Technically Speaking...

By Michael L. Craner

Welcome back to Technically Speaking!

Last month I told you about WindowsXP, and promised to show you how to make your Windows 9x or Windows ME fast and reliable, in lieu of upgrading, although the content this month can also be applied to Windows 2000 and/or XP.

This month I’m going to tell you a Ghost story, but don’t be afraid. This Ghost is Norton the Friendly Ghost. Specifically named, “Norton’s Ghost 2001”. This friendly Ghost will help you to forever banish the other monsters. I’m talking about the horrors of a PC that is so cluttered, one can scarcely get Windows to even boot, and about a machine that you have to reboot constantly as it is always locking up, displaying the “Blue Screen of Death”, or even just filled up with so much stuff you don’t have room for anything else. Most people have been using their PC long enough now to run into these problems. If not, maybe you’re just in denial. Ask yourself this, “Does my PC run as fast and reliable as when I first took it out of the box?” and “Do I get upset every time I have to kill the power to restart because of a lock-up?”.

There are a great many things you can, and should be doing to keep the health up on your Windows PC. I may spend a couple months going over these, because there is too much to detail this month, although I will mention them, so that you know where Norton’s Ghost falls into the schedule. Most people know the basics anyway, if not already doing them.

1. Scandisk – The scandisk utility is probably the single most important and most often tool used. Scandisk checks your directories for certain errors, and corrects them.

2. Disk Defragmenter – The way the PC writes to the hard disk is much like I took notes in school (when I did), which is it write a little here, a little there, where ever is convenient at the time for the hard disk. Programs are broken up, or “fragmented” all over your drive. Frequent defragging puts the data all together so the drive doesn’t have to go all over the place to load your applications, and generally makes things run faster. In some cases I have seen a speed boost so great people thought I upgraded their PC! (Note, these results were after defragging a system that has been extremely neglected.)

3. Basic Housekeeping – If you don’t use it often, or at all anymore, UNINSTALL IT! Especially if you have the original software that you loaded on CD. Be sure to uninstall by using the “Add/Remove Programs” utility located in your Control Panel, or the uninstall utility that came with the application, or a third party uninstaller.

4. Backups – This is where our friendly Ghost comes in.

In the olden days, people used to back up to a tape backup system. These were/are expensive, slow, and unreliable. Tape goes bad, gets magnetized, and takes forever to backup to and restore from, etc.

There are now several utilities on the market for backing up data, however I found Norton’s Ghost 2001 to be HIGHLY recommend by a great deal of readers of a tech column that I subscribe to. If you haven’t guessed yet, Ghost is made by the same folks who brought you “Norton’s Anti-Virus” and other great PC maintenance utilities, and in case you didn’t know, “Norton’s” is now under the “Symantec” name.

What makes Ghost better than the rest? I really don’t know, as it is the first I have tried, because it is the first that I found to be so popular, and so powerful that supported all the options I wanted. Here is a run-down on the features, at least the ones I considered to be most important:

1. Ghost is now compatible with most CD-R & CD-RW drives.

2. Ghost will back up and restore your partitions or drives to CD, even if it takes more than one. (This is called Spanning).

3. Ghost runs under DOS (Disk Operating System). Some may consider DOS to be primitive and weak, but they couldn’t be further from the truth.

4. Ghost will also backup and restore to/from tape (ugh), over networks (Home Networking, anyone?)

5. Ghost will work over USB and parallel connections as well as to ZIP drives.

6. Ghost will compress the data as it backs it up, making it possible to store much more on a smaller media. For example, I backed up one Gigabyte onto a 700 Megabyte CD-RW.

My personal choice is CD-RW. They’re fast, they don’t get magnetized, and they’re cheap. Plus, I can set my machine to boot from the CD drive when I want to restore, and it will boot up into Ghost and restore from my disc without having to use a floppy. It took me just 12 minutes to restore 1 GB from CD, using a 48x speed CD-ROM, and only 30 minutes to create the backup image on a 2x speed burner.

Ghost has another neat feature as well. You can browse an image file and restore some parts, without restoring the entire image. This is great for folks with lots of data, such as email, pictures, spreadsheets, etc.

Ghost will tell you that it is for the experienced PC user, the documentation is a little technical, even a little overwhelming at first, but it’s well worth the time to read and learn about your PC. Also, I had no problems using the DEFAULT, basic options to set up a boot disk with the CD drivers, create a backup and restore from the backup.

You can use Ghost to create an image of your data to transfer to that new PC or hard drive you’ve been wanting, or simply to go back to that fresh, “new car” feeling your PC had out of the box. NOTE: If you back up your primary drive or partition (C:) to disk, and try to restore it do a different PC, you will most likely have problems. This is because you aren’t just restoring your programs, you are also restoring hardware drivers and configurations. Unless the two PC’s are identically built, there will be problems.

Below are the steps I recommend for using Ghost effectively for keeping your PC healthy, and you happy, but first a couple more notes. Most people have what I call “canned PC’s” This means they bought them with most of their software already loaded, and they got a few disks with the programs that were installed for repairing the software.

If this is you, you should check with your vender before trying to format your hard disk or create partitions, or else consider going out and buying the latest edition of Windows 98 or Windows ME if you feel you really must, (I wouldn’t touch Windows ME with a ten foot pole).

The best way to set up your PC is to start with proper planning like anything else. I think I’ll go into detail about this next month, so I’ll just skim over it now.

1. Organize your hard drive into partitions. I have three. One for the “System”, one for my “Data” and one for “Archives”. The system partition contains Windows, and all the major applications that I use, such as MS Office, Antivirus software, photo and video editing software, my MP3 player, etc. “Data” is where I keep my email, address book, spreadsheets, columns, “saved games”, etc.

2. Once you have your partitions built, you can format them, which means wiping them clean, and load all your applications, Windows, and everything else that you use OFTEN.

3. Go online and get all your latest drivers, patches, upgrades, Service Packs, etc.

4. Set up all your custom settings, such as Display settings, colors, themes, ISP, Start Menu, etc etc.

5. You are now ready to back up your system. This will give you the initial image that you can fall back to later when your PC isn’t performing properly and you want to get back to where you are now, with a lean, mean, computing machine!

The next time you get ready to upgrade your Windows, install a new game or application, take a few minutes to create another image of your system drive. Label it, Date it, and store it. If the program you install afterwards gives you any problems, or you want to uninstall it, you can restore from your latest back up and your PC won’t have a clue that the program was ever there!

The more backup images you create, the better off you will be. Since it usually takes time to identify the source of a problem, it’s good to keep a dated library of backup images so you can step back through time until the problem disappears. Keep in mind that when you restore a backup, ALL changes to your system that were made since that image was taken will be missing after you restore. This is why it is good to keep your data files, and saved games on a separate partition and backup disks. Since these files almost never are the source of your problems, and they contain things like email messages and addresses, your progress in that game you’ve been working on for 12 months, etc, you don’t want to lose them, or even parts of them, (like the last 3 levels of the game or the email address of the girl you met last weekend).

Next month I’ll cover Partitions, what they are, and how to make them as included with planning your computing system.

Feel free to comment below and share your nightmares, fixes, and opinions on anything related to this month’s column. I’ll also take questions and answer them if I can.

Technically Yours,
--Mike