Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

I answered a question on a newsgroup today that I thought might have general interest.

The poster asked about benefits to having multiple hard drives and multiple partitions. Again, my answer is for PC workstations, not servers.

Using multiple partitions is sometimes advantageous for organizing data. In the past there was efficiency (smaller data chunks used) in smaller partitions. Nobody worries about that anymore. Drives are huge and cheap and efficiency is a lost art in the computing world, unfortunately.

Recently, most seem to recommend just one big partition. For the most part, I agree. If the drive is sufficiently larger than I think is needed I will sometimes leave some unallocated space in case I want a 2nd OS or an Acronis Secure Zone at a later date.

Frustratingly, if a 2nd partition is available to the OS (and the Acronis Secure Zone is NOT), sometimes Microsoft will dump a big temporary file there or Outlook’s MSO cache without even asking. Which means of course that malware can also access it.

This is an important point because the poster is using a 2nd drive and/or partition to backup to. He wants to be able to fall back to a “known good configuration”.

This is why it’s nice that a USB drive that can be unplugged - even carried to another location for portable need or backup security.
A drive image backed up to 2nd drive or USB drive and restore CD might give you more security and flexibility than just another location on your PC. Drive images are compressed to save space, meaning you can have many image copies from various dates.

You’ve heard me bang the drum on Acronis True Image. Here are links to some other comments regarding backing up to a USB hard drive.

This morning I was at a Doctor’s office where the computer system was a complete afterthought. No central “data” room, not even a central location for the cabling to hub together. (Which was quite confusing to the phone guy there to install a couple more data runs.)

Since just the other day the Doctor had to pay me to come and find a power plug kicked loose by someone’s feet under the reception desk where the wireless routers, cable modem and Fortinet Firewall were all stuck in the same area as a no longer used data mux to another office, he was in a mood to pay me to straighten things up.

Everything no longer used was ripped out, what is being used was protected as much as possible and tidied up.

The payoff? Besides the hope of not having to pay me to find a kicked power cord soon, I also found a check for $662.89 that no one even knew was missing. That made his day on the one hand, how it was able to get lost without being notice was quite troubling on the other hand.

I love found money.

In the course of my work, I am often at a users workstation with either a problem to fix or software to install.

Naturally, I need the user to exit out of all programs since, anything can go wrong and the probability of that happening increases in direct proportion to how much they have to lose if it does (Murphy’s Law).

In order to cause the least amount of distress to the company, I try to do as much of this type of work as possible when the user is absent from their computer, such as during lunch. The problem, however, is that users leave their workstations for extended periods of time - not only logged in, but with numerous programs and documents open; some not only not saved, but not even named. If it’s just not saved, I can hope they didn’t want to rename it and just save it. If it’s not named, I get to guess and leave them a sticky note.

When I try to track down the user from the lunch room, they whine about having to follow me back to their workstation. Never mind that these are users who have lost work before (due to their own errors and inabilities) and whined about that.

Further, never mind that it is company policy to not only save your work and exit programs AND logoff if leaving for any extended length of time; this is for both safety (of your work) and security purposes.

For some of these people, I have even recommended rebooting their PC before going to lunch, that way if one or more of the poorly written programs they use all day has some memory leaks, the PC is less apt to crash in the afternoon. AND, it guarantees that all programs are closed and the user logged off.

To save and protect your work is pretty simple. Now, just get in the habit of doing it and you’ll be in great shape.

More information can be found at my website on my user behavior page.

Setting up the blog to share daily insights that you can find useful in working with your Windows PC.