August 25, 2014

Macs are PCs

iambiebs | Make A Comment | nerdisms, Tech

For many years I have been an anti-apple advocate in some ways I still am because I feel Apple PCs are just a status symbol. When someone tries to tell me that their Mac is superior than the pc I know and love that’s when I get upset. It is that elitest mind set that sometimes comes with that apple. Now I can not say that that same attitude doesn’t come from windows fans, it does. I use to be that way, but in the last year or so I have changed from that. Today’s Macs are no different than the windows laptop I carry with me each and everyday. Albeit a very expensive brand name that you are paying for. They are no different.

The time for dividing computers into “PCs” and “Macs” is over. With more and more people are using mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, Mac OS X is just another PC operating system alongside Windows and Linux.

The Historical Meaning of “PC”

“PC” has several different meanings. On one extreme, PC just means “personal computer,” and smartphones and tablets are just as much PCs as laptops and desktops. On the other extreme, “PC” originally meant “IBM PC-compatible.” These were computers that were compatible with IBM’s PC architecture. They had a BIOS and could run all the same operating systems, like IBM’s PC-DOS and Microsoft’s MS-DOS. This was a standard architecture computers could conform to so they’d be compatible with the software that ran on other IBM PCs or IBM PC-compatible PCs. IBM no longer makes PCs, so this description isn’t accurate.

IBM PCs became less common and eventually vanished, so the term”IBM PC-compatible” fell out of favor. “Wintel” PCs replaced them — Windows-compatible PCs with an Intel x86 chip inside.

People continued to use the term “PC” for those Windows-on-Intel-x86 machines. But there was nothing intrinsically Windows-only about a PC. PCs originally ran DOS, and today many PCs run Linux. There have been other PC operating systems like IBM OS/2 and BeOS, too. “PC” may be synonymous with Windows to many people, but it shouldn’t be — Linux is also a PC operating system.

Macs Moved From PowerPC to Intel

In the past, a Macintosh’s hardware was very different from a PC’s. Where those Wintel PCs had Intel x86-compatible chips inside, Macs had PowerPC chips. PowerPC was a completely different architecture, so Windows just couldn’t install on a Mac, and Mac OS just couldn’t install on a PC. The difference wasn’t just the operating system, it was the architecture. That’s why a computer that came with OS/2 or BeOS could be considered a PC, but a Mac wasn’t a PC — it wasn’t “PC-compatible.”

In 2006, Apple began transitioning Macs to run on Intel’s x86 chips instead of the PowerPC architecture. This wasn’t just swapping out a chip manufacturer — Mac OS transitioned from being a PowerPC operating system to being an x86 operating system. Macs now use the same Intel chips found in “PCs.” The last version of Mac OS X to even run on PowerPCs at all was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard back in 2009.

Macs and PCs Have the Same Hardware

Some people seem to think that the hardware in a Mac is very different from the hardware in a PC, but this isn’t true.

The CPU in a Mac is the same Intel CPU you’ll find in Windows based machines. Companies like Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk provide the solid-state drives used in a Mac — these are the same SSDs you would buy off the shelves to put in a “PC”, too. LG and Samsung make the displays for the majority of the worlds computers.

Windows, Linux, and Mac Are All PC Operating Systems

In the past, you couldn’t run Windows on a Mac without an emulator. Now, Windows can be easily installed on a Mac. You can install the standard version of your Linux distribution of choice on a Mac, too.

Mac OS X can even be installed on PC hardware — this is what’s known as a “hackintosh.” It isn’t officially supported by Apple. However, it’s possible because you can get PCs with the same hardware as to what you’d find in a Mac. Those hardware drivers Apple writes specifically for its Mac hardware can work just as well on that PC with the same hardware.

Macs are PCs — nice and expensive ones, but PCs nonetheless.

