Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

U3 USB Flash Disk technology is warming up to users. U3 USB Flash devices are said to be like having a laptop without a computer.

U3 is like any ordinary USB flash drive except that additional software and some special hardware provide the following benefits:

• Device level password
• Secure, encrypted channel from the PC to the smart USB device
• Unique ID assigned to each U3 drive
• U3 is a standard, so all U3 drives can run all U3 software

With U3, you can load your favorite applications like Firefox (complete with bookmarks & passwords), email client (like Thunderbird) with your emails and contacts, and Skype with your own user configuration.

So with a U3 flash disk, you can borrow anyones Windows PC, pop in your U3 device, and a U3 LaunchPad will offer a menu of the installed applications. And it’s password protected. The password can be used to protect data on the drive too, even if you don’t need applications on the drive.

As more users become aware of the risks of carrying unsecured data around on USB flash devices, these devices will become more popular.

AS more users decide not to tote the laptop when they only need email and maybe some data, these devices will become more popular yet.

Can you do a lot of this without the extra expense of U3? Yes, you sure can. But U3 makes it easier and more convenient. And if an extra $20 or so saves you an hour or more of hassle, it’s worth it for most of us.

If you decide you don’t want the U3 launchpad software taking up space on the USB flash disk, here’s a removal utility. If you decide you want the launchpad installed again, here’s a utility to reinstall it.

U3 devices are available everywhere.

Shop Buy.com or Amazon.com for a great selection at some of the best prices.

I wish I weren’t such a nice guy. A gal that works for one of my clients asked where she could take her laptop to for cleaning.

There wasn’t anyone I really felt comfortable recommending and I figured “how bad can it be?”

“Bring it to me”, I foolishly said.

It’s an IBM Thinkpad, which is good, with a Celeron processor, that’s bad.

Even though it has a Windows XP Pro license sticker on the bottom, XP Home is installed - Strike two.

And this thing is so polluted you can barely move the mouse pointer. There was no working antivirus software, although I finally found some program shortcuts for Norton 2003. No sign of the software though.

Internet Explorer is absolutely useless, well, more than usual. Unless you like infinite exploding popup windows. So after cleaning out the registry and everything else that was easy to find, I loaded BOClean antitrojan, antimalware and Firefox. BOClean has found only 1 item so far (and killed it).

Firefox runs, go to Google and do a search, no problem. Try to navigate to http://housecall.trendmicro.com and the program closes.

Using a USB flash drive I copied adaware 2007 (free version) and ran it twice. Found quite a bit and cleaned it. Now it refuses to run.

Using a USB flash drive I copied SysClean from another PC where I downloaded it. It gave me fits too, but finally I was able to make it run.

Also from a USB flash drive I copied the free antivirus from Comodo. It found nothing, although much had already been cleaned.

Searching for RootKits I used F-Secure’s Free (expires Oct 1st) BlackLight. It found nothing.

The persistent file I find, loading from the registry is PRX.exe in C:\Windows\System32. Googling it brought up nothing of any use.

I keep threatening to blast the whole thing, format the drive and reinstall Windows XP Pro from scratch but:

• I’m stubborn and see this as a challenge
• The owner says there is nothing she wants on the machine, but I’ve heard that before
• I can save C:\Windows\inf off to USB before I blast it, but I still fear the potential hassle of finding all of the drivers I will need for a laptop this old

Folks, surf wisely. Check out my User Behavior page on my website. Use SiteAdvisor. Run a competent antivirus program and BOClean for malware. Don’t open suspicious emails.

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Update

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• McAfee’s rootkit tool found nothing
• Trend Micro PC-Cillin would not install.. reported corrupt installation file. Installs fine on other, known clean, PC’s
• Navigating to Avast.com or AVG in Firefox caused the browser to immediately close
• Even if left unattended, at some point IE windows would open at a furious rate trying to go to www.llehs.com

Final resolution: Wipe Drive and Reinstall Windows XP.

I had a Pentium 4 2.4 processor floating around that would only eBay for about $25. So I decided to see how little I could spend to turn it into a decent computer.

I found the Asus P4V8X-MX motherboard was feature packed and very inexpensive. 1 GB of memory from Crucial.com was less than $75. The SATA hard drive I had laying around had XP installed on it from an Asus P5B or P5L installation, not sure which, but surprised the heck out of me when it booted into windows with just a few drivers missing.

Since more and more of the problems I solve are regarding Windows Vista, I decided to see how Vista would fare on this board.

So I downloaded and ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor. After doing its thing, the advisor reported that it had encountered an error (thanks for all of that detail, Microsoft); and perhaps I should re-download the latest version (did it change in 15 minutes?) and try again.

