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I just got off the phone with one of my clients asking if I still had a copy of her files from her laptop. 2 months ago she bought a brand new dell laptop with all the bells and whistles. After having for a week she started having problems booting into windows vista. She brought it to me to check it out. What I found surprised me a little. The hard drive had bad sectors and when it would read from the drive it would click and tap something fierce. After spending two hours on the phone with them and reformatting the system twice they deemed the hard drive as bad. I received the new drive preformatted with windows vista already loaded. That was convenient, no more reloading software once I received it. Even with the drive clicking and taping I was still able to recover all of her information.

So I get this phone call this afternoon about her data. She went to college about a week ago, and today had trouble booting it up again. She called me and I asked about the clicking noise and she said there was none. It would boot all the way into windows and then puke with a blue screen. I told her we would have to boot into safe mode and try and repair it. She said she would call me back once she had it in safe mode. About an hour went by and that’s when she called back. Apparently she didn’t want to bother me so she called dell support. The first thing they asked her to do is take the repair option. That didn’t work. So the next step they asked her to do a full system recovery. She asked if they could back up her data, that’s when dell told her that it they couldn’t backup her information. It was lost, and there was nothing they could do about it. Honestly what gives dell the right to tell their customers that there data is lost. I’m really disappointed in what they have done.

About a month ago same scenario a new customer calls me and asks where to buy an external hard drive. Her computer wouldn’t boot so she called dell support. She inquired about backing up her data. The dell representative told her to go buy a USB hard drive to back everything up. He told her that they could do it remotely through the internet with no problem even told her what size hard drive to get. I inquired about where the machine was stopping on bootup. Apparently the machine would blue screen and reboot constantly. How in the hell were they going to back up their data? They weren’t. going to. I went to visit them the night she was to call dell back. I sat in on the phone call to protect the Gigs of personal pictures and home movies.

We call dell and get right through he has us find her restore cds. We inquired again about backing up the data. He said oh yes go ahead and plug in your external hard drive. So I plugged in the drive I brought along. He said please hold while I connect. He put us on hold for about 10 minutes and came on to say that everything was backed up on the USB hard drive. No activity light on the drive and the computer rebooted at least 3 times while he has us on hold. What is this bullshit, really bait the user into thinking you would backup their data and then lie to them. I called him right there on the spot. I asked to speak to his supervisor and was promptly disconnected. What a bunch of Shit. I want some answers along with this post I am emailing support today. I will post the responses I get to my inquiries.

As for Dell, I used to recommend them, but for now I think I won’t.

If anyone has been backed into this same position please comment below or use the contact form on this site.  I am willing to help anyone that they’re trying this with.

Okay so the last post dealt with clearing your interent history, if you havent read it go there now. So now you know where to clear your browsers history and temp files. But what about when you went to google and searched for something that you dont want seen. Like searching for a loved ones birthday ideas or that suprise vacation you want to take your family on. If you dont clear your auto complete form data someone can see what you searched for.

Here’s the kicker with autocomplete, if you enter your credit card into a computer with auto complete turned on you can actually pull it up again without needing your credit card. That may be a big shock but try it, go to a site you have ordered something from and see if you start typing your credit card number if the rest shows up. Did I get your attention now, this is why you need to clean up after yourself.

Now lets just say you were at an interent cafe, or a library with computers and internet access. You just ordered something from the web. If autocomplete was turned on guess what, your credit card could be used again. I actually ran into this a couple of months ago. I was browsing the web at my parents house when waiting for a spyware scan to complete. I found a really great book online and went to order it. My parents bank at the same credit union as we do so when it came to entering my credit card number i was shocked that as i typed the first 8 numbers where the same. I finished my purchase and asked my mom to see her debit card for her account. The first 8 numbers where the same. I called my uncle and asked him, he banks at the same location, guess what his were the same too. Now if you live in a small town like ours it would be pretty easy at the library to get multiple credit card numbers. …..Click here to read more

The Importance of Clearing Your Internet Cache and History

The other night I was at a computer job. The computer was infested with spyware and viruses. I went through the machine and cleaned it all up. Then the big question, “How can we keep my son from getting on porn sites.” I know everyone has done that one search that leads to a porn site but really kids at the age of 6 aren’t out looking for porn are they? My first order of business was finding out how the kid actually found the porn site his mom caught him on. It was pretty simple, clicking the down arrow in Internet Explorer yielded a wealth of porn sites. The kid really had quite a few to choose from. That’s when the husband and wife admitted to actually browsing porn.(Big Shock)

I find this is the case in at least 35% of the homes I travel too. People surf the porn sites on the same computer their kids do there homework or play games on. How can this be avoided? Pretty simple if you ask me, there is at least 1 full proof method. Don’t surf on that machine, but they’re others too. You can enable content filtering with a password, which again is pretty easy to do. Then if you want to surf to those sites all you have to do is disable content filtering. Another way would be to have supervised internet time with the kid. That’s a big shocker, spending time showing your kids, the internet is a wealth of information, can be very rewarding. I know, I know, some kids aren’t keen on you watching over there shoulder while they IM their friends and browse MySpace. This calls for another method.

There are numerous content filters or internet filters on the market, but your biggest defense is keeping your machine clear of tempting links. Back to that computer job, the husband and wife had no clue it was that simple for their son to find the sites they were visiting. A simple cleanup would have spared them the embarrassment. You really want to see some embarrassed people. A 28 year old tech finds the couples secret in less than 20 minutes. Update I also added Opera and Safari

Okay so how do we clean our history and temporary internet files?

1. In internet explorer go to the tools menu and click internet options
2. On the General Tab look for the Browsing history Section
3. Click Delete
4. Click Delete files on the next screen.
5. Click Delete History from the next screen.

For Mozilla Firefox

1. Goto the tools menu and click options
2. Click the privacy tab
3. Click clear now
4. Make sure Browsing history and cache is checked
5. Click Clear Private Data Now

(Side note – you can have mozilla auto clear this every time you exit firefox.)

1. On the privacy tab check: Always clear my private data when I close firefox.(That way when you exit quickly it all goes away :-).

For Opera

1. Form the File menu select preferences.
2. From Preferences click history and cache.
3. To clear typed in addresses and history click clear.
4. To clear Disk Cache click Empty now.

For Safari

1. From the Safari menu, click Empty Cache.
2. When asked are you sure click Empty.

That could save you a lot of embarrassment when your kids find what porn site you’re visiting. Can you really scold your kids for being their. Probably not because you left the door cracked and all they did was walk in. So next time your surfing the porn sites remember to cover your tracks or your kid could follow them to where you don’t want them to be.

I changed the theme for data-drop.com.  Im trying to figure out what looks the best.  Let me a comment and tell me what you think.  This theme might just stick for a while.

There is a great pluging called wptouch that allows your blog to be viewed very easily on a iphone or ipod touch. Its really simple to install and works great on the iphone here is a couple of screen shots that i took while using it. You can download it from here.

There is a new Iphone app out that I just read about on lifehacker.  Its called Simplify Media.  It wirelessly streams songs from your itunes library to your iphone or ipod touch.  Check out the article here and dont forget to let me know what you think of the app.

1.  Download app for Iphone
2.  Download app for computer
3.  Get playing.

Oh did i mention you can stream to up to 30 of your friends this is cool as shit.

Lifehacker Article