Tech DC

Lightning Strikes
A  small office near Dulles airport in Virginia had a Business T1 line from Verizon because they didn’t qualify for DSL or cable Internet. Everything was working great for about 3 months. Then there was a big lightning storm.
When people showed up to work the next day, the Internet was down. Verizon told them [...]

Prevent Lost Data

Many DC area residents have been contacting me lately with hard drive failures and lost data. Data can sometimes be recovered using software such as SpinRite. But it’s easy and relatively inexpensive to be proactive and backup your data. The best backups are automated, using free software such as SyncBack for Windows or [...]

We recently helped someone in Adams Morgan upgrade their laptop to a larger hard drive. It was for an old Dell laptop running Windows XP (32-bit) that had an ATA (IDE) drive instead of one of the newer SATA drives.
Here are the steps to upgrade a hard drive. The EASEUS software is free for personal [...]

The Palm Pre has just been released and most of these reviews are from review units.  This means some of the issues may be resolved with OS updates.  Here are some of top reviewers initial problems with the Pre.
Phonescoop.com
When the Pre is attached to a PC to sync media, it cannot make or receive calls [...]

There have been many technologies I’ve been skeptical of, none more so than Ooma, a VoIP phone service. If you don’t know what that means, essentially it is a way to make phone calls through your pre-existing internet connection as opposed to using a normal phone line. Ooma has several big selling points, [...]