Home & Small Office Computer Guide

by Stuart Livesey

In the last 10 days there seems to have been a mini surge in the number of computers coming into the shop with failed Western Digital 80 gig hard drives. Ironically the first one Rick, at the best computer shop in Hervey Bay, saw was his own office desk top and five or six others soon followed.

Each one of the hard drives that failed was built by Western Digital in 2003 and installed in machines in that year or early 2004.

When a hard drive fails there is very little if anything that anyone can do to repair it. Once it fails it’s gone and, in most cases, so has all the data that might be stored on it. There are some specialists who can recover lost data but their services are very very expensive.

These particular drives all came with a one-year warranty but no matter how long the warranty might be it only ever covers replacement of the failed unit - no hard drive warranty covers recovery of the lost data.

In one of the instances that came into the shop one family lost thousands of family photos and several years of research into their family tree.

You have to remember that hard drive failures are inevitable. Every hard drive will fail and the only way to protect your data is to back it up regularly. Back up at least weekly and don’t back it up to another sector on the same hard drive.
 

Cherry Electrical Products has introduced its new 6240 Series compact keyboard with an integrated touchpad and IP 54 spill and dust resistant key field for harsh environments. Typical applications include rack mount systems, test & medical equipment, automotive service, kiosks and transportation/warehouse distribution facilities and others.

The new 6240 Series features an enhanced, 109-position full QWERTY key layout in a compact, 14-inch form factor, combining maximal space efficiency with uncompromised alphanumeric data entry. The integrated touchpad ensures easy curser navigation with minimum desktop footprint.

The keyboard has yellow status LEDs for improved visibility in rooms with artificial light. The additional keys include a “double-zero” key, as well as Copy, Paste, Cut and Undo for easy function calls in Microsoft® Windows® operating systems.

The 6240 Series compact keyboard is offered in black and light grey and comes standard with a USB 2.0 interface. It measures 14.17” X 7.80” X 1.50” and weighs 3.09 pounds. The G86-62401EUADAA keyboard is readily available from stock.

For detailed information regarding the 6240 Series compact keyboard, contact Cherry Electrical Products, 11200 88th Avenue, Pleasant Prairie, WI 53158. Tel: 262.942.6500. Web: www.cherrycorp.com.

Forecasters are suggesting that we will be seeing the commercial release of desktop hard drives that will hold 1 terabyte of data before the end of 2006. Seagate has already released a 750GB hard drive and they are said to have development of it’s big brother well under way.

A major cause of computer failures is a little, but very expensive problem known as blown caps.

Capacitors (or caps) store electricity and they are used in that capacity in a number of locations on the mother boards that go inside your computer. Capacitors can last for many years and then again they can pop their corks in much less time … although it is unusual for that to happen too quickly.

In this photo you will see part of a motherboard and the capcitors are the tall cylindrical items circled in red and green.

The ones circled in green look quite good - the silver top on each of them appears to be quite flat. If you look at the ones circled in red you will notice that the silver caps are bulging - some perhaps more than others - and that is what a blown cap looks like.

A badly blown capacitor will be leaking brown corrosive fluide down the sides and onto the copper tracks but whether they are mildly blown or badly blown the result is still the same. The computer will begin to malfunction and the motherboard is ruined and needs to be replaced.

In the last week or so Dell announced that they were setting aside $300 million to cover the costs of replacing motherboards with blown caps in swome of their workstations. And now there is a report on Cnet that Hewlett-Packard, Apple and other brands that are using Intel motherboards are all facing similar problems.

I’ve just seen a report that suggests that AMD processors outsold their Intel counterparts in the US for the first time in October.

Sales of desktop computers and notebooks with AMD chips accounted for 49.8 percent of PCs sold in domestic stores compared to Intel’s 48.5 percent according to a report on Cnet.

I have to admit that I’m not really surprised because for some time now I’ve been hearing reports that the latest Intel chip runs HOT and no amount of cooling can keep it at a reasonable temperature. Hot chips tend to cause sudden reboots and that seems to have been the experience of many just lately.

On the other hand AMD manage to keep turning out chips that work and go on working and obviously the heat and reboot issue has caught up with Intel.

Well it depends on who you talk to as to whether this is really a laptop or a tablet PC or as Gateway calls it, a Convertible Notebook.

Whatever you might call it it’s just been released in the US and if I lived in the US then I could definitely see one in my future. After all, if it’s good enough for Bill then it certainly is good enough for me

You can find out more about it right here

… but only in the US so the rumour goes. It seems that Walmart an d Hewlett Packard will likely celbrate this Thanksgiving season by offering a laptop or a PC with an LCD monitor for $398 each.

You can read the full story here

But all I have to say is that you get what you pay for. You buy cheap then you get cheap … just ask all those people who bought Dell computers in the last year or so and have had no end of trouble with them.

If you’re into computer gaming you will know that when it comes to the price of gaming machines the sky really is the limit.

$600 for a graphics card doesn’t even cause a hardened gamer to catch his breath and the gaming machine that my friend Rick has for sale down at Fraser Coast Computers for $A4000 is nothing out of the ordinary.

What is out of the ordinary is a good budget priced gaming PC and while you won’t find a manufacturer who supplies them ready built it may be possible to assemble on of your own for around $US500.

If you want to know how then jump over to this article on Tom’s Hardware Guide

The last thing most of us think about when we’re sitting in front of our computers working hard is what processor is inside the computer. As long as it keeps working there’s no need to worry about whether it’s an AMD or an Intel.

And for most of us the processing speed isn’t going to be of great concern either because most of us won’t even notice any discernable difference in the speed between a high-end AMD chip and a low-grade Celeron.

The only time we are ever really going to ponder the question of what processor we want is when the time comes to buy a new computer and the salesman starts asking us for our preference.

At times like that we usually don’t want to appear dumb and we would sometimes like to dazzle the salesperson with our brilliance and so, with that thought in mind I offer you The Right Desktop Processor:CPU/Performance

You will find that it’s a lengthy and in depth look at a number of processors. and if you don’t have time to read everything let me tell you that the bottom line is that there is no definitive winner.

And my personal preference? Well we do a lot of graphical work, we regularly run programmes like Dreamweaver and Photoshop and we have a variety of AMD and Intel processors in our machines and we can’t tell the difference either.

Ask the computer guy who repairs our machines though and he has no doubt. When the customer has no preference he’ll install an AMD chip every time because the latest Intel chips run way too hot for his liking.

The last few posts have been out on the fringe so why spoil the record and go back to something serious?

Instead let’s talk about what could be one of the world’s oldest computers. It’s known as the Antikythera mechanism and back then they sure built things to last. It is believed that this gizmo was built around 87 years before the birth of Christ and at some stage one of them went to the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck. 1900 years later it was brought up by sponge divers.

The mechanisim is now one of the oldest known surviving geared mechanism. After being at the bottom of the sea for 1900 years the mechanism wasn’t quite in pristine condition and there have been a number of attempts to build a replica of what the machine might have looked like.

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of divergence on how the machine looked and function but everyone seems to be agreed that the device was used to calculate the positions of various celestial bodies on any given date.

Yet another reconstruction has now been unveiled at the Technopolis museum in Athens.

And if you wondered why researchers have had so much trouble deciding on what the mechanism looked like then you can see a photo of this amazing piece of equipment here

Hmmm - I wonder if there is still some warranty left on that thing?