Computer Hardware – Page 7

Replace UPS Batteries

September 22, 2009 / Computer Hardware, Electronics, Shopping

If you have computers or electronics that you don’t want to be killed by power fluctuations, it’s a good idea to have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). The battery in the UPS keeps your equipment running through blackouts our brownouts (reduced power).

Dead Battery

The main problem with a UPS is that its battery might only last a couple of years. A dead battery is often announced by a UPS through regular beeping. Because a UPS is expensive, consider just replacing the battery instead of the whole UPS when the battery dies.

You can buy a replacement from the UPS company or for significantly less money from a third party such as Battery Mart. Just be sure to get a battery that is designed for your specific UPS. I have had good luck with with Battery Mart, but there are some third party batteries which are of poor quality, possibly having a short life, acid leakage, or even causing a fire.

I replaced the battery for the APC Back-UPS 500 ES for $26.39 from Battery Mart instead of $48.99 from APC (prices include shipping).

Flash Drive Speeds

September 9, 2009 / Computer Hardware, Mobile

What should be important to you when buying a flash drive, besides capacity? Speed and reliability.

Amazon and Newegg provide useful user reviews that can alert you to drives with high failure rates. I also look for good read and write speeds.

Read and Write Speeds

Speed tests can be calculated manually, but I used HD_Speed software to determine speeds of these common drives.

	Size GB	Read MB/s	Write MB/s
Kingston DataTraveler I	8	17.8	7.8
SanDisk Cruzer Micro	16	24.9	5.2
Corsair Flash Voyager	16	28.8	6.9
Kingston DataTraveler 200	64	28.6	10.7

The speeds will vary depending on the size of the files transferred (block size). Larger files can be moved more efficiently than smaller files.

As you can see, the write speeds lag the read speeds. The latest generation of flash drives, such as the Kingston DataTraveler 200, are often significantly faster than older models.

Fast read speeds do not always translate into relatively fast write speeds, as demonstrated by the SanDisk Cruzer’s slower write speed than the Kingston DataTraveler I.

Speed should be more important to you when looking at larger drives since you’ll really notice it when moving more data. People didn’t tend to worry about the speed of 3.5 inch floppy drives when they only held 1.4 MB of data.

Counterfeits

Another thing to watch for is counterfeits. Apparently there are several counterfeits of the Kingston DataTraveler 150 64GB often sold on eBay for around $50, less than half what they currently should cost. These drives still have 64GB of storage. They are just slow and prone to failure, leaving you without your data.

T1 Business Support from Verizon

September 7, 2009 / Computer Hardware, Internet, Local DC area

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 that the line was good and that it was likely due to their router being hit by lightning. This seemed to make sense. But unfortunately Verizon was no longer responsible for the router after they installed it. Even though Verizon had sold them the router and set up all its configuration files, it was the office’s responsibility to diagnose any router problems and fix it. So the office asked me to take a look.

Finger Pointing

I ran a series of T1 loopback tests on the router and everything responded correctly. I even spoke to Adtran (makers of the router) and they agreed that everything looked good. So I called Verizon. Then the fun back and forth began.

Verizon said that they were sure it wasn’t their fault because they ran their own loopback tests. I asked them to come out. Eventually they did, but they didn’t come out when they said they would so I didn’t get to see them do any tests. When they reported that everything was fine, I didn’t believe them. I knew that they hadn’t even gone into the room with the customer jack and router since no one in the office saw Verizon enter the building.

So I had to set up what Verizon calls a “vendor meet”. Verizon said this was the only way to arrange a specific time. But Verizon warned me that if it didn’t end up being their problem, the business would be charged. Verizon didn’t show up for our first vendor meet because one of their techs was sick. On their second meet, the tech noticed some weird line activity but the Internet came back up.

The next day the line was down again. This process happened three more times, with the Internet going in and out and Verizon coming out occasionally but still maintaining that it was probably the router. Four weeks after the storm, one of Verizon’s techs finally switched out their line between the phone room and the customer jack. That fixed the problem and it has been up ever since.

The router wasn’t broken. Evidently the storm somehow damaged the last bit of line that Verizon owned, but that line was past the phone room that Verizon typically tested against.

The office had been ready to give up when this was finally solved. They were going to move to a cellular Internet solution.

Lesson: Verizon Sucks

This story illustrates Verizon’s failure to properly handle their business customers who pay $500 per month for T1 Internet service. By not being responsible for the router that they sold, Verizon was able to just point fingers instead of properly investigating the problem. Small businesses without a tech staff have no way of dealing with that. They can’t easily log into the routers and type Cisco commands to prove Verizon wrong. These aren’t as simple as Linksys routers for the home.

