Monday, September 17, 2007

Hard Drives, Pharoahs, and Mad TV . . .

I'm sitting here backing up my hard drive and watching reruns of Mad TV on Comedy Central. If you don't back up your hard drive regularly then you are in for trouble sooner or later. I learned this the hard way when one of my early computers died and took all my stuff with it much like the Pharaohs did when they died and were entombed.

I use Drive Image 7.0 which was made by Powerquest but is now owned and distributed by Symantec. It is an absolute joy to use, simple and fast, and you can back up your drives WHILE you are using your computer. How can you beat that?

And doing so while you are watching Mad TV is a great way to spend the morning. I love Mad TV . . . not as much as The Kids in the Hall, which was my habit before Comedy Central quit running it, but it is very close.

In fact, if you are taking suggestions from me, a total stranger, then I suggest you get the following programs and run them regularly:

- Norton Systemworks (with the Personal Firewall and VirusScan)
- Adaware (which finds and deletes spy and adware)
- Window Washer 5.0 ("washes" your computer of those weird liberal sites you visit)

Use these along with Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter and your computer should be in good shape . . .

UPDATE:

Took 31.01 minutes to back up a 80 gig hard drive. And it would have probably been faster if I wasn't backing it up to my 120 gig external USB drive. Told you it was good!

UPDATE:

It seems that Symantec doesn't make Drive Image 7.0 any longer. Evidently they bought out Powerquest and then stopped making the program. Now all they sell is their Norton Ghost back-up utility, which is a good, but not nearly as easy to use as Drive Image. I am a definite capitalist, but buying out the competition to kill off a better product sucks big time.