Part 2 of our continuing series from the TechCast Weekly on Buying the Perfect Computer is all about RAM.  Some people have a hard time understanding what RAM really is, often confusing it as the amount of storage space available on your computer.  The storage space available on your computer is your hard drive, which we’ll discuss later.  RAM is fast memory used by your computer to execute tasks. When your computer runs out of RAM, it starts swapping data to the much slower hard drive, which slows down your entire system.

Here’s how it works:  Your CPU, the processor, needs information to perform an action, let’s say we’re opening up Microsoft Word.  It tells the RAM what it needs to open the program.  The RAM tells the hard drive what information it needs and receives it.  If you have enough RAM in your system, all of that information can then be stored in RAM, which can send information to the CPU much faster than your hard drive can.

The more programs you have open on your computer, the more RAM you use.  And some programs require a great deal of RAM to perform well, like Adobe Photoshop.

Increasing your RAM is the cheapest and easiest way to speed up your computer’s preformance.  But you have to know what type to buy and how much. 

The type of RAM you need is totally dependent on the motherboard in your computer.  Generally you can find out what type RAM your system takes and how much you have in it by either checking the manual that came with your computer (not included with most nowadays) or by checking inside the System Information panel in Windows XP.

But, there’s a faster, more simple way to check. The Crucial Memory Advisor Tool takes the guesswork out of upgrading. Crucial’s free tool will scan your system and tell you everything you need to know.  Then will give you recommendations on the right RAM for your system upgrade.  I highly recommend their products and use them exclusively in my systems. Great performance and reliability.  Don’t buy cheap RAM on get it on eBay.  You never know what you’re going to get when you purchase budget RAM.  Stick with the good stuff.

With RAM being so cheap these days I’d recommend you get at least 512MB. If you’re going to run Windows XP, don’t get less than 512MB or you’ll slow even the fastest CPU powered computer to a crawl.  For XP to perform at it’s best, shoot for 2GB of RAM.  I know that sounds like a lot and if you only do minor tasks like surfing the web and Word documents, 1GB will be more than sufficient.

If you’re one of the brave souls that has already picked up Windows Vista, 2GB is really your starting point.  That 512MB or 1GB that came in your system when you bought it is just not enough.  And you’ll also need to think about purchasing a 3D graphics card for your system, but we’ll talk more about that in another installment.

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Don’t forget to pick up your FREE digital report on preparing for a computer crash! It happens to everyone and you can’t prevent it. But you can be prepared!

In Episode #29 of the TechCast Weekly, I cover how to be prepared for a computer crash and 4 options that you can use to protect your valuable data. Topics covered on this week’s show include:

• What’s the difference between software data and user data?
• Using a second internal hard drive
• Backing up to CD or DVD
• Using an external hard drive
• Online data storage options

Also covered are some excellent software choices that you can use to help implement your backup strategy. I recommend either Norton Ghost from Symantec or Acronis True Image 10. Both are easy to setup and can perform backups automatically based around options that you setup. Both pieces of software offer an outstanding solution for anyone interested in protecting their valuable data, something everyone should be interested in.

Also, you can store your data offsite with Mozy Remote Backup, saving all your files online with easy access anytime you like. Sign up here and get unlimited online storage for only $4.95 a month.

Music this week from Erin Bode

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This is part 5 of a 5 part series on how to prevent your hard drive from crashing.  I also did a computer knowledge podcast on the subject of how to prevent your hard drive from crashing.

I’m wrapping up the week with some final options and thought on storing your valuable personal data on your computer.  The key to all of these options is to pick something and just be prepared.  You never know when something terrible can happen.

Option 3: Attach an external USB Hard Drive to the system.
With the price of hard drives getting much cheaper, this is another really good option. By attaching an external USB hard drive to the system, special backup programs can be installed and scheduled to run over night. There are many cost effective backup programs available. Do an Internet search on these. Backup programs can be configured to save user data to the external hard drive. This option can also be used in place of options 1 and 2. But some of the benefits achieved by these other options are lost or minimized if this is the only option you choose. However, it is another good option because the back up process is fully automated and the user data is still physically separated from the main hard drive.

