Wednesday, July 27, 2011

How to install Windows 7 from USB (any version too!! in 4 easy steps)

oh hi!  nice to see you again :3 (revisited december 27 2011 small detail)

Have you ever had the need to install  windows 7 onto your computer only to find the dvd drive is dead, or your system is question has no dvd drive at all?, like all those new Net books for sale at around  100$ that only come with linux or some other kind of web browser interface ?

Well i am here to save the day! because i have been on the computer business for a long while, and i have been installing windows systems daily, and having to swap discs from system to system is a real hassle, the dvd's get scratched and customers often loose them, and i cant afford to buy every single windows DVD version  for every single customer.


-START LESSON-

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

To RefurBish or Not Refurbish! that is the question! (HARD DRIVES)

Oh hello there, so nice to see you again :D

You may have heard about REFURBISHED items which are basically items that have been reworked, fixed, re calibrated, re packaged in order to be sold once more to the consumer in an effort to re-cycle and re sell otherwise well and functioning product, Most of the times, since we like new and shiny and "un-handled" these products are cut  down in price, we have to make clear, these are not Used(mostly)  and worn out items, that you find in outlets, here is a little deeper explanation:

he is such a great sales man!


Tuesday, July 12, 2011

100% Cpu usage - Hardware Interrupt calls!

Oh boy do i have something on my hands right now,  a computer a compaq Presario sr1615la that right from the start of windows xp login screen, is slugish and has a 100% cpu utilization,  we ruled out any kind of virus and rootkit, after searching and searching for  every possible hidden culprit, i opted to use  ProcessExp, a nifty great tool to find what program is hoggin the CPU, turns out the program identifies a "Hardware interrupt calls"  procces at 99%, Installing a fresh copy of windows on the same hardware yields the same result!

At this age and day, an interrupt problem reminds me of the past, where you had to reserve and give IRQ's for special hardware, sound cards usually where IRQ5, network cards where IRQ 9 or 11, and video cards where 9 or 14, and if you happened to have two diferent hardware cards with the same IRQ, things  usualy did not work at all , or made fort a very unstable system, these days we dont need to fumble with any of that, since the motherboard and operating systems work on the PNP method "plug and play"


Tuesday, July 5, 2011

BACK UP YOUR DATA, Before your hard drive dies!

Ah computers, we have invested our dollars in them for gaming and or for work, and storing our information, those nifty pictures of your trip out of the country, the beautifull visages, mountain ranges and the memories with your loved ones, and all this can dissapear in a second!

You see, we often overlook the fragility of a hard drive, the magic that happens every time we boot up our system, how the drive heads float and glide across the disks surfaces on a small bead of air, how the magnetic fields are read, interpreted, in a well orchestrated fashion. time after time, without failure, a work of art, but things can always fail, and hard drives are not meant to work  perfectly forever!.

BRIEF HISTORY

Since the dawn of computing, computers where used to calculate data and get results, but  there was also the need to store information in a way that could be readable at a later time, the binary system has always been the way to go,  in the form of circuity inside the computer processors,  switches that have 2 states (binary), on and off, data is broken down in binary code, zeros and ones, and soon it was possible to store data, in the form of  "punch" cards, thick paper cards with holes in them to store a 1 (a hole) and a 0 (no hole), and soon in the form of magnetic media, a positive magnetic field for a 1 and negative field for a 0, magnetic tapes, magnetic disks, all you needed was head that reads and writes the magnetic field accordingly, and this method became the mainstream even to our days (flash memory media came to aid us, but more on that later)

Just as a magnetic head would send pulses of positive or negative energy along a  magnetic tape, the same method was applied, take the strip , lay it down and bend it to form a flat circle,  you got yourself a track!, now bunch up a lot of tracks together, and you have yourself the basic principle of  magnetic disk media, From the old 8" 1/2 , 5" 1/4 or  3" 1/2 floppy drives, up to metal hard disks,  a round plate surface full of tracks, in which you can store data with magnetic pulses.

WHERE IT FAILS