2.5″ SATA hard drive to replace the 250GB hard drive in my 2009 all aluminum 13.3″ Macbook.  Changing the hard drive was a preventive measure, a job of changing it now, rather than AFTER a hard drive crash.

Before changing out the hard drive, I did some research on the web about “cloning” my old hard drive onto the new one.  After a lot of research, I settled on “Carbon Copy Cloner“, a free, shareware program written by Mike Bombich.  I found this program much easier to use than Apples’ Time Machine, and was able to do exactly what I wanted to do, make an exact clone of the 250GB hard drive.  I used an external USB 2.5″ SATA hard drive case that I already had, placed the 500GB drive in it, and “cloned” the 250GB hard drive to the new 500GB hard drive.  After cloning, I installed the 500GB hard drive into the Macbook.  All in all, a fairly easy job, removing a few small screws, installing the drive, putting the screws back in, and I was done!  The swap out process took no more than 10 minutes.

My old 250GB had OSX 10.5 on it, and I had bought an upgrade ($19) to OSX 10.6, but I decided not to “upgrade” before the drive swap.  I also did not “upgrade” to OSX 10.7 Lion, after installing the new 500GB hard drive.  After getting everything the way I wanted on the new 500GB hard drive, I cloned it back to the 250GB so that I would have a “backup” in case the new drive failed.

Since the hard drive swap, I’ve used the cloner to perform incremental backup’s without a hitch.  If you have a Mac, do yourself a favor and check out Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner.  And Mike, my $15 donation to your project is in the mail.

As most of you know, I’ve been a big fan of Vipre Antivirus from Sunbelt Software for about 4 years now.  However, they were bought out by a big corporation about a year and a half ago.  Since then, the quality of their product has taken a nose dive, so this year when it came time to renew my subscription, I decided to move to Kaspersky’s Internet Security 2012 package.  I have been using this at work, and we use Kaspersky’s AV on all our managed workstations and their Security Center software on all our Windows servers.

I can’t tell you how many computers that I fix every year that have Norton, McAfee, AVG, Avast, Vipre, or some other brand of either paid or “free” AV software.  I have yet to repair a computer with up-to-date Kaspersky software loaded and activated on it.

If you follow the link listed in this article, you will be able to purchase a 3 user license version of Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 for only $19.99.  That’s $60 off the regular retail price, and actually cheaper than just the AV product.  I don’t know how long this price will be available, but even if you still have some time left on your AV product, buy this to replace it with when the time comes.

Like most AV and IS products, there is a large download to do AFTER you install it to get the product up-to-date.  But once it is installed, you can just “set it and forget it”, because it works like a champ!

Do yourself a favor and take advantage of this special pricing right now!

Over the last month, all the tech news has been dominated by the passing of Apple Computers’ co-founder Steve Jobs.  Most folks can agree that Jobs changed the way computers  interfaced with people, and vice versa.

Dennis Ritchie, (aka DMR), passed away on October 12th, and the world barely noticed.  Most folks don’t even know who DMR was, or what he did to revolutionize computer programming.  Without DMR, there would have been no personal computers, MAC OSX, Windows OS, Linux OS, and a host of other OS’s and programs.

Steve Jobs may have changed personal computers for all of us, but he was standing on DMR’s shoulders when he did it!

I personally owe DMR a huge note of gratitude, as I made a living for a while as a “C” programmer.

Read more about DMR at Dr. Dobbs.

RIP DMR

In my previous posts, I had explained the trials and tribulations of upgrading my 5 year old Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop.  Knowing that the “not charging” problem was either the battery or the AC adapter, I ordered a replacement AC adapter from a reputable seller on Ebay.  After plugging the new AC adapter in, I still had the same problem.

A week or so later, I was trying to repair a customers’ Dell of the same model that was DOA, and I took their battery out and placed it in mine.  Voila, it started charging, both with the old AC adapter and with the new one.  After returning the customers’ battery to their unit, I starting looking for a new battery on Ebay.  Looks like I can get a new OEM battery for around $35.

In two previous posts, (Dell Hell Again and Dell Hell Again continued), I told my tale of trying to update the BIOS on my old Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop.  Well I finally took the old 80GB hard drive, and loaded Windows XP on it, and then tried to update the BIOS.  Once again I got an error -144 message, but this time I went and Googled the error message and found many pages to read.  The Dell official forum pages were absolutely useless, but buried in the results I found a forum with a posting from 2008 with the same problem that I was having.  It suggested removing the battery and then running the BIOS update.  I did that and sure enough, it worked!

There is a saying that “no good deed goes unpunished”.  After feeling really good at what I had accomplished, I then plugged the battery back into the laptop and heard a “beep”.  Looking at the battery icon on the tray showed that the battery was “charging”, but at 0%.  I left the laptop alone for an hour and when I checked the battery again, it still said “charging” and “0%”.  So, in short, my laptop has the latest BIOS now, but will not charge the battery!

After reading about the battery not charging, I will have to replace the battery and/or the A/C adapter.  Dell and HP both put an extra wire in their A/C adapters that tells the Motherboard to “charge” the battery.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress, (or lack thereof).