For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the TWiT Netcast Network

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Tech News

Rumors are flying about a $5.6 billion merger between AMD and ATI. What would it mean? A real boon to consumers. I’ll explain why.

YouTube is now officially the fastest growing web site in history with 75% just last week week from 7.3 million to 12.8 million.

Check out my interview with the founders of Youtube.

Microsoft has announced its iPod killer, Zune

11a-Noon

Q Harry in Palmdale - moving wi-fi access point

He’s moving his wi-fi access point to a military location. Can he use the ethernet there? Depends on what kind of security they’re using, but if it’s just a LAN connection you’ll probably need to change your access point’s settings from “PPPoE” to “Obtain IP address automatically.”

QMary in Redlands - moving data to a new computer

She’s seen ads for Transferease - I haven’t tried it but I used to recommend Aloha Bob’s PC Relocator. Frankly it’s more likely to cause problems than solve them. It’s just too easy to copy problems along with programs over.

You could also just move the old hard drive into the new computer as a second drive. But Beware - you could be moving any viruses or spyware on the old machine into the new one. In most cases I recommend just copying the My Documets folder over and leaving it at that.

QPaul in Lakeview Terrace - book web site

He’s an author and wants to create a web site. First set up a blog at www.Typepad.com, then sign up for an Amazon affiliate account. That way you make extra on every book you sell. It can be quite lucrative!

QMark in Tustin - moving my web site, will Google follow?

He and is planning his site, www.longbeachmarine.org, to new servers but is worried Google will lose him. Nope. Google goes by name - as long as you don’t change your site’s URL you’ll still show up on Google.

Noon-1p

QRyan in Torrance - cell phone upgrade

He’s looking for a smart phone from Verizon. I hear bad things from friends who own the 700w and the Q. I love my Blackberry 8700 but if you want a camera or Windows Mobile I think the Q is probably your best Verizon choice. You might also want to look at the XV6700. It’s bigger, but has a very nice keyboard.

Q Geo in Belleflower - new computer, how do I protect it

Read my article in the Tips section.

QRuth in Camarillo - New computer for family and video editing

Get a Mac. It’s made for video editing. The $1299 iMac is the perfect family computer. No security issues, rock solid reliability, and it comes with iTunes and iDVD for really simple video editing and burning. You’ll want to upgrade to a DV camcorder, too. Get one with analog passthrough so you can convert the video from your old Hi-8 camera.

QDick in Arizona - Intel 82801 RAID

He’s using the motherboard’s RAID controller to create a mirrored RAID 1 array. He’d like to add a drive. Hardware RAID can do this, but the consumer grade RAID controllers usually can’t. You have to go through a complicated process to add a drive.

Dick emailed me later to say he’d been in touch with Intel:

I called regarding the RAID 1 upgrade. I wanted to pass on the fix as supplied by Intel. First the purpose of the RAID 1 system here is redundancy in case of hard drive failure. I realize that it is NOT a backup solution. I do other things to handle that. What Intel says regarding their 945PVS board is this. As I suggested, replace drive 1 with larger capacity. Replace drive 2 with larger capacity. The system will still be at old size. NOW run Partition Magic to expand the RAID volume size. I should not have to reinstall a thing.

1–2p

QMike in Glendale - His external Useless Serial Bus drive is slooooow

USB 2 can be slow, especially when copying a lot of small files. Firewire will be much faster. I use Second Copy to mirror my data to a second (or external drive).

Recently I switched to a really great backup solution: a terabyte Infrant ReadyNAS 600 drive. NAS, or Network Attached Storage, puts the drive on the network where it’s available to all machines on the LAN. The Infrant supports RAID 5, does automatic backups from all my systems, and supports Gigabit ethernet. Since all my machines are also Gigabit capable I bought a Netgear Gigabit switch and now the Infrant is as fast as a local drive.

QJulie in Asuza - Syncing Windows Mobile 5 with a Mac

Markspace just released version 2.5 of their sync software and it finally supports Windows Mobile 5, but… it doesn’t do the office file conversion that ActiveSync does on the Mac. It does everything else though. You might need additional software on the phone to read and write the unconverted Office files.

She’s loooking at the Verizon Wireless VX6700 - it’s really a computer with phone capabilities.

QBarry in Ventura - Hijacked by WinAntiVirus 2006

It’s a tough sypware program you’ll likely have to remove manually. Visit Spywareinfo.com for information on using Hijack This. An example on how to do this is online at GeeksToGo but spyware is updated frequently to resist removal.

QTim in LA - Ghosting programs for the Mac

Apple’s Disk Utility (in the Applications/Utilities folder) will make disk images, but the best program for this is the $27 Superduper

QRobert in Glendale - booting from an external drive on a Mac

All Macs will boot from Firewire drives, so it’s no problem to get them to boot from an external drive. Just put the system on it, press option when you boot, then select the external drive. It will boot from that drive from now on. He’s thinking of buying a MacBook Pro with a slow 5400RPM drive. You probably can install a 7200RPM drive in the notebook - they make ‘em - but it will be hotter and drain the batter faster.

Chat Logs and Show Audio

Listener Comments

22 July 2006

23 July 2006

24 July 2006