I must be the next-to-last person in the world to spend significant lengths of time experimenting with these, but for the benefit of the last person in the world, I'd like to talk about USB flash drives, also known as thumb drives (for a brand name), pen drives, or keychain drives, because they're small enough to fit on a keychain.
A hard drive upgrade is one of the best ways to extend the usable lifespan of a computer.
A lot of people come to this site looking for hard drive upgrade advice, but I realized that it's been a long time since I've written anything about that. Since there are some gotchas, I need to address them.
A question recently came up on how to identify the age of an electronic gadget. There's actually a secret code that allows one to do this and gain other insights into the history of such devices. This works for computers, of course, but also for most any other device that contains computer chips.
Backups have weighed heavily on my mind lately. When you have 125 servers to tend to at work, chances are one of them is going to fail eventually. Really what seems to happen is they fail in bunches.
One of my clients has a problem. He's out of capacity. And that's gotten me thinking about backups in general.
This is a response to the eWeek editorial Bring DIY Systems to Work. Nice theory. Unfortunately, lab theory and the real world don't always mesh.
I like building PCs. I built my first PC in early 1994, back when everything was on a separate card and you had to set interrupts and DMA channels using jumpers and DIP switches and in most cases you had to tell the BIOS exactly what size drive was in it--it wouldn't detect anything for you. I built my main PC at home myself. I built my secondary and tertiary PCs at home myself too. And my girlfriend's PC, and my mom's PC, and my sister's PC.
