Before you REinstall windows …

So I was on my desk working when I realized that my mouse had stopped working and I dint have a spare mouse to replace it with. No problem. I had one more option. I pulled out my lappy and started it.

As soon as I got logged in, I knew there was something wrong with my laptop. It took me a second to realize that it was infected with some kind of virus. The most annoying part of the entire episode was not being able to work when I was supposed to work on something damn important. On Vista, my explorer kept crashing. It really frustrated me for some time. Playing with it for sometime made me realize that my personal computer was in bad shape.

I scanned my entire system to find only few infections which dint seem to me as potential trouble makers. So I went ahead and tried a newer version of my antivirus.

Downloaded -> Installed -> Scanned -> Cleaned. My lappy was moved from ICU to GENERAL ward. Then I checked some settings and did some tweaks to bring my PC back to life. I started trusting antiviruses again

I could get my PC back in shape without formatting my system or reinstalling Vista and hence I could save few hours reinstalling everything

It was then that I thought of writing this post. I just hope that these things will help you avoid atleast few reinstalls / fresh installs.

So before you go for a reinstall / fresh install, try these and see if it comes handy.

1. Make sure you have an antivirus installed. System scan takes time but should be performed sometimes. Your WINDOWS partition should be given preference for scanning.

2. If you come across any weird activity (slow system / popups / explorer related issues), the first place to check should be startup programs. You can see the list by typing “msconfig” in windows run dialog box. If you see entries which you had never installed, disable them and restart to check if that helps. If it does then you need to remove those programs. Uninstall / Delete the installed folder.

3. Try logging in Safe Mode to check if the system remains stable. If it remains stable, try uninstalling recently installed programs. If not, then you might be required to start from scratch, format and reinstall windows.

4. Try running some registry cleaners. Sometimes viruses create links in registry to get executed every time with system startup. Most AV programs take care of this now.

5. Do Ctrl+Alt+Del to check the running programs and system. Kill the unwanted processes. Check for processes that reappear with windows startup but were never installed or meant to be there.

6. Keep your Antivirus updated.

7. Avoid using unscanned pendrives.

8. Keep cleaning/deleting your internet history / cookies.

9. And above all, always keep a backup of your important stuff.

There are many helpful articles on the net that could / would /should help you out on some specific problem.

As long as we have PCs, we have OSs, we will keep getting infected. The problem is not infection though. The issue stays with us. Our ignorance leads to situations that make things move out of our hands.

So go get an antivirus (ur techie friends should be able to help you with it) and be prepared.

To name a few:

Norton Antivirus / McAfee / AVG / Avast / Panda

And DO NOT FORGET … You are NEXT…next to get infected…

Leopard is out…

Leopard is out…

This one is not from the jungle but from Apple. The latest OS / OSX release has been
labelled LEOPARD. Leopard was always in the news as it was scheduled to be released
with 300 new features and now that it has been released, all these new enhancements / features
are available for you. Check it out on www.apple.com

The new release is obviously feature packed. The major features fall under these categories:

1. Universal Access
2. Mail
3. Preview
4. System
5. iChat
6. DVD Player
7. BootCamp
8. Finder
9. Time Machine
10.SpotLight

Other categories include Graphics and Media, Parental Control, Terminal, Dashcode, iCal and many more.

Universal Access – They have added anew voice. They call it Alex. Support for drag and drop using keyboard, added Braille panel, faster web and Page navigation and many other features.

Mail – Stationery added, forward email as attachment (already there in other OSes), photo browser, improved search, rich formatting.

Preview – Personalized annotations, improved color adjustment, PDF manipulation, Batch Image Operations, auto levels for Image manipulation.

System – Live Partition Resizing, Help Menu search (new search field in Help menu), Grammar check, Empty trash button, Eject all partitions (USB / FireWire).

iChat – PhotoBooth (apply effects to fotoz), backdrop effects, screen sharing, custom buddy list order, tabbed chat, SMS forwarding, File transfer manager, recording.

DVD Player – Auto zoom, floats above other apps, chapter thumbnails, parental control, time slider

BootCamp – Run XP & Vista @ native speed, assistant, copy files between XP and Mac, easy restore, convenient boot camp shortcut

Finder – Cover Flow – lets you flip thu ur files and shows the first page, connect Mac from anywhere, Instant screen sharing, bar for path, folder sharing.

Time Machine – Automatic Backup, Shows the various versions in a time wise manner, allows for manual backup too, preserves privileges, lets you browse other disks vreated with time machine.

SpotLight – Dictionary n calculations in spotLight, lets you search web history, searches by filename and searches system files too.

These are some features that have been released with the new Mac OSX – LEOPARD.

And the price is:
Single user – $129
Family Pack – $199

Datz all 4 d time being….

2007 and beyond…

After reading stuff on processors, memory, hard disks, memory and graphics cards, I thot of putting it down here so dat I cud refer it later. Lets put it down now.

CPU: Heart of computer. Or is it the Brain? Well watever it is, it is getting big increments in performance year after year. Intel Core 2 Duo is just the beginning. Processors with 4 and 8 cores have started making news. With AMD and Intel struggling to top the market, its the consumer who will be getting better options to choose from. Intel is coming out with two processors:

Penryn and Yorkfield

Penryn is being made with 45nm technology and has 6MB of L2 cache. After this arrives the Big brother of Penryn. Welcome Yorkfield. Quad cores and total 12MB L2 cache (4 MB over Core 2 Quadz 8 MB L2 cache).

AMD on the other hand has Barcelona (K8L), Altair and Windsor. In Barcelona, AMD has borrowed OOE (Out of Order) Execution from Intel. AMDz Hyper transport technology and Integrated Memory controllers have made news in the past and technology on parallel lines is now being used by Intel. Intel soon will be coming out with a new architecture….Nehalem.

Fusion technology is also something which is being worked on by both technology giants. Fusion technology lets you put GPU (Graphics Processing unit) on CPU itself. In the near future, we could see processors with 3 CPUs and 1 GPU or 2 CPUs and 2 GPUs.

CHIPSET: Think of processors and the first thing that crops up is Chipset. Motherboard is nothing but the pair of specific chips: NorthBridge and SouthBridge. As time has passed, chipsets have seen a lot of changes. Processors have moved from 478 to 775 socket. Intel’s 925/915 series evolved from 800 series.

G33 and P35 (code named Bearlake) will be the new chipsets for 45 nm processors. It has memory controller that supports DDR3 and new southbridge to support processors built on 45nm technology.

MEMORY: DDR3 has prefetch buffer of 8 bit whereas DDR2 had 4 and DDR had 2. It has lower power consumption and theorotical transfer rate of 800-1600 MHz.

GRAPHICS CARD: High end graphic cards have been using GDDR3 for some time now. It has memory speeds up to 2 GHz. GDDR4 has also made its entry.

HARD DISK: We have HDDz coming up in sizes that we had never even dreamt of. 120/ 160 / 250 / 500 GB drives are a norm now. Hitachi has come up with 1 TB (tera byte) hdd that has 32Mb cache. Hybrid HDDs are also making news theez dayz. These drives will have up to 1 gig of cache (flash based) for some terabytes of storage capacity.

With so much to look out for…..lets hope that all these innovations make our lives easier. But the truth is, with all those advancements in hardware, nothing much has changed. Softwares have become even more bulkier. Now we have OSes dat demand atleast 1 Gigabyte of RAM to work properly whereas in the past this amount of RAM was sufficient enuf to play graphics intensive games, manipulating layered photografs, listening to music and doing all possible stuff.

Lets keep our fingers crossed. Some day things will change