Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Many people have thought it was difficult to repartition or partition your hard drive.

This free software makes it a snap; easy, graphical interface.

Repartitioning a large hard drive can help you make more organized, efficient use of the space. Watch how easy it is to do.

Please heed the warning and make sure you have a good backup first.

If you need more advanced capabilities then take a look at Acronis Disk Director.

There is a very handy backup utility for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. You hopefully are backing up your entire PC and definitely data that is important to you; but how about all the bookmarks, saved passwords, etc that you have in Firefox? Or how about your Thunderbird email configuration? Bet you can’t recreate that without looking a few things up!

MozBackup is a free utility that makes backing up Mozilla profiles a cinch. Do it often, and definitely before making any major changes or upgrades.

You’ll thank me later.

I have written before about the value of a password storing program, or password safe. The concept of a password safe is that you memorize one password or passphrase, fairly complex and hard to guess (which is why a phrase is sometimes better) and use that to unlock a database of all of your passwords.

The free Password Safe has been a favorite of mine for a long time. However, the desire to have a password safe on my Windows Mobile enabled cell phone has had me looking for alternatives that support such a device.

I found one. Steganos Password Manager supports Windows Mobile devices. It’s fairly inexpensive and very secure.

But I did read about an online password manager that seems like a contender for some people. NeedMyPassword.com promises to be simple, safe, secure and always free (non business version). They even have a mobile interface.

There is no excuse for lost passwords or someone guessing your password because it’s too easy. I don’t see where NeedMyPassword.com has a password generator, but Password Safe and Steganos Password Manager do.

I have a number of clients who are making great strides toward being paperless. At least, that is, when it comes to storing documents. A great many more, I might add, are always talking about it.

The problem is absent when dealing with data that is created by your own employees or provided to you electronically. But what to do about the volume of paper dropped in your lap by customers, vendors or whomever?

The answer is to scan it in, obviously.

But to what format? PDF makes sense, but if you just create a document with a high school student doing the scanning you had better hope they name it with something meaningful and store it in the correct location. Why not make the PDF’s searchable? That way, you don’t have to use a 256 character filename to fully describe the document.

And wouldn’t it be nice to turn that PDF into a Word or Excel document on occasion?

Some of my clients fork over big bucks for OmniPage (Save 10% on OmniPage 16! Use coupon code 16OP10) but you don’t have to.

The same company that makes OmniPage 16 also makes a more affordable program called PDF Converter Pro ( Save 10% off PDF Converter Pro! Use code 5PDFP10)

PDF Converter Pro has a lot of the same functionality of it’s more expensive brother at a price that’s just plain affordable.

For business users, PDF Converter Pro delivers the features you need without the complication you tend to find in more expensive alternatives. And what do want most, ease of use, right?

With this software you can create PDF files from any application, convert PDF’s into fully formatted Word and Excel files and even edit PDF files. The program takes the scanned document and turns it into text so that you can use it without re-typing.

How many times haven’t I seen someone print out a PDF form, stick it in the typewriter to fill it out, then SCAN it BACK into their computer? No need for that with PDF Converter Pro.

This software is priced at just under $100 and you can save 10% with this link. (I’m always trying to save my clients and readers money!)

You don’t have to have the latest and greatest PC to run the software, either. The system requirements are ridiculously low.

If you work with PDF’s regularly, or would like to, check out this inexpensive, simple to use package in your work environment. The accuracy of the OCR (optical character recognition) is exceptional and it even has an Outlook plugin. You can convert an email into a searchable PDF document in one easy step.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Omnipage, but I also realize that its price tag is out of reach for a lot people.

Note: Once you convert that paper to electronic format, don’t forget to BACKUP!

With testking now offering complimentary training material for 640-802 and 70-290, more 70-291 and 70-270 students are showing interest in advanced studies.

Anymore, I almost always download video that I want to see. I got frustrated with too many videos starting and stopping, or maybe worse, stopping right before the end – with no way to restart at the point I left off!

So I did a little research some time ago and found out that most videos worth watching can be downloaded to my hard drive. I then make sure the video is complete (as near as I can tell) before wasting my time watching it.

It also avoids embarrassment. Ever gathered 4 or 5 people around your computer screen to watch something cool, then 5 or 10 minutes later the last holdout finally gives up on you and walks away as you’re trying for the umpteenth time to get the video to play?

Once, downloaded, you can then replay at your leisure as well – or save it for later. Heck you can even put it on a flash drive and send it with someone else or take it to another location yourself.

Downloading the video is pretty easy, there’s even a Firefox plugin that makes it a snap.

And the list of sites you can download video from is expanding all the time. YouTube, Google, Metacafe, Dailymotion, MySpace, Revver…and the list goes on and on.

For complete details and instructions, see Video Download on my website.

I wrote the other day about the Sony VAIO laptop with Vista Home Premium loaded, but no support for Windows XP.

As it turns out, I actually formatted the hard drive and installed XP before I discovered that Sony had no drivers. Sounds stupid, maybe, but it just never occurred to me that a company like Sony wouldn’t have XP drivers for a new laptop. By the way, this means you would NOT see this laptop used to any extent in Corporate America – one big clue to whether you want to own it or not.

It also turns out that Sony provides no recovery CD; just a recovery partition that I had also removed. From forum posts on the web, I found that one isn’t even available from Sony! (Is this a company you want to buy hardware from?)

Other forum posters who had done what I did now have an expensive doorstop. Pretty useless.

Me? Just so happens that before I did anything to the laptop I took an image of the entire drive, recovery partition and all, with Acronis True Image.

So, I plugged in the USB drive, inserted the Acronis boot CD, rebooted and restored. Good as new… as good as that is.

For more details on Acronis True Image, look here.

My new Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB hard drive came in and it was time to replace the temporary drive I had setup my new PC with.

Since I eat my own cooking, I chose Acronis True Image to do the job. I added the second hard drive, and with SATA drives, no jumpering is necessary. I booted the PC with the Acronis v8 build 937 CD, a bit old, but it’s what I had handy, using the F8 option on the Asus motherboard bios to choose my boot source as the DVD/RW drive.

Unfortunately, Acronis said it didn’t find and hard drives. I need a later build, or better yet, v9 of the Acronis True Image Workstation or the new v10 of Acronis True Image Home.

Plan B. Boot to XP; Acronis v8 937 was installed on the machine, and it did see the hard drives now. Requires a reboot or two, but the job was done in about the same time. Just tell it how much of the new drive I want partitioned for the configuration of the old drive, keep the old data, and voila!

Up and running on the new drive. Painless, and, even more important, I can save the old drive for a while as a backup. At least until I get a backup image of the new drive anyway (that’s why I told it to “keep data” during the cloning operation).

Learn more about Acronis True Image and you’ll want to start using it for cloning and backup too.

Today we were updating firmware on some Intel Servers and needed to boot via floppy to an MS-Dos prompt. (Ok, head hurts, think!)

That’s right. Both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have a check box in the format dialog for “make MS-Dos startup disk”.

But another option is to go to bootdisk.com. There you will find a wide variety of operating systems represented. Download the executable file, run it, and you will be prompted to put in a floppy disk. I prefer Windows 98SE (second edition); it offers CD-Rom support which can be convenient.

Thankfully, a boot floppy isn’t often needed. But when it is, it’s nice to know where to find one!