Discovered that my UPS's are about 30minutes good with their current load, and made some progress talking up the notion of an affordable generator of sufficient oomph to be free standing, and sufficient weight and nastiness to be relatively immobile without heavy equipment. Significant progress was made once reality-based pricing was brought into the picture (yes, you can buy a 35Kw for around 7k, it'll weigh a bit over a ton, and once bolted to the slab, won't go much of anyplace). We're mainly looking at diesel, since we're in earthquake country and gas lines have a nasty tendency to rupture under such circumstances...where a tank of diesel fuel just sits there and jiggles.
Norton Anti-Virus 2007 has proven problematic. A client, a local church, invited me up to replace their expired version...and what should have been a simple install ended up taking out their e-mail client (Mozilla Thunderbird) and cutting them off from e-mail for a few days. After much putzing around and cursing, discovered that nothing short of uninstalling Thunderbird and then doing a clean re-install from a freshly downloaded install file would really make things better. All data recovered, but after this little episode, chatted with a friend out at the Fortress of Darkness, and his comments on Norton led me to consider options.
McAfee doesn't seem much better, and I'd long since discounted all Norton/Symantec products beyond the Anti-Virus products as hopeless resource pigs. Spoke with a local shop, and Kapersky Anti-virus seems to be what they are using. Dropped it on a Win2k test box today (one of my issues with Norton is that it has ceased support of Win2k boxes unless you buy a package of business licenses for $250 or so), and it loaded right up.
Kapersky seems much more paranoid (good!) about things than Norton, and a Full Scan with Kapersky seems to take about half the time that Norton does (also good). With products available for Windows 95 through XP and Linux...hopefully MacOS soon. There's something just charming about software that spans all three major operating systems, giving you the same places to poke and prod with consistent results.
Beyond that, the documentation on Kaspersky is the most thorough I've seen, with more user-available options, than any anti-virus I've looked at in any detail in some time.
While I was up at the church, I had the opportunity to chat with the church secretary about back-up and the evils of restore partitions.
Once the nice techie stops twitching and contemplating blunt objects, they will settle down and explain reality to you. Back-ups should be performed at LEAST once a month in a RESIDENTIAL environment, and in a church or small business environment, weekly or daily are BOTH better choices.
Backing up to volatile media (3.5" Floppies, Flash Drives, etc) is a BAD idea...the idea is that you want something inert and reliable, not that will tank the first time you sit next to a mis-placed magnet or get static-zapped) is less than good.
Finally, the whole idea of back-up is to prepare for bad things to happen. Back-up disks are for much more than if your hard drive implodes - they also cover your bacon if your home/business/organization spontaneously combusts, you get raided by the FBI, evil bogeycritters pop in and make off with all your electronics, or the cat yaks into your power supply and the machine fries...setting fire to your computer area, and burning all the media.
This is a *hint*. Once you've backed up your data (your first novel, the last 10 years of taxes, your favorite naughty pictures, whatever...) carefully take them and place them someplace SECURE (after all, there's plenty of things you don't want posted in the town square) and OFFSITE (when bad things happen to site, being able to recover to a week-old state almost always beats "OMFG!", emotionally).
Sneakiest scheme I've heard thus far was a group of friends that discovered a member of their circle suffered a case of the galloping ne'er-get-overs and had about 3 months - the guy set up a BUNCH of safety deposit boxes, e-mail addresses, post office boxes, and magazine subscriptions before he passed. All of which are kept current by money order to this day, to the best of my knowledge....
Not all of us need that level of devious security, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward. Make your backups with grim regularity, keep them offsite, and keep them secure. If a good backup falls into the wrong hands, amazing and bad things can happen. Think identity theft, embarrassment, and job-hunting...
Recovery partitions.
Once upon a time, when you bought a new PC with various software (Windows, Office, Quicken, etc) you got a complete set of "install disks" - disks that you would normally use to install the bundled software that came with your new toy, if your friendly manufacturer hadn't already installed the software on the hard drive of your new toy.
Where those disks were a *really neat thing* was when, as happens from time to time, the hard drive crashed, you upgraded to a new hard drive, or the operating system (Windows, Linux, or MacOS?) got corrupted, you had a clear recovery path. Life was GOOD.
Just throw in a new HDD, pull out the disks and a good book, and start feeding the machine disks as you re-installed from scratch. Time consuming, but bone simple and since you'd been doing your back-ups of your DATA regularly, all that was lost was time...and it was a chance to catch up on your reading.
Then came the recovery partition. Some bright bean-counter figured out that those install disks cost money - and that they could save money by partitioning the hard drive (setting aside a "magic portion" to store all that data on) and only installing the absolutely necessary software on this special magic portion...
Umm...what happens when you try and install a bigger hard drive or the existing one melts down? You are, in technical terms, Simply Out of Luck!
Now...meandering onto the scene after the fateful purchase...sometimes you can call up the maker and whine and grovel with sufficient skill that they will send you install disks. More often, a great shriek of fiscal agony ensues as you trot down to the computer shop and buy (at full retail) copies of all the lovely software you've come to depend on (on a Winbox, this tends to run $600-1200)...
Or you scream twice, accept the learning curve, and flip to Linux...for under $100.00. But that's a tale for another day.
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