3 Tips to Fix Unreliable Wireless Connections

3 Tips to Fix Unreliable Wireless Connections

Generally speaking, wireless computer connections are reliable. However, nothing is perfect, and sometimes you may lose your connection or experience a weak signal. There are many factors that impact the reliability of your wireless connection.

For example, if your wireless adapter is too close to a 2.4 GHz wireless telephone, you may notice a decrease in your computer?s wireless single strength. Why? Because the phone and the computer reside on the same frequency and can interfere with each other?s performance.

Handy Repair Checklist for Wireless Interruptions

1. First check to see if your cable or DSL is actually working. Usually located in your basement, most modems have four lights. You have a live Internet connection if the ?data? or ?status? light is on. If it?s off, or flashing, your cable is out.

2. If your cable/DSL is working, then reboot your computer. Sometimes, if your cable/DSL goes out for even 10 seconds, your computer and the wireless router may no longer be able to talk to each other. By rebooting your computer, a new IP address is assigned, allowing them to once again communicate.

3. If your desktop is wireless and you?ve moved the wireless adapter [the box that sits next to the computer with antennas], then you may need to move the adapter until you find a stronger signal.

By : Sharron Senter
Keyword : wireless connections,wireless adapters,personal computers,technology

Backup Your Hard Drive Manually Or Automatically

Backup Your Hard Drive Manually Or Automatically

Are you regularly backing up the hard drive on your PC? It has been said that there are two kinds of people ... those who have had a hard disk crash and those who will. I'll tell you some easy ways to protect your data.

And I present my qualifications by saying that I have experience with data storage and backup. And you know the definition of experience right? Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted!

Let me begin by saying that I have used many different kinds of backup devices over the years. I have used cassette tapes, floppy disks, tape cartridges, disk cartridges, writable CDs, writable DVDs, and external drives. And I still recommend some form of this kind of backup today. For today's high-capacity disk drives, you can't go wrong by backing up, at the least, your critical data on some external media. Because even if you don't use your PC to store sensitive personal or financial data, there are still configuration settings for your PC you may not want to lose.

Now you can buy hardware and software that automatically starts backups and cycles backup media in and out of the backup device as necessary. But that tends to be pricy and best left to servers. I'll leave that topic for another time.

If your system has a drive that supports writable CDs or DVDs you can manually backup your hard drive on this type of media. Writable CDs and DVDs can hold from 650 megabytes (MB) up to 4 gigabtyes (GB) and more of data. Your CD or DVD writer probably came with software that lets you drag copies of data from the hard drive to the CD or DVD drive folder. Or it may even include some automatic backup software. One disadvantage of CDs and even DVDs is that hard drives today typically won't fit on one of these. With hard drives in the range of 10-200GB are common. And it's not unusual to see 250GB drives now. Another disadvantage is the write speed. Even with high-speed CD or DVD writers it can take a long while.

Another option is an external disk drive. Large sizes are available which makes it possible to backup your entire hard drive in many cases. And the hard disk drives are very fast. You can copy an entire drive quickly.

However many people find it difficult to make data backups on a regular schedule. I'm a people! I mean I'm a person and I just can't seem to make the time for backing up my data.

So I'll tell you what I do. I use mirrors! Not smoke and mirrors ... just mirrors. In my machine I have two hard disk drives ... not to double my storage capacity, but to provide a continuous backup of my hard drive. Every time my computer writes to the disk drive, it actually writes the same data to two different disk drives. They are a mirror image of one another. Most Windows computers since Windows NT have had this capability.

The first, and most painful part, is to get two hard drives in your system. I usually buy my computers that way, but I have added hard drives later. It's not exorbitantly expensive though. Hard drives, even large hard drives, are reasonably priced these days. It's usually best to have the two hard drives the same size (or you waste space in some form). And I like to have the drives from the same manufacturer (but maybe I'm just anal). I say painful, because you, or someone will have to open up your PC and put a second drive in if doesn't already have one. If you don't feel qualified to do this, check with your nearest PC store. Most will do it for you, for a fee, or for free if you buy the hard disk there. They may even perform the next step which is to set up the mirror.

After that, you go to the Control Panel, select Administrative Tools, then select Computer Management, then click on Disk Management. You right-click on the existing or "old" volume and select "Add Mirror", then right-click on the new disk that will host the mirror and select "Add Mirror". This will establish a mirror and initially copy the data from the "old" drive to the "new" mirror. Thereafter, the data is automatically written to both drives when changes or updates occur. You can also view the status of your mirrored volumes to make sure the mirrors are healthy and all your data is backed up. On Windows systems you may not see the options for mirrors until you have a new unused drive in your system on which you can create a mirror. There are detailed instructions for your version of Windows on Microsoft's site.

I recommend to all my friends to set up mirrored disks. I've had a couple of friends call to tell me they had a a hard disk crash. Instead of a catastophic loss of data, this turned into a minor inconvenience while we recovered the data from the other disk. They expressed undying gratitude and told me they would be eternally indebted ... because they couldn't pay me anything!

By : Mike Furlong
Keyword : hard drive, hard disk drive, backup, back-up, ATA hard drive,external hard drive, USB hard drive

An Introduction to HD-DVD

An Introduction to HD-DVD

High density digital versatile disc is a digital optical media format which is being developed. HD DVD is similar to the competing Blu-ray Disc. It is currently in a format war with the Blu ray disc proposed by the Blu ray disc association.

HD DVD has a single layer capacity of 15GB and a double layer capacity of 30GB. The surface layer is 0.6mm thick which is the same thickness of surface layer as standard DVDs.

HD DVD media is less expensive to manufacture than Blu ray discs which require re-tooling of DVD production lines. Another advantage over Blu ray is the common disc structure with DVDs which therefore allows for full backwards compatibility of HD DVD drives which will be able to play both DVDs and CDs. However it is now likely that Blu ray drives will be backwards compatible with DVDs.

HD DVD provides the large capacity storage needed for all sorts of recorded content, including high definition movies and music as well as computer data and files.

There are two kinds of of HD DVD discs for content, the 15GB single layer disc and the dual-layer disc with double capacity, a full 30GB. Using the latest compression technologies, the 30Bg disc can store up to 7 hours of images. Today' DVD has a capacity of 4.7GB and store only 2 hours of standard definition content.

HD DVD discs have a data transfer rate of 36.55Mbps which allows the 24Mbps data stream of digital television broadcasts to be seamlessly recorded.

Using HD DVD in the every day world will have numerous advantage over other optical media technologies. The resilient HD DVD disc has a protective layer which removes the need for a protective cartridge, allowing the development of slim computer drives. The added bulk of a disc cartridge would have also caused any laptops using a cartridge based optical media disc to increase substantially in size to allow for the extra room the drive would need.

By : Chuck Red
Keyword : HD-DVD,