Option 4:  Online storage.
It’s all well and good to have something burned onto a CD or DVD or stored on a USB drive, but what happens if your house burns down?  Aren’t those forms of backup just as likely to be destroyed as your computer hard drive is?  Yeppers, they are.  Fortunately, you can store data remotely using one of several services available online.  Most are very inexpensive or free and offer enough storage to hold your most valuable data.  By far the best of these services is Mozy Remote Backup.  With Mozy, you can get unlimited online backup for only $4.95 a month and begin saving those files in a secure, safe environment, ready to access anytime you need them.

Hopefully this series has raised the importance of user data. The options presented here are the very same options used by many highly experience data processing centers and can be easily adopted by the average computer user. The most important point to remember is that good planning for potential disasters is the best protection against loss of valuable user data. You may not think of it this way at first but the user data that you accumulate on your computer takes time to build up and acquire. If you value your time then you’ll value your data. Your data has a lot of value. So why not take a few simple steps to protect it.

This is the fourth in a series of posts for the PC Buying Guide 2007

With the release of Windows Vista, all of us are going to have to take a hard look at the hardware in our PCs.  Vista offers lots of new functionality, but that requires beefier hardware.  And not just that video card and processor that I’ve been talking about.

Vista is going to tax your system’s RAM like no other version of Windows ever has.  In order to have Vista running on your system properly, you’re going to have to have at least 1GB of RAM installed.  Maybe even 2GB (That’s gigabytes, or billions of bytes for those that don’t know).

As far as your hard drive is concerned (that’s the actual storage space that your computer has), the size you need is still really up to you.  Most computers are going to come with at least 120GB drive installed at this point. But, there are systems with upwards of 300-400 GB installed, sometimes in what is referred to as a RAID configuration.  Most new drives are also SATA (Serial ATA) as opposed to the older PATA (Parallel ATA).  Now, I know some of you may be confused about all these acronyms, so let’s take a look at them.

• RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Discs - Here’s how RAID works: You have at least 2 hard drives installed. Information is written to all of your drives at the same time.  Depending on the RAID setup, you can either mirror the information on the drives (same info on each one), or you can stripe the data (split the data between the drives).  Option 2 will give you faster access to information, since each drive is looking for different data elements.  This can come in handy if you do intensive tasks like video or audio editing.  The mirrored option comes in handy on, say a server for a website.  You can have multiple drives with the same information.  That way, if one fails, you just pull it out and put in a new drive, no loss of information.
• SATA - Serial ATA - ATA is the standard used by drives to interface with the motherboard on your computer.  Serial ATA is a newer standard, offering faster transfer rates and a cleaner cable interface.  If you ever build your own computer, you’ll be much happier with the assembly process if you can use a SATA hard drive rather than the older PATA.
• PATA - Parallel ATA - The older, slower standard for drive interfaces.  Still used by most CD and DVD drives.  These guys use the big ribbon cable that look so ugly.  Blah.

Make sure you look for a system with at least 1GB of RAM.  I can’t stress how important that will be.  Your entire experience with Vista will depend upon your choices for your systems hardware.  Hard drive space is cheap, so get as much as you can.  With Vista’s new photo editing and video editing features, you may need it in the long run.

Technorati Tags: computers, Vista, buying a PC, buying guide

Just because you don’t have any programs open on your PC doesn’t mean that nothing is going on. There’s a myriad of processes that are just cooking along in the background at all times. Most of these processes are necessary for the normal operation of your computer. You can see which of these processes are running at any time and find out what they are up to.

For instance, you should see something in your process list entitled explorer.exe. And no, that’s not Internet Explorer. It’s everything you see in front of your face. That explorer is the graphical interface you use to interact with Windows. That process is obviously pretty necessary, don’t ya think? I do.

But what about processes that may not be so important? A favorite of mine is iPodService.exe. This little beauty arrives when you download iTunes from Apple. Whether you have an iPod or not. And it runs in the background of your computer. All the time. This and many other processes are not really necessary for the operation of your computer.