Forget it. Install Vista anyway.

I booted with the Windows Vista Ultimate DVD (Dell OEM copy) and chose to install to a new partition. Wisely, I had only allocated about half of the 120GB disk to the Windows XP Pro installation.

With Vista, there really aren’t too many questions to answer during the install so I came back later to see how it was doing. I had to press the power button since it had gone to sleep waiting for me (fitting, as I have fallen asleep so many times waiting for Windows) but essentially it was all done.

The Asus P4V8X-MX board did not come with Vista drivers and I didn’t download any. Yet everything worked; no yellow exclamations in device manager; NIC, sound, and an old Asus GeForce MX 400 AGP video card all worked perfectly. The P4V8X-MX has video on the board making it a great value, but I figured AGP video with its own RAM would perform better - and the card was just gathering dust anyway.

So I guess my advice when Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor reports an error is to just go ahead anyway.

With one BIG caveat!:

I had backed up the PC first, even though I didn’t care about the XP install, with Acronis True Image software to a USB hard drive.

When I was done I now had a dual boot, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Ultimate, computer. Runs great on both.

Absolutely; sort of. If you own a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive.

What you get is a basic version of Acronis True Image Home with just the basic features.

But you CAN do a full image backup and restore. Not only that, it surprised the heck out of me to find out that you can mount an image as a drive letter, explore with Windows Explorer, and copy files from that image if you want to.

Acronis True Image Software and a USB hard drive is an awesome combination.

Here are the details and the links:

For Seagate Hard drives click here.

For Maxtor Hard drives click here.

When you decide you love the program so much you want the full version, please come back here to buy through a link on my website. Thanks.

I was at my Chiro today and he asked me about backing up data on his business computer. It’s not like I haven’t tried to talk him into Acronis True Image and a USB hard drive before; it’s just that he is, well, rather frugal. Ok, cheap.

The reason he brought up computer backup today, though, was because of friend of his is currently trying to recover from a computer disaster without benefit of a good backup of his data, programs, or anything else of value.

PLEASE, don’t wait for disaster to strike you before thinking seriously about computer backup. Grab a USB flash drive of some type then drag and drop some files to it - then take it home; or take it to the office if it’s your home data. Encrypt it first for security.

Just please take action now, while your data is still accessible. It’s a lot more fun to recover data from a quality backup than from a toasted hard drive.

You can find more info on computer backup here.

Data backup on my mind again.

Here I am at a yard sale, typing on my laptop, connected to a wireless router (wirelessly) which is connected to the internet with Motorola Canopy wireless gear and an antenna on the roof of my truck. (I’m a director at the local telco and I’m trying to promote our wireless internet service.)

Things are a touch slow right now, so I thought I’d comment on the movie “Duplex” we watched last night.

Ben Stiller is working on his laptop trying to complete his book with the deadline looming. Naturally, something happens to the laptop just after he finishes the novel. He’s been working on this project for months and has not even one backup.

Wait, you’re saying, it’s just a movie. People in real life don’t do stuff that stupid. Well, you’d be wrong my friend. I’ve mentioned before the bright, ambitious college student whose hard drive crashed with her semester thesis on it - nary a backup to be found.

Thumb drives are just too cheap, too convenient, not to have multiple copies of important data.

For better data backup, check out Acronis True Image. Does a great job of picking up just important stuff if that’s all you want; does an even better job at imaging the entire drive to an external hard drive - also incredibly cheap.

You wouldn’t think secure USB memory sticks would remind me of a song, but then you wouldn’t think that if you knew me either. EVERYTHING reminds me of a song. (If only I could remember more important things..)

If I were writing to Elvis fans, I might have used the expression “Don’t Be Fooled”. But since I’m not sure of the age of my audience, some of you may not even know who “the king” was. In addition, the internet seems to love the word scam - so that’s what I used.

Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram had an interesting note about a secure USB memory drive called Secustick. Secustick promised not only unbeatable security for your data, but also that too many incorrect password attempts would automatically wipe out the data. In fact, the company claimed a lot of things, including adoption by the French Intelligence Service.

Unfortunately, Bruce points out that all claims were bogus. Tweakers.net not only broke its security, but found that the data was NOT encrypted at all, nor was there any “erase feature”. Troubling to say the least.

So what does that mean? It means that more than ever you have to learn what vendors you can trust and to what extent. It means sometimes paying for a product instead of going for what is either cheap or free.

And while you certainly can encrypt data yourself on any USB flash drive, memory stick, call it what you will tiny memory device; some people prefer convenience and avoid hassle and learning curves at all costs.

