Q. An observation rather than a question: I bought a new computer a few months ago and it has been great. However, earlier this week I went to load some software and it reported that it was out of disk space. The manufacturer partitioned the hard drive into 3 partitions. One is hidden and is presumably a restoration source, the second is the C: drive and has the operating system--15GB, and then the rest is the D: drive which is the remainder of an 80GB drive. I do digital photography and didn’t notice the D: drive as being a hard disk, I thought it was the memory card’s assignment. Had I noticed I would have installed programs (and their ‘data folders’) on the D: drive. A. Comments from others: Yes, manufacturers are doing it that way as it is easiest for them to create a master disk image of the operating system that doesn’t especially care what size the boot partition is. That way if they change hard drive sources they don’t have to make any major changes to their installation setup. Have you noticed that in the retail outlets that it is impossible to purchase a drive of less than about 80GB, and that 160GB drives are now quite common? With the frequent changes in drive size coming out of the drive manufacturers this is the only way the PC manufacturers can keep up. By the way, doing your disk layout as you mention also makes it easier to do backups--make a master backup of your C: drive (O/S and installed applications on C:) that you only need to do when you make major changes. Then put your data on the D: drive. Most programs let you specify where the their data is to reside via an options or preferences setting. Q. If you have to rebuild a drive or put in a new, larger hard drive, how to you get the machine to start if it doesn’t have a floppy drive? A. Newer machines often don’t come with floppy drives. You can often get a USB floppy drive, but in most cases you can’t boot from it because you need an O/S with USB support. However, newer Windows install-ation CDs are bootable, in which case you can set your machine to try to boot from CD first. If you have an operable machine with a CD burner, you can also make a “Pre-Installed Environment” your own emergency boot CD for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. A good web site for seeing how to do this is “Bart’s PE” - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ This is not for novices. It has plug-in capabilities to support various anti-virus, anti-adware, anti-spyware, etc. It requires that you have a Windows installation CD--from this it creates a bootable environment such that you can come up in full Windows and have access to your new (bare) hard drive or existing hard drive (with a possibly damaged Windows environment.) Q. What the heck is the high-level domain .NU ? A. It’s based in Sweden and is their answer to the lack of available domain names in the .COM high-level domain and the lack of interest in the high-level domains of .info and the like. Q. Last month we had a discussion about the differences in how the cable and DSL providers handle their connections, e.g. differences between Charter and ComCast. Could you provide additional information? A.
A lot depends upon the media. In one configuration, the provider
knows who is on the other end of the circuit because of a dedicated
link (such as with DSL)—in which case it will allow access
to anyone who connects to the customer end of the circuit. In
other configurations, there is no dedicated set of wires—for
example, with cable all subscribers on that branch of the circuit
share the common cable—so there has to be a way to authenticate
who is who. Note that while more common for cable providers,
some DSL providers including SBC/Yahoo! here in Connecticut also
require PPPoE. The most common way of doing this is via the use
of a communications protocol called PPPoE - Point-to-Point-Protocol
Over Ethernet. It is used to establish an initial connection
including authentication (i.e. logon name and password.). Once
the connection is established, then data that flows through that
connection is known to be originated by In all cases, it is a mechanism whereby the service provider (large box at left in the diagram) can keep track of who is on the other end of the pipe (3 subscribers represented by the three middle boxes.) What is ‘beyond’ those smaller boxes (smallest boxes on the right, which represent a PC or a PPPoE-enabled modem or a PPPoE-enabled router) doesn’t matter as by that time the circuit has been split out and delivered. So our 3rd subscriber in the diagram presumably has a router/firewall providing PPPoE and the broadband connection is distributed to the machines that constitute the local area network.
PPPoE isn’t the only way that providers can distinguish between subscribers. For example, each ethernet device (which includes a cable or DSL modem) has an absolutely unique electronic identifier within it called a MAC address. If the provider provides equipment to you they may have programmed the MAC address into their end, in which case when you connect they can determine the MAC address and match it up with their account. Q. My father-in-law just passed away at the age of 97, leaving an autobiography that he had written on a PC. He lost the only printed copy he had made. He used some sort of voice recognition/dictation software on his computer. I use a Mac and don’t have voice recognition software. Is there some way to get it off the PC and onto a Mac so we can read it or print it? I have the hard drive from the PC. A. There are several ways. First, your father-in-law’s voice recognition software isn’t the same as a tape recorder--it hears the voice and then converts what it hears into text—usually by stuffing keystrokes into a word processor. With training by the person doing dictation, they are often 99%+ accurate. Probably the easiest way to do it is to put the hard drive into another PC as a second (or third, or forth) hard drive and then copy the data from the drive to a CD which you can then load onto the Mac. (A member then stepped forward and volunteered to do the transfer.) Q. A question about WiFi—there’s a pretty good price difference between 802.11b and 802.11g. What is the difference in performance, reliability, etc.? A. The major difference is in the speed of the connection. 802.11b is nominally 11 megabits per second (mbs) while 802.11g is nominally 54 mbs. They both use the same frequencies, and 802.11g devices can be enabled to communicate with 802.11b devices at the lower speed. Pure 802.11g devices are interoperable between brands. Some vendors have extended the standards with “Turbo” capabilities, but these are not interoperable between brands. Without external antennas, directional antennas, etc., the range and ability to get through walls, etc. is about the same between the two standards. One other significant difference is that 802.11g supports WAP security while 802.11b only supports WEP. WAP is more secure than WEP. Q. Will older computers work with 802.11g? A. Some of the 802.11g cards list that they have to have a certain processor speed behind them to support the software driver. This is because doing the encryption/decryption is fairly computer intensive. You will need to check the system require-ments on the box (or the web) before purchasing. Q. If you have a business web page set up, how long should it take before it will show up in a Google search? A. The Google ‘spider’ that crawls through web pages and indexes them may take a while to find you. You can speed up the process by inviting a visit. However, even if it has visited your page it doesn’t do anything that will cause it to appear near the top of the list of a search request. Google doesn’t publicize how they do ranking, but it is pretty well known that a major component of page rank is how many other pages link into the page in question. However, each journey starts with but one step--you might start with this Google page: http://www.google.com/addurl.html Where you can invite the search engine to visit the page. You can also provide key words that you think are relative to your page. |
| Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, a consultancy in Ridgefield, CT specializing in database applications. A DACS director, Bruce also leads the Access SIG. Members may send tech queries to Bruce at askdacs@dacs.org. |
|
or
addressed to the particular subscriber. For a service that makes
use of PPPoE it is thus necessary to have the PPPoE protocol
active on the client’s end of the circuit. If you have a
single computer connected to the broadband connection (cable
or DSL) then the PPPoE protocol may be implemented in either
the PC or in some cases within the modem itself.