August 8, 2014

How much is too much memory?

iambiebs | Make A Comment | nerdisms, Tech

TL;DR you can never have too much memory unless you have a 32bit OS then you are limited to 3.5 GB of memory

Memory is a very important part of a PC. the best way to describe RAM I have found is using a table and open books where the open books represent programs. The amount of RAM you have is the size of said table. The larger the table the more books you can have open at one time. The more RAM you have the more programs you can have running. The only time you would ever be limited is if your are running a 32 bit OS, because you can not use more than 3.5 GB of ram with a 32bit OS. with a 64 bit OS you can use a lot more. Theoretically 16 exabytes or 17.2 billion gigabytes is the limit. however the operating system(in this case windows) will limit your amount of RAM as follows.

• Windows 8 Enterprise 512 GB
• Windows 8 Professional 512 GB
• Windows 8 128 GB
• Windows 7 Ultimate 192 GB
• Windows 7 Enterprise 192 GB
• Windows 7 Professional 192 GB
• Windows 7 Home Premium 16 GB
• Windows 7 Home Basic 8 GB

Suppose you have a computer with 16 GB of memory. If the computer is usually using about 4 GB of memory and never reaches 8 GB. You may end up asking would the computer run as equally fast by removing half of the 16 GB and working with only 8 GB or memory.

The quick and dirty answer is no, because the operating system can use the extra RAM as disk cache, which speeds up access to data on the disk. Extra RAM will not make CPU-bound computations (not involving much disk I/O) faster though.

The more precise answer is as follows:

Below is an example from a computer with 24 GB of RAM. Even though only 7 GB is currently allocated as “In Use” memory, another 10 GB is allocated as “Standby” memory and contains data that may or may not be read again. If it is read, it will make your computer faster. The “Free” memory is not being utilized whatsoever at the moment.

Hardware Reserved

Beginning on the left, in gray, is the Hardware Reserved list, which shows the amount of memory reserved for hardware. This list represents the amount of memory that the various hardware devices installed in your system have reserved so that they can communicate with the operating system. Of course, memory reserved for hardware is essentially locked and as such is not available to the memory manager.

Typically, the amount of Hardware Reserved memory ranges from 10MB to 70MB but can vary depending on the system’s hardware configuration and might be several hundred MB. Examples of components that can affect the amount of memory reserved include:

• System BIOS
• Motherboard resources, such as I/O advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC)
• Sound cards or any other devices that require memory-mapped I/O
• PCI Express (PCIe) bus
• Video card
• Various chipsets
• Flash devices

In Use

The In Use list, shown in green in Figure C, represents the amount of memory being used by the operating system, drivers, and the various running processes. In Use memory is calculated by adding the sizes of the Modified, Standby, and Free values and subtracting this from the amount of recognized memory, which is listed as Total in the section just below the graph. The Total memory is calculated by subtracting any Hardware Reserved memory from the Installed RAM.

Modified

Shown in orange, the Modified list represents the pages of memory that contain data that has been modified but not been accessed for a while. As such it is not technically in use but can still be pulled into service quickly if needed. If memory in the Modified list has not been accessed in a long time, the memory manager will write the page to disk and then move it to the Standby list.

Standby

The Standby list, which is shown in blue, contains pages that have been removed from process working sets but are still linked to their respective working sets. As such, Standby list is essentially a cache. However, memory pages in the Standby list are prioritized in a range of 0-7, with 7 being the highest. Essentially, a page related to a high-priority process will receive a high-priority level in the Standby list.

For example, processes that are Shareable will be a high priority and pages associated with these Shareable processes will have the highest priority in the Standby list.

Now, if a process needs a page that is associated with the process and that page is now in the Standby list, the memory manager immediately returns the page to that process’ working set. However, all pages on the Standby list are available for memory allocation requests from any process. When a process requests additional memory and there is not enough memory in the Free list, the memory manager checks the page’s priority and will take a page with a low priority from the Standby list, initialize it, and allocate it to that process.