If you choose to encrypt it yourself, Bruce uses PGPDisk. Steve Gibson of GRC, a HIGHLY respected tech guy, has promoted the free TrueCrypt software. What I would like to know is if either is impervious to government cracking (in reasonable periods of time - NO encryption will stand if given enough time [over which time computing power increases and makes the cracking easier]).

If you are one who enjoys convenience and will pay a few dollars for it, Kingston - a well respected memory company - offers their DataTraveler Secure series in various sizes. Kingston uses the venerable AES 256 encryption.

Kingston 1GB DataTraveler Secure with 256bit AES Hardware-Based Encryption USB2.0 Flash Drive - 1 GB - USB - Portable

I just uploaded a video to YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj7iMAgji0I]

In it I am cloning a hard drive using Acronis True Image Workstation. The hard drive is from a USB hard drive enclosure; which is why I like building my own - I can upgrade when I need to for a minimum amount of cash.

USB Flash Drives are handy to have around; but are they all created equal? I’m not talking about just quality or ruggedness here, but more particularly speed and other features.

Here are two different USB Flash Drives in my drawer:

This Kingston DataTraveler Elite is quite pricey, primarily because it comes with software to make this a high privacy, secure data transport device. Now, I personally wouldn’t pay a bunch for this feature because there are other programs, some free, to help you do this as well.

But if you click on the picture and look at the product specs, you will see that this unit is capable of data transfer rates of 24MBps (Mega Bytes per second) reading and 14MBps writing.

Contrast that with this less expensive Kingston DataTraveler. In the description you will see that this unit is also USB 2.0, but rated at only 3MBps while writing data.

Now, speed isn’t always everything. I would suspect, in part because the warranty is 5 years on both, that each unit is as reliable as the other for keeping your data. But if read/write speed might be an issue for you, note the specs and buy accordingly.

Don’t pay for features you don’t need or won’t use. But if you will use them, it’s nice to know what to look for and how much you are paying for that feature.

If inexpensive (as opposed to “cheap”) is your criteria, then look at the standard DataTraveler. When it was recently featured as a weekly special from Buy.com, you could get 2 of them for about $5 after rebate.

As one who is critical of our high cost government schools, I get tired of hearing how those sharp kids are learning so much technology in their school.

Oh yes, they can rip (or rip off) music to their mp3 player, upload and download at youtube and waste most of their day (and their parents money) text messaging each other.

You’re hoping I have a point; well, I do. Yesterday I got another one of those emails.

“Kid lost important school project, can you help?” To make matters worse, this was a group of kids. How did they lose it? Hard drive crash with no backup.

And some people wonder why I’m always harping on computer backup. I would really truly feel sorry for these kids if backing up on a USB flash drive were not so cheap and easy.

I was just telling another client yesterday about all of the USB flash drives I have in my drawer that I got for free (after rebate) from Buy.com. All you have to do is plug it into your PC then drag and drop some important files over to it. Want to make really sure? Then change USB flash drives and do it again. Two backups in under two minutes; probably under one minute.

Never mind a complete image backup with Acronis True Image to a USB hard drive.

Will I help these people? Sure, I always do if I can. But I won’t do what I used to do. Years ago I would have some teary eyed student standing in front of me whose world was on the brink of collapse and tell them I would help. I would then take the project home, spend most of the evening (or weekend) saving their bacon and charge not more than $50, if anything at all.

Some of you are smart enough to see how stupid that is, but I have always been a sucker for a young person in need who I know I can help. And I don’t want to charge them in such a way as to be taking advantage of them. But enough of my family suffering in their place.

The internet has too much free information (like here on my blog and over at my website www.FreeComputerConsultant.com), too many cheap USB flash drives and my life is just too short to continue doing that kind of stuff.

And since the Federal, State and Local governments are doing such a great job of siphoning money from my wallet to build an education system that they are so proud of; maybe these kids should take the failed hard drive to school and turn it in. Perhaps salvaging the data should be a learning experience for the whole class? Perhaps losing the data could be a learning experience for the whole class. (Actually, this sounds like a good idea.)

Might as well add that despite all of the hoopla about these students being great with computers, my clients are not impressed either. The graduates they hire might be able to type well enough, but many can’t figure out how to turn the PC on. Or how to backup their work.

Enough rant, I’ve got to go earn some money to pay my upcoming property taxes, of which 56% go to my local government school system; while the road in front of my house deteriorates to a horse trail.

Suffice it to say that I will continue to post new and exciting ways to backup your data.