Why do I need a backup?

All hard drives can fail. If a hard drive fails, recovering data is unlikely and expensive. So having a back up of the important data in your computer is essential, particularly those which are irreplaceable such as family photos or work documents.

How do I backup my data?

Most common devices used for a backup are:

• External Hard Drives are great for general use. You can use them over and over again, they usually have quite a lot of space, and they are good for backing up large amounts of data. Remember that external hard drives can fail too so make sure you keep the copy on your computer.
• CD’s and DVD’s are also good mediums for backing up data, and are reasonably cheap if you just want to backup a few things like your photo collection, music and documents.
• USB Flash Drives are great ways of storing small amounts of data, like work documents, etc.

A Backup is essentially just a copy of the data you backup, so the simplest way of backing up is just copying the data and pasting it in the device you want to backup to. There is also software that will do this for you automatically.

Backing up onto a server

A server is a computer which sole purpose is to hold and give out data. Backing your data onto a server is becoming more popular in homes. Having multiple computers, each one having its own backup can be costly and messy. This is where a server is handy. With a server, all the computers are connected via a network and the backup runs through the network. Servers are also handy for a centralised place for sharing data on a network.

If you would like to purchase a server please talk a Spanner Box specialist.

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Things to Remember

To help prevent hard drive failure, it is good to get a UPS (uninterrupted power supply). This is a device that ensures devices plugged into it get clean constant power without spikes or drops and also has a backup battery, in event of a power cut.

It is best to not bump your computer too much as this can cause hard drive heads to scratch the discs and corrupt data.

It is also not recommended to turn off your computer at the wall or by the switch. If your hard drive is working and you suddenly cut power to it you can damage it or corrupt data.

Keeping your hard drive at a good operating temperature helps prevent hard drive failure. Usually a hard drive by itself won’t over heat, but in certain situations hard drives may be hotter than normal. If you are worried about your hard drive over heating it is a good idea to have extra cooling fans installed in your computer.

 These are just some tips to make your PC run fast when it starts going slow

How does the processor make the computer slow?

Your processor is like the brains of your computer it does the calculations.

It”s common for processors to use a large amount of processing power for short periods of time when loading software. That is why the more programs you have programmed to load on start-up, the longer it takes to start up .

Scenario

You have six programs that load at start up, and all require 6 seconds loading time. That is roughly 30 seconds longer than if you had only one program loading at start-up. Generally as a computer gets older the owner will install more programs . Many of these load on start-up because software makers often program their software to load during start-up to try and make people use their software more.

How to turn off start up programs

The easiest way to do this is by using msconfig.exe, a utility that allows you to control a number of settings on your computer.

Turn on “msconfig.exe” in Windows XP

1. Press the “start” button in the bottom left hand corner
2. Select the program “RUN” and turn on.
3. Type in “msconfig” then press enter

To turn on msconfig.exe in Windows Vista

1. Press the “Windows” button in the bottom left hand corner
2. Type in ‘msconfig’ in the search field then press enter

A window should pop up with ’system configuration’. Select the “Startup” tab

Uncheck the boxes of the programs you don’t want to load during start-up, click the apply button in the bottom right hand corner then ok. The next time the computer starts up it should be a lot faster!

If you don’t know what a program does, don’t turn it off! You can do google searches on programs if you want to know what they do.

How does memory (RAM) usage make the computer slow?

Memory is like short term storage for the computer. Everything that is running is stored in the memory to be used by the processor.

All of your programs use up memory. The more programs you have running at one time, the more memory it will use. However, using up memory won”t actually slow your computer down until you run out of memory.

Scenario

An old computer has 256MB of RAM. This computer is running Windows XP which uses about 200MB of RAM itself. This leaves only 56MB of free RAM. If you open MSN Messenger, Microsoft Word, and Internet Explorer these programs combined will use 157MB. This creates 357MB of RAM, being used by a computer which only has 256MB of Ram.

In this situation the computer will use the Hard drive (long term memory), as replacement for RAM. Since the hard drive runs a lot slower than RAM the computer will start to run slowly.

However, if you have 2048MB (2GB) of RAM and you only use 357MB then your computer will run fine until you use more than 2048MB of ram.