Here’s how you can keep those pesky things from running.

• Use a tool like ProcessScanner to indentify processes that you don’t need. Don’t just go willy nilly turning things off. You might screw something up pretty bad.
• Click “Start”, then “Run”. You’ll type in the little box that comes up the following “msconfig”. And you’ll then be greeted by a wonderful little tool. The System Configuration Utility.

Once you’re in this little window, click on the “Startup” tab. All those pesky processes startup right along with your system. By simply unchecking the box next to that item, you’ll prevent that process from opening the next time your system starts up.

Of course you may want to stop a process right then and there and not wait for things to restart. There’s an easy way to do that, too. Hit the CTRL-ALT-DEL key combination to open the Windows Task Manager. Click on the “Processes” tab. You’ll see the entire list of processes currently running. Find the one you want to cease and desist and then highlight it. Then click “End Process”. Done. Process stops.

At least until the next time you boot up.

Windows Defender and Spybot Search and Destroy also have tools to control the running processes, so you may want to check those out as well. Both are free, by the way.

Let me start this post by saying that I don’t use PCs to do most of my computing. I’m on a Mac for the majority of the time. I still have a PC (And contrary to what you may think, it’s not a Dell! It’s an HP, thank you very much), but I use it pretty sparingly. I haven’t taken the plunge yet and installed Parallels, software that allows Windows to run on an Intel-based Mac. Although I hear that the newest beta release has a very cool feature called coherence mode, which does something very cool. But if you want to find out about that story, you’ll have to read this and see what life could be like running Windows on a Mac.

And I feel bad sometimes when people ask me what type of computer they should buy. My first response is always a Mac. But that’s just because I’m a sad little Apple fanboy who will line up and wait for days just to get a chance to buy the newest cool gadget that is released from Apple. It could also be the fact that life is inherently safer and more fun on the Mac platform, at least at this point in time. There has not been a virus “in the wild” that Mac users have had to worry about for years, spyware and adware don’t target Macs, and the system software just works really well with the hardware.

Don’t get me wrong, I get frustrated with my Macs at times. Although I do consider them better computers than most PCs, there are issues sometimes, but nothing as terrible as the woes of Windows users.

And before I go any further, let me say that I’m not trying to convince everyone to buy a Mac. You might not, and that’s ok. Macs aren’t for everyone, contrary to what some Mac addicts may say. For one, there is the price hurdle. Macs are more expensive than the PCs that the average person buys. People are out shopping for laptops and desktops that are under $500, and in the PC world you’ve got tons of options. For Macs, you don’t have any. The closest is the Mac mini at $599. And you don’t get a monitor, keyboard, or mouse with that little beauty. Just a computer. Granted, the mini can do more than any PC priced at $599, put the average computer buyer isn’t thinking about that. They want a bargain, they want a computer, and they don’t want to spend an arm and a leg to do so.

So price is going to knock Macs out for some of you. Another hurdle to cross is this: software. You use programs written for Windows at work, home, and for playtime. Whether it’s Office or Bejeweled or Chuzzle, your favorite programs are made for Windows. Many of them do offer versions for Mac, which can be kind of nice. But let’s take that one step further. With the help of programs like Parallels or Boot Camp from Apple, you now have the ability to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac. If you’re not sure what an Intel-based Mac is, it’s simply a computer made by Apple which uses an Intel processor. Apple previously used the PowerPC chips from IBM for their computers.

Even though you can run Windows on your Mac, price still becomes involved. Unless you buy your Mac from an Apple reseller and pay them to pre-install Windows for you, you’re going to have to cough up at least $200 for a full version of Windows to install on your Mac. Lots of people forget how much Windows costs since they are used to just buying it pre-installed on their systems. Windows can be expensive and you have to have a full installation disc to use either Boot Camp of Parallels. More money.

I can list the reasons why you won’t want to get a Mac all day long. And I can also list the reasons why you would want to get a Mac all day long the next day. You have to make up your own mind about the type of computer you buy.

