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Sunday, February 15, 2004

Show 14

Coming up in the 1p hour, Robin Liss from CamcorderInfo.com to talk about the latest products from the Photo Marketing Association Show in Las Vegas.

Plus - for the next three weeks I’ll be doing an extra hour from 3–4p. We’re taping calls for later airing, so if you’ve had trouble getting in before, try between 3 and 4p for the next three Sundays! 1–800–520–1534.

Jim in Oxnard - wants to know the best way to backup his hard drive. For a complete image of the drive, I recommend Norton Ghost from Symantec. But I also recommend making regular backups to a CD-R then getting the CD-R offsite just in case. I do that every week. You may also want to consider an upload service. I use dot-mac with Panther which works very well. Windows users can try XDrive.

Bob in West Hills wants to make sure his data is not recoverable on an old hard drive he’s planning to give away. That’s a very important point. Merely emptying the recycle bin does NOT erase data. It just releases it for future use. You can easily recover the information with a file uneraser. To kill the data permanently, format the hard drive, or better yet, use a DOD quality file shredder. I like the free Eraser from Tolvanen but there are many other equally good programs. My buddy Patrick Norton has compiled a list on The Screen Savers web site.

David in Valencia is bugged by Golden Palace pop-ups. His daughter very likely downloaded it from Kazaa and it can be hard to get rid of. I recommend AdAware - a great free spyware removal tool. In this case HijackThis should also work. Free from SpyChecker.com. I also use Spybot. It’s ok to use all three!

Dennis in Palmdale has a multifunction printer and wireless print server that won’t work together.

Jeff from Anaheim’s file system has changed to type Hex 6 - now he can’t read it. He’s using Windows 2000 with a 200GB drive. According to boot-us that’s FAT-16. Uh-oh.

Robin Liss of CamcorderInfo.com reporting from PMA. Here are the highlights:

• Polaroid with new Foveon based chips
• Sony introducing two new small DVD recording camcorders but…

• Canon upgraded Elura-50 to the 60/65/70, new larger CCDs, and 1.33 megapixels. We’ll have to wait for testing on low light, but the new CCDs might improve performance.
• Panasonic’s $700 3-CCD camcorders are looking very good

Myles in Lake Arrowhead has a Beige G3 he wants to upgrade so that he can run Panther. You can do it. I recommend a visit to Other World Computing - they offer a variety of upgrade processors. For more information on what you can do with your Mac visit Accelerate Your Mac.

John in San Diego wants to know the best way to download drivers? I recommend saving them directly to the hard drive before running them. That way you’ll have a copy for future use. I keep them on a separate hard drive from Windows to simplify future Windows installs. I also burn them to CD. Don’t forget to run the driver after downloading it! John also recommended DriversHQ’s Driver Detective for a good way to keep track of driver updates.

Andy from NYC had three very interesting questions:
1. He wants to dial into his computer from a phone and listen to the audio playing back on it. (Brad our computer whiz from Yorba Linda says a message on hold box will work. OnHoldInc.com might have some software to do this.)
2. What’s the single DVD file to click on to start a DVD video playing from the hard drive. (Brad says it’s VIDEO_TS.VOB).
3. What’s the easiest way to create a web page on his system that can contain clickable links to files, videos, etc.

Jim from Mission Viejo’s wife lost her Sharp Zaurus. He wanted a recommendation for a replacement PDA. I like Palm Zire 71, $250, but if she’s attached to the Zaurus’s keyboard she may want to look at a Tungsten or a Sony Clie. Both offer keyboards in addition to handwriting recognition.

Mark in Santa Ana recommends Data Mechanix in Irvine for data recovery. He wanted to know about how to combine multiple hard drive partitions into one big one. I recommend Symantec’s Partition Magic. It comes with a drive mapper program that will re-assign drive letters o

He’s also looking for the location of Flash’s DNS cache. Anyone know where to look.

Susan in San Diego has a Windows 2000 machine that takes ten minutes to start up. You can see which programs startup on boot with Mike Lin’s free Start Up Control Panel. I also recommend she reinstall Windows 2000 on a completely formatted hard drive. I think the problem may be caused by the fact that she tried to install Windows 2000 on top of Windows Me. Bad idea.

Leo in Hawthorne is worried he has a virus. His up-to-date version of Norton Anti-Virus says he’s clean but he wants a second opinion. Try Housecall - it’s a free online virus check and I’ve found it very reliable.

Brett in Sherman Oaks wants to move over his hard drive from his old system to his new system. No problem - just do it. As long as it’s not the boot drive it should show up just fine.

Jeff in Rancho Cucamonga can’t install Panther on his 15″ Powerbook. He’s been online with Apple and they’ve even sent him new discs, but the install always fails at some point. Anyone have a good Apple store he can visit?