[Irish]

It's early Sunday morning and my time to do a few computer chores. This week I believe that the computer gremlins must have been running amok as we had so many people write to say that "my computer crashed and I lost everything". In fact in one email a lady wrote that her computer exploded. Geeez! I've had one struck by lightening but never just plain explode.

As I know that some of the members of the message board are new computer users I thought I might share a few of these chores with you. These are just a few things we do around the studio, perhaps other that have a good deal of computer experience will share their routines.

1. I pick up a lot of stuff off the Internet and much of that ends up on my desktop. Since these were snatched quickly they often end up in a folder named "New Folder" and I will have a several of those anonymously titled folders.

So I will start by checking what is inside each folder. Decide what I really want to keep and what I want to throw away by deleting it or sending it to the recycle bin.

Next I rename that folder to something that tells me what is inside of it. With the folder closed you right click on the folder. From the menu chose "rename". Type the new name and then left click twice somewhere on the desktop, not on the folder, and this will set that new name.

2. Now I will move that folder off the desktop and into another drive or into My Documents, My Pictures or My Downloads. By clicking on the My Computer icon on my desktop I open "Explorer", find the drive or folder where I want to move the renamed desktop folder, click on that folder to open it in the Explorer window, then either "cut and paste" or "drag and drop" it into it's new place. Usually I cut and paste as it deletes that folder from the desktop.

3. You can make a folder inside of these areas of your computer - My Documents, My Pictures, My Downloads - just the same way you make a new folder on your desktop. I have quite a few folders in My Documents that I have named for general areas of interest as "Wood Carving s", "Wood Burning s", "Photographs", "Quilt Patterns" ... That helps me to keep all the odd little folders organized by subject. Instead of having 75 individual folder to root through I now have about 12 main topic folders. That's much easier for me.

Did you know that you can easily arrange those folders in alphabetical order? When you open something like My Documents go to the task bar at the top of the folder and chose "View". In the drop down menu chose "Arrange Icons By". In the new side menu chose "Name". When you click everything gets alphabetized.

Did you know that you can view what is inside of a folder by clicking on the folder to open it. Now go back to that task bar. The far right icon looks like a little grid work, click it. In the drop down menu chose "thumbnails". All of the pictures will now show up as pictures.

4. After I have everything moved and in it's proper subject folder it's time for me to make back-ups! Lots and lots of back-ups. We do that in three ways around here. First, for us, are our external hard drives ... we run three off the main computer. Since these are free standing externals if our main computer should fail the information on those drives is independent of the main computer and so unaffected. All of these externals can be unplugged easily and then re-plugged to a new computer in just a few minutes. They are great for saving files, protecting files and transferring files to another computer.

Why three? Because an external hard drive can fail just as the hard drive on your main computer. Redundancy is the key to protecting your files.
I also have a small-in-size portable external hard drive (120 gig) . Yea, it's a tiny one but just great for quick moves from the PC to the notebook. It's also our "natural disaster security blanket". We had one of our artists lose everything about five years ago in a Florida hurricane. Well, she would have except she made copies of her art files on several small externals, threw then in her purse on the way out the door. When she returned home everything was gone ... her home was taken down right to the ground ... but she saved her business with those little externals.

Now, we make copies of all of our "can't not lose" files about once a month on our small external. It sits on a shelf by the door so that should we ever need to evacuate we can grab it and run!

The third method, of course, is to burn CDs. I will burn duplicates. I have never had a CD fail but I sure have put one in that "of course I will never forget where it is" spot in my shelves that I can never find again! Having two copies where one goes into a big box where I keep a copy of ALL CDs I'm pretty safe.

5. Thinking of this as a house cleaning session where I now have the big items in their proper places it's time to do a good vacuuming of the computer by running our fragmentation program. Our program is found by going to the Start Bar, selecting Programs and then selecting "Executive Software Diskkeeper" ... I don't know what defragment program you might have on your system - sorry!

Computers do not record information as we would in a school notebook where all of the info for one thing or all of the same type of info is kept neatly on one page of paper. Windows will right little bits of info just anywhere or everywhere on your hard drive. Plus Windows does not necessarily delete every little bit of something you trashed - it often leaves tiny bits that are unusable but taking up space on your hard drive.

Running the defragment program cleans up the trash and then rewrites all those floating bits of info into compressed areas. If your computer is getting chunky-slow-grumbly this, in my experience, is one of the best things you can do to restore it's vigor!

6. Time for the dreaded Virus Scan ... When was the last time you up dated your virus program or spyware software? We do the main computer and all three external hard drives so that one can take anywhere from four to six hours ... AHHH!

These are just a few ideas and suggestions! For me, my computer is my life line to our business, to the net and to the friendship here on the message board. The hour or so it will take me to get ready for another week of fun is well worth the time.

Hope some others will chime in on what they do for basic maintenance ideas ...

Susan

[Ashbys]

Susan ,

We backup daily- 4 spereate comps, defrag weekely and spyware constantly.

Updates , automatic .

Order list are kept on both comp and print-out updated daily.

Working with comps since 86 , I have found one thing to be true ... never trust them. Support and backup can help, but when system software is changed , and your required to maintain records, you end up like a computer storeroom , I still have the orginial Mac. 128 . The machine that changed the world, now it isn't large enough to open a system , then it held payroll for 40 people ... the changes of time .

Ash

[Irish]

Garry ... Did you know that NASA sent Apollo 13 to the moon with a computer who's size would be used today to run a small transitior radio.?

Susan

[sharon cottrell]

Thanks Susan, I'm pretty much computer illiterate.Only had this beast(computer) since Aug.07, so any info on how to use and understand it is really appreciated.