Increasing the Life of Hard Disk
Taking care of your hard disk is important because this is the place where all the data is stored and once the hard disk crashes, data in most cases is not recoverable. There are data recovery softwares and programs which recover data from crashed hard disks but they are not for normal computer users and may be expensive.
But why do hard disks crash and what can be done to prevent them from crashing? At the same time how can a hard disk be made more efficient? Here are the answers.
Hard disks crash due to many reasons: voltage fluctuations, physical impact, improper alignment and of course mechanical failure due to wear and tear of internal parts. Let us start one by one and get the answers to these problems.
1. Voltage fluctuations or spikes as they are called can be prevented by using voltage stabilizers or spike guards. This will limit the damage to the hard disk to a great extent. These are available locally at many stores.
2. Physical impact. This one is easy: Don’t drop the hard drive or keep it somewhere where it will get hot!
3. The natural wear and tear of parts can be limited by defragmenting your hard disk from time to time. But what is fragmentation? Never mind what it is, just know it is bad, it is hard on your hard drive, and slows your computer down! So run your defragmentation program.
To start disk defragmenter from the start menu, click the start button and follow this path (All Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Disk Defragmenter). A minimum of 15 percent free space on your disk is needed for disk defragmenter to run. The disk can also be defragmented automatically by using schedule task. This program can be accessed via system tools.
4. Disk cleanup increases the efficiency of the hard disk. So delete unwanted files and programs regularly.
Follow the above rules to increase the life of your hard disk.
Full article source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lalit_Navani
Batch Rename many files with no software needed
Here’s a great tip I just discovered: To begin with, you have a bunch of files that need to be renamed in the form like, file_name, file_name(1), file_name(2), … file_name(n). It’s not a problem if you have only ten, but if it’s 100 or 1,000 files, what to do? This can be a real pain AND you may not even do it. I found this tip to quickly rename many files in a few steps for any format. You don’t have to rename file by file anymore. I usually use this tip for hundreds of images in a folder. Here are the steps (do this once and you’ll remember how to do it in the future):
l I open the folder containing many image files that I want to rename all of them. Note that all are the same format, xxx.jpg. (Any file format will work, though).
l Select all the files by pressing the key, Ctrl+A.
l Right click on any file selected in the second step then choose Rename tab.
l Now I rename a file “nyepi2008.jpg” and then press Enter key on your keyboard.
l I get them all renamed in the form nyepi2008.jpg, nyepi2008 (1).jpg, … , nyepi2008 (3).jpg, etc
l Finish and no need to use any program for this to work!
Do you worry about viruses or adware or software you download
I discovered a great and free application that I love. It’s called WOT (http://www.mywot.com/). It works with IE and Firefox so there’s no excuse NOT to download and use it. What does it do? It simply sets a green, yellow, or red little circle next to each link on the page (emails included if you use hotmail, gmail, etc). If the little circle is ‘green’ then you know this is a safe web site, ‘yellow’ means be careful, and ‘red’ means don’t even think about going there. Here’s the example: suppose you want to download some interesting screensaver like Santa Claus or Christmas. Do a google search and you’ll see thousands of web sites. Which ones are safe and which ones will include a virus with your neat new screensaver? WOT will let you know. I’ve been using it for several months and it’s great! Try it.
