System Tuneup Guide

PC Disasters Day 6: You Lose Your Digital Photos

Digital photos and photography have spelled the demise of cameras that take film for the most part (just ask Kodak). But because digital photos are so easy to take and upload to your PC enmasse, they are also easy to accidentally misplace or delete. This has actually happened to me several times…

I’ve uploaded a camera full of precious digital photos of my family to my PC, and then deleted them off my camera’s media drive since they were loaded into Photoshop on my PC. I figured I’d be safe, but when my PC crashed after only being able to save one photo to the hard disk, I learned a painful lesson: NEVER delete the photos off your camera until you are certain copies are safely stored on your PC’s hard drive!

Fortunately you can now use an undelete utility on your camera’s media card as an easy way to recover lost or deleted photos, just like on your hard drive. The only catch here is that the photos should be recoverable as long as you haven’t written over any deleted photos on your Camera’s media card by a newer image.

There are several recommended utilities for recovering lost photos from your hard drive or media cards found on Cameras, thumb drives, etc. One good utility is called Active Undelete 5.1 (costs $40) and can be downloaded at www.active-undelete.com There are also a few free utilities like Zero Assumption Recovery: www.z-a-recovery.com. You can simply launch the program and navigate to your Camera’s media card, select ’simple scan’ and browse the deleted files. Simply select a file to undelete and click on ‘Recover’.

We have developed the habit, as mentioned above, of simply not deleting photos on our digital cameras until after we’ve uploaded and saved them on our PC’s. It only took one time losing 50+ photos of our two daughters to cement that habit firmly into our minds when dealing with digital photos. Perhaps the easiest way to transfer photos to your PC is to simply dump all of them into a central location on your hard drive, and then open up and edit/rename/manipulate them.

Make sure you protect your digital photos and other data by having backups also (we save all our photos to a DVD writable disk once every few months). Redundancy in backing up your data is the best policy, even though it is slightly inconvenient.

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Day 5: Repairing Corrupted Files:

Nothing bites worse than working on reports, data etc. in a program like Word or Excel and after diligently saving your files while you worked on them, opening them up later and seeing nothing but a confusing string of illegible rectangles in place of your valuable data! Data corruption usually seems to occur at the worst times, and it can happen even now that Microsoft has included data recovery tools with their latest versions of their programs.

Corrupted files are a pain, because you usually cannot access a backup, but have to try and repair the corruption. Corruption of data is often caused by the media used to store your data on (hard drives, floppies, optical disks, etc.). There may be a scratch on your disk or bad sectors on your hard drive when yuo save your data, resulting in a corruption.

It only takes a small amount of corruption to damage your entire file and render it useless. Many corrupt files can be recovered however, in whole are part, by using corrupted data recovery software like Ontrack Easy Recovery. It points out one of the simplest yet most effective ways to recover corrupted data and files: opening the file as a plain test document. While some formatting characters and images won’t be recovered or displayed in the plain text format, it is possible to recover sizeable amounts of text this way.

Once you open your file and copy the text, you can then paste that back into your main program (ie, Word) and then restore the formatting you had before. This might take a while if you had a large document or file initially, but at least you don’t have to start from scratch again!

Make sure after you have experienced a corrupt file that you run a full disk check (if the file that was corrupted was stored on your hard drive). This will make sure any bad sectors are marked and not used again for the storage of any future data you save.

To run a disk scan, right-click the drive icon in My Computer and then choose Properties > Tools > Check Now, and choose “Automatically Fix File-System Errors”. Also select the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” option, and then click ok and be prepared to restart your PC for the scan to start.

Note: Another Very useful program that will fix any windows registry corruptions (which could lead to PC errors and data corruptions) is RegCure registry cleaner. Give the Free scan a try today and save yourself from suffering through any more data corruptions!

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10 Steps to Avoiding PC Disasters: Day 3 - Memory Failure

After the hard drive, your RAM memory is the most likely hardware component to fail, which can cause your PC not to boot or stop responding. You will see most memory errors and problems occur upon installation of your DIMM Memory sticks…but RAM problems can also occur at any time during the daily use of your PC due to power surges or overheating.

If you are getting Stop errors or your PC keeps freezing or crashing, you may have memory problems. The easiest way to repair memory errors is to first run a Windows registry cleaner like RegCure, as sometimes a corrupted and bloated windows registry can cause all sorts of errors on your PC, including freezes and crashes.

The next step would be to actually replace your memory, as that will usually fix any RAM related problems, but you’ll want to run some tests first: One of the most effective memory tests you can run, has to be executed outside of windows, so you’ll need a bootable CD. The test is called Memtest86 and is Free! The longer you run this memory test the more accurately it can measure your RAM’s performance levels, and determine if any faulty memory needs to be replaced.

If you find that you need to replace your computer’s memory sticks, then head of to Crucial.com and use their memory advisor tool to locate the specific RAM you need for your PC. This will involve choosing your PC’s manufacturer and model number. Then go to Newegg.com to purchase your memory (much cheaper prices than crucial)!

Keeping a close eye on your hard drives and RAM with the programs we’ve mentioned in these first two posts can really go a long ways towards preventing any kind of PC disaster from even happening!

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