Free

The Free list, shown in light blue, contains pages of memory that have not yet been allocated to a process or were previously allocated but returned to the memory manager when the process ended. (While “not yet been allocated” and “previously allocated” memory both show in the Free part of this bar graph, the “not yet been allocated” pages are actually part of another list called the Zero Page list. These are so-called because they have been initialized to zero and are ready for use when the memory manager needs a new page.)

July 7, 2014

Why Does Rebooting a Computer Fix So Many Problems?

iambiebs | Make A Comment | nerdisms, Tech

Ask a geek how to fix a problem you’ve having with your Windows computer and they’ll likely ask “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” This seems like a flippant response, but rebooting a computer can actually solve many problems.

So what’s going on here? Why does resetting a device or restarting a program fix so many problems? And why don’t geeks try to identify and fix problems rather than use the blunt hammer of “reset it”?

This Isn’t Just About Windows

Bear in mind that this soltion isn’t just limited to Windows computers, but applies to all types of computing devices. You’ll find the advice “try resetting it” applied to wireless routers, iPads, Android phones, and more. This same advice even applies to software — is Firefox acting slow and consuming a lot of memory? Try closing it and reopening it!

Some Problems Require a Restart

To illustrate why rebooting can fix so many problems, let’s take a look at the ultimate software problem a Windows computer can face: Windows halts, showing a blue screen of death. The blue screen was caused by a low-level error, likely a problem with a hardware driver or a hardware malfunction. Windows reaches a state where it doesn’t know how to recover, so it halts, shows a blue-screen of death, gathers information about the problem, and automatically restarts the computer for you . This restart fixes the blue screen of death.

Windows has gotten better at dealing with errors — for example, if your graphics driver crashes, Windows XP would have frozen. In Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, the Windows desktop will lose its fancy graphical effects for a few moments before regaining them. Behind the scenes, Windows is restarting the malfunctioning graphics driver.

But why doesn’t Windows simply fix the problem rather than restarting the driver or the computer itself? Well, because it can’t — the code has encountered a problem and stopped working completely, so there’s no way for it to continue. By restarting, the code can start from square one and hopefully it won’t encounter the same problem again.

Examples of Restarting Fixing Problems

While certain problems require a complete restart because the operating system or a hardware driver has stopped working, not every problem does. Some problems may be fixable without a restart, though a restart may be the easiest option.

Windows is Slow: Let’s say Windows is running very slowly. It’s possible that a misbehaving program is using 99% CPU and draining the computer’s resources. One could head to the task manager and look around, hoping to locate the misbehaving process an end it. If an average user encountered this same problem, they could simply reboot their computer to fix it rather than dig through their running processes.

Firefox or Another Program is Using Too Much Memory: In the past, Firefox has been the poster child for memory leaks on average PCs. Over time, Firefox would often consume more and more memory, getting larger and larger and slowing down. Closing Firefox will cause it to relinquish all of its memory. When it starts again, it will start from a clean state without any leaked memory. This doesn’t just apply to Firefox, but applies to any software with memory leaks.

Internet or Wi-Fi Network Problems: If you have a problem with your Wi-Fi or Internet connection, the software on your router or modem may have encountered a problem. Resetting the router — just by unplugging it from its power socket and then plugging it back in — is a common solution for connection problems.

In all cases, a restart wipes away the current state of the software. Any code that’s stuck in a misbehaving state will be swept away, too. When you restart, the computer or device will bring the system up from scratch, restarting all the software from square one so it will work just as well as it was working before.

Ultimately, the answer is that “resetting a computer wipes away the current state of the software, including any problems that have developed, and allows it to start over from square one.” It’s easier and faster to start from a clean state than identify and fix any problems that may be occurring — in fact, in some cases, it may be impossible to fix problems without beginning from that clean state.

May 22, 2014

Back up Strategies

iambiebs | 1 Comment | nerdisms, Tech

Everybody always tells you to make sure that you are backing up your PC, but what does that really mean? And what files do you actually need to backup? Today I will walk you through the basics of backing up your PC, what you should back up, and why.