Verizon should provide a business solution that is responsible for Internet all the way to the local area network. This would have saved the customer a lot of time and money.

The only positive thing that I can say about Verizon is that at least they aren’t Comcast.

Network Attached Storage for Automated Backups

August 8, 2009 / Apple, Computer Hardware, Shopping, Software

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 the built-in Time Machine for Macs.

Backup Locally

Backups can be sent to a local USB flash drive or local USB hard drive. The Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB costs about $107. These use laptop hard drives which have the advantage of being able to run only on USB power. Larger 3.5 inch external drives can hold more data but require an additional power supply.

Network Backups

If you have more than one computer, a better solution can be to backup to a network attached storage (NAS) drive. This connects by ethernet to your router allowing you to connect to it through your home network.

Here are a few solutions:

Apple Time Capsule

If you are a Mac user and you want the simplest solution, you’ll have to pay a lot more for the Apple Time Capsule. Apple just upgraded their large capacity Time Capsule to 2GB for $499. The Time Capsule is both a NAS and a wireless router, so it simplifies your setup. However it is only a solution for automated Mac backups that use Apple’s included Time Machine software.

Buffalo Linkstation

Buffalo Technology Linkstation Pro LS-XH1.0TL 1 TB is a great NAS that costs about $215 currently. It is fast and works as a Time Machine drive for Macs just like Apple’s Time Capsule above, though you’ll have to login to the Buffalo to set up that capability. You pay a bit more for the Buffalo’s speed than the below Iomega. If you are only using the NAS for automated backups, speed is not particularly important. Speed is helpful if you are also using the NAS as a network shared drive. The other advantage of the Buffalo and the Apple Time Capsule is that they are near silent. You have to put your ear right up to them to hear the small fan.

Iomega Home Media Server

Iomega Home Media Server 34337 1TB is a good media server, which is cheaper ($148) but a bit slower than the Buffalo. It is not loud at all, but the fan is noticeable. It includes software for automatically backing up 5 PCs. You can also backup to it with a Mac by using free software such as SuperDuper.

NAS Reviews

SmallNetBuilder.com is a great site for NAS reviews. They also have charts such as this one which show you the speed versus price. I circled the Buffalo and Iomaga drives mentioned above illustrating the Buffalo’s excellent performance.

Multi-drive NAS

For larger businesses or those who want an extra backup of their backup drive, consider a NAS that consists of multiple drives. This could be a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) box such as a Netgear ReadyNAS. Or it could be a Drobo and Droboshare. These solutions are more expensive and often slower than single drive solutions. But they ensure that your data will safe if one of their hard drives crashes.

Backup Your Data

In the world of computer support, nothing is worse than seeing someone lose family pictures or days of important accounting data. Given the low cost of storage, there is no excuse for avoiding backups. Automated solutions are a simple way to keep your digital data safe.

Upgrade Hard Drive with Free Tools from EASEUS

June 12, 2009 / Computer Hardware, Notebook Computers, Software, Windows

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 use.

1. Buy a new drive. Currently the largest ATA drvies are 320GB and SATA drives are 500GB. 750GB SATA drives are anticipated in 2009 and 1TB drives are expected in 2010. We typically buy hard drives from Newegg.com.

2. Buy a USB laptop hard drive adapter or USB drive enclosure for the new drive. Again, try Newegg.com.

3. We recommend first running the Windows Disk Defragmenter so that your new drive will start out with the files well organized. It is located at Start – All Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter. In order to run Disk Defragmenter, you need at least 15% free space. This might mean that you need to run Disk Cleanup or back up and temporarily remove some of your larger files such as photos.

4. Download the free EASEUS Disk Copy. This will provide you with a .iso file that you can burn to CD as a disk image.

5. While the computer is off, connect the new drive to the computer via USB adapter or USB enclosure. Start the computer with the EASEUS Disk Copy CD created above. You might have to go into the BIOS to prioritize the CD drive to be bootable. This will boot into EASEUS Disk Copy and allow you to copy the entire old drive (also known as cloning) to the new drive connected via USB. In our tests, EASEUS Disk Copy was able to move 55GB of data in about 35 minutes. We found EASEUS Disk Copy to be one of the fastest bit-for-bit copying systems. For comparison, we tested Norton Ghost which copied 55GB in over 3 hours.

6. Remove the old drive and replace with the new drive. Boot up the computer.

7. Download and run the free EASEUS Partion Master 3.5 Home Edition. This is needed because EASEUS Disk Copy only copies (makes a clone of) the drive as it is sized. Use the Partition Manager to expand the partition to use the entire drive.