My point that I have been trying to get to in this post since I started (and what a merry little journey we’ve been on since I started typing) is this: People want advice on the brand of computer that they should buy. Before picking a brand, do this. Pick either Mac or PC first. If you choose Mac, the rest is easy. Only one company makes them, so your choices are fairly slim. If you choose PC, then you still have a lot of work to do. But I’m going to make it a little easier for you.

If you choose PC, don’t make your selection simply by brand. Most of the hardware inside the PCs are the same or very similar. There are only two companies making chips for mass market these days, Intel and AMD. Video cards are predominantly ATI or nVidia. This pattern flows down the lines of most every major computer component. Very few manufacturers, lots of different brand name PCs.

What you need to do is determine what you want to be able to do with your computer. If you only need internet access and would like to send the occasional email, you won’t need a very expensive system. Definitely under $1000 and probably considerably less than that. Don’t use brand names as a guide. And don’t listen to your next door neighbor who has this “piece of junk that he bought from a store and now I won’t buy anything but a Dell!” All PC manufacturers have issues sometimes. Bad components, faulty wiring, somebody who wasn’t feeling well when they put your hard drive inside the tower. A million things can happen and they will.

Brands are not nearly as important as having the computer that you need to meet your requirements. It’s your money, get the system that works best for your needs. For me, that’s a Mac. Actually, two of them.

What computer will meet your needs? Only you can decide that. But if you need some help, don’t hesitate to ask.

I get so sick and tired of seeing people’s computers and they still have the default wallpaper from the factory on their desktops. Don’t you want to be an individual? You spent an awful lot of money on that computer of yours (unless you bought one of those $300 laptops), you should take some time and make that puppy look and act like you want it to. Don’t let the minions that slave away in some far-off land of Assemblyville decide what font size and windowing effects you need to look at on your computer monitor.

With Windows (heck, with any operating system, Windows is nothing special in this regard) you can change pretty much anything you want to about the appearance of that thing we call the desktop. You know, that’s the stuff you stare at for like 35 hours a day while you’re trying to gain some more computer knowledge by reading stuff on this site. I’m hoping that most of you already know how to change the wallpaper or background on your desktop. If you’re not quite sure what the wallpaper is, do something for me. Take a look at your monitor. Minimize all your open windows. If you’re looking at what looks to be and ad for the type of computer you bought (HP and Compaq are experts with this one), that’s the wallpaper, and it just happens to be the one the aforementioned slaves in Assemblyville decided that you needed to look at every day.
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People ask me this all the time, “Mike, my computer is acting funny, running slowly, (insert various other computer ailments) and I’m worried that I might have picked up a (insert your favorite cause of the aforementioned computer ailments). What should I do now?”

Here’s the problem. Most of the time it’s too late to do anything really effective once your computer has been infected with a virus, trojan horse, worm, or some other type of malicious software. It’s the preventive maintenance that you have to do on your PC to keep things running smoothly and virus-free.

Here’s 3 things that you can do right now to improve your internet security situation. (And the best part is, all of them are free!)

• #1. Stop using Internet Explorer to do your web surfing. Even with the upcoming release of IE7, I still feel much safer surfing the web in either Firefox or Opera. Inherently safer, inherently faster, inherently easier to tailor to your needs, just better all the way around. And until you’ve surfed the web tabbed-browsing style, you haven’t surfed at all.
• #2. Make sure your Automatic Updates in Windows are turned ON Microsoft tries really hard to keep their software updated and work to fix any security risks as quickly as possible. However, if you don’t check for updates or have your automatic updates turned on, they can do you no good.
• #3. Make sure your antivirus program is up to date. Most of the antivirus publishers update their virus definitions weekly. If you’re not keeping things updated, you might as well not have an antivirus program.

This is by no means all that you need to do to enhance your internet security, but it’s a start. I know for a fact it’s more than what most of the people I talk to are doing right now. I don’t mean to rant, but this is a sticking point with me. Lots of people don’t know how to keep their computers virus and spyware free, so I’ve deemed it my personal mission to tell as many people as I can how they can do it.

Try these for yourself. Just switching web browsers will make a ton of difference. I’ve had first-hand experience. Try it today.