Of course, these rules won’t fit every scenario, so you’ll need to use a little common sense—think about what is most important to you on your PC, and make sure that you’ve figured out how to backup those files.

The All-Important Rule of Backups

The primary principle of backing up your data is that any important data should exist in two or more physical locations at once. You cannot create a backup and delete the original, or else it is no longer really a backup.

You might think this is obvious, but you’d be surprised how often I’ve been approached by others that lost their data after their “backup” drive died.

What Should You Use for Backing Up Your PC?

There are lots of different applications that you can use to make backups of your files, and there’s even one built into Windows… It doesn’t matter which tool you use as long as it does a decent job of creating backups.

Local Backups
It’s important to create local backups to an external drive or another PC for speed of restoring files should something bad happen, and also because this is going to be the quickest way to create backups.

Online Backups
There are a number of paid online backup services like Mozy, Carbonite, Spideroak, andJungledisk, and there are also some file sync services like Dropbox and SugarSync that provide backup type of capability. These are all excellent secondary backup services, but probably shouldn’t replace a regular backup just because they will take a long time to restore.

Note: if you’re looking for a great way to keep a folder in sync between PCs and accessible from anywhere, Box or dropbox. Otherwise, you should probably check out Mozy, since it has a unique ability to create local backups as well as online backups.

System Image Backups
Rather than simply backing up files, you can create a complete backup of your system that can be restored over top of your system. The only problem with creating these type of backups is that they require a real lot of drive space. The best bet is to create an image when your system is up and running and everything is installed, and then you can use it to more easily restore everything rather than reinstalling everything manually.

You can use a freeware application called DriveImageXML. If you’re looking for a paid solution that works really well, you can check out Acronis.

What Files Should You Backup?

The most important files to backup are probably your documents, pictures, music, and other user files, but they are not the only files that you need to backup. Let’s walk through some of them.

• Documents: You should backup your entire documents folder all the time. This should be a no-brainer.
  
• Music: If you’ve paid lots of money for MP3 downloads, you’ll probably be sad to lose them. Make sure to include this folder. Note: if you’re an iTunes user, you should make sure to backup your iTunes folder, which is thankfully usually inside this directory.
  
• Pictures & Videos: It’s really sad when I get emails from people saying their hard drive died and they lost all their pictures of their family. The photos might not have actually costed you anything, but you’ll probably be more sad about losing memories than paying for music downloads again.
  
• Desktop Email: If you’re using Outlook or Windows Live Mail, make absolutely certain that you’ve backed up the files from these applications. Outlook stores all your email in a .PST file.
  
• Application Settings: If you look within the AppData folders, you’ll see directories for each and every application you’re running. These settings can often be restored from a backup so you don’t have to tweak everything again. Just head into C:\Users\Username\AppData\ to see the Local, Roaming, and LocalLow folders that contain many settings for your applications.
  
  
• Virtual Machines: If you use virtual machines for real work, you should probably create a backup of your virtual machines at some point. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend backing these up every single night, but you should at least consider some type of backup plan.
  
• Bookmarks: Most browsers other than Internet Explorer actually make it difficult to backup your bookmarks using Windows Backup, but the much better option is to sync your bookmarks to the cloud.
  

Backup These Files More Easily
Instead of trying to find all those locations, backup your entire Users folder, which is at C:\Users\Username in Windows 7 or 8. This will include all of those files, unless you’ve stored them somewhere else.

Files You Should Not Bother Backing Up

There’s simply no reason to backup these directories:

• Windows: There’s almost never a reason to backup your Windows directory, as you’re going to have to reinstall the whole thing anyway, so this backup will likely do you no good.
  
• Program Files: You’re going to have to reinstall your applications if your computer dies and you have to reinstall. Why bother backing up all these files?
  

It’s worth noting that if you create a system image backup, you won’t have to reinstall all of your applications, and backing up these folders would still be pointless.

When should you backup?

The best bet is to backup your files on a fairly regular basis–daily if possible. If you’re using an online backup solution, they are often configured to immediately start syncing any changed files when your PC is idle for a little while. This can be a great way to keep your files safe without having to wait for the next backup.

