Freezing Your Hard Drive.

Well I came across a couple of posts about freezing your hard drive to revive it.

So this is basically what I understand, you have a broken hard drive which wont boot anything.

So you stick it in the freezer for about a day (24 hours) and this should allow your hard drive to to contract.

After you’ve frozen it for about a day you take it out leave it to dry out for a couple of hours, be careful when plugging it in as you have condensation which could make it blow up in your face (which you don’t want), so this will allow your hard drive components to expand again which should fix your hard drive.

I would love to hear your comments on this post if you have anything to add or any experiences with doing this, please tell me in the comment section.

Wireless LAN (WLAN)

Now everyone thinks their fine with completely secure but the horrible fact is your not.

I know a couple of people using WLAN that think their fine with it a couple of programs to secure it and a WEP encryption, I couldn’t help but laugh.

You can stop your newbie neighbours from stealing your wireless with a WEP encryption or something like that but your not stopping the full time hackers from stealing your bank details, so never do any important work using a wireless connection because the harsh truth is you will be hacked at some point, have a computer ready that is connected directly to the internet, for things to do with important things, but even then your not secure but its your safest bet.

Save Your Work From a Knackered Machine.

Well recently I’ve had a couple of people complaining about their pc because windows or something has come up with a error and can’t get access to it.

And most of these times you will find that they will format the hard drive, without burning a CD of all their stuff, which really ticks me off because that means I have to help them getting everything back on their computer.

The answer is backups you can setup a simple backup machine on your LAN easily using things like FreeNAS allowing you to send your files to that machine from another on your LAN.

Or the simple idea is use Linux Live to get your files back, a simple disk like Knoppix or Damn Small Linux will allow you to get access to your partitions allowing you to recover your files without logging onto windows.

Ubuntu (Linux)

Well I’ve been trying out Ubuntu for the past couple of days because I’m looking for a good OS to swap with Windows as I’m beginning to get bored of it, so I ordered a couple of Ubuntu live CD’s which was also a installation CD which I was very chuffed about so I could surf the net while I was installing Ubuntu which I loved.

Connecting to the internet: This was so easy it auto detected my hardware when I put the CD in it didn’t tell me or anything and I was instantly connected to the internet. So I started the installation while I was talking to a couple of my friends using ‘Gaim’ so I thought this is brilliant Microsoft should do something like this!

Configuring you’re settings: this was a really annoying part for me, I was stuck with the default setting I couldn’t go any higher I asked on Ubuntu Forum’s and it wouldn’t work, I tried it several times and I ended up with a blank screen on boot.

Beginners Guide To XAMPP.

XAMPP is made by Apache Friends (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html). It allows you to setup your http server with ease. If you have tried setting up Apache on your desktop PC it can be very hard to configure especially for Windows machines, XAMPP allows you do basic setup all you need in one setup file.

It will offer to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and Perl instead of installing them separately.

So I’m going to talk you through the installation to check your doing it all right so we are going to download XAMPP i downloaded XAMPP Windows 1.5.4a you can download it here (http://www.apachefriends.org/download.php?xampp-win32-1.5.4a-installer.exe).

So i went throught the installation before hand this is my results

Choose language

Install destination (C:\program files)

Waiting for install…

Finish

Popup “install XAMPP Servers (Apache, MySQL or Filezilla FTP) as service?” Yes

Popup “install Apache 2 as service?” Yes

Popup “Apache 2 service was installed successfully! (ports: 80 +443)” Ok

Popup “Install MySQL as service?” Yes

Popup “MySQL service was installed successfully! (port: 3306)” Ok

Popup “Install Filezilla FTP service?” Yes