Hopefully these tips will help you backup your files and keep you protected.

Don’t forget the most important rule: any important data should exist in two or more physical locations at once.

May 22, 2014

Backup Options for Windows

iambiebs | Make A Comment | nerdisms, Tech

Backups on Windows can be confusing. Whether you’re using Windows 7 or 8, you have quite a few integrated backup tools to think about. Windows 8 made quite a few changes, too. You can also use third-party backup software, whether you want to back up to an external drive or back up your files to online storage. Windows 7 has its own Backup and Restore feature that lets you create backups manually or on a schedule. You’ll find it under Backup and Restore in the Control Panel. The original version of Windows 8 still contained this tool, and named it Windows 7 File Recovery. This allowed former Windows 7 users to restore files from those old Windows 7 backups or keep using the familiar backup tool for a little while. Windows 7 File Recovery was removed in Windows 8.1.

System Restore on both Windows 7 and 8 functions as a sort of automatic system backup feature. It creates backup copies of important system and program files on a schedule or when you perform certain tasks, such as installing a hardware driver. If system files become corrupted or your computer’s software becomes unstable, you can use System Restore to restore your system and program files from a System Restore point.

This isn’t a way to back up your personal files. It’s more of a troubleshooting feature that uses backups to restore your system to its previous working state.

Windows 7′s Previous Versions feature allows you to restore older versions of files — or deleted files. These files can come from backups created with Windows 7′s Backup and Restore feature, but they can also come from System Restore points. When Windows 7 creates a System Restore point, it will sometimes contain your personal files. Previous Versions allows you to extract these personal files from restore points.

This only applies to Windows 7. On Windows 8, System Restore won’t create backup copies of your personal files. The Previous Versions feature was removed on Windows 8.

Windows 8 replaced Windows 7′s backup tools with File History, although this feature isn’t enabled by default. File History is designed to be a simple, easy way to create backups of your data files on an external drive or network location.

File History replaces both Windows 7′s Backup and Previous Versions features. Windows System Restore won’t create copies of personal files on Windows 8. This means you can’t actually recover older versions of files until you enable File History yourself — it isn’t enabled by default.

Windows also allows you to create system image backups. These are backup images of your entire operating system, including your system files, installed programs, and personal files. This feature was included in both Windows 7 and Windows 8, but it was hidden in the preview versions of Windows 8.1. After many user complaints, it was restored and is still available in the final version of Windows 8.1 — click System Image Backup on the File History Control Panel.

Windows 8′s Storage Spaces feature allows you to set up RAID-like features in software. For example, you can use Storage Space to set up two hard disks of the same size in a mirroring configuration. They’ll appear as a single drive in Windows. When you write to this virtual drive, the files will be saved to both physical drives. If one drive fails, your files will still be available on the other drive.

This isn’t a good long-term backup solution, but it is a way of ensuring you won’t lose important files if a single drive fails.

Windows 8 and 8.1 allow you to back up a variety of system settings — including personalization, desktop, and input settings. If you’re signing in with a Microsoft account, OneDrive settings backup is enabled automatically. This feature can be controlled under OneDrive > Sync settings in the PC settings app.

This feature only backs up a few settings. It’s really more of a way to sync settings between devices.

Microsoft hasn’t been talking much about File History since Windows 8 was released. That’s because they want people to use OneDrive instead.

OneDrive — formerly known as SkyDrive — was added to the Windows desktop in Windows 8.1. Save your files here and they’ll be stored online tied to your Microsoft account. You can then sign in on any other computer, smartphone, tablet, or even via the web and access your files. Microsoft wants typical PC users “backing up” their files with OneDrive so they’ll be available on any device.

You don’t have to worry about all these features. Just choose a backup strategy to ensure your files are safe if your computer’s hard disk fails you. Whether it’s an integrated backup tool or a third-party backup application, be sure to back up your files.