How your Windows software works…

Of course every piece of hardware in your computer must be run by a piece of software (a “Driver”). And you also need software to do the tasks that you bought your computer for in the first place. These are called “Applications”. These applications need the services of your hardware, by way of the “Operating System” which controls the drivers.

The operating system is a set of programs that tie it all together. The operating system (Microsoft’s Windows, in our case) is used to monitor, control, maintain, install or remove, arbitrate between and generally manage your drivers and applications. An it presents them to you in a useful (maybe even pretty) way – through a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

So much for the basics. But beside the applications you need for your work or play and the drivers to run your hardware devices, there are also “Utility” applications used for maintaining your system and it’s security. Many Windows users don’t have or use the utility programs they need.

So, let’s talk about the best of each of these types of software and what you absolutely must have to keep your computing experience a happy one.

Drivers:
These come from the various manufacturers of your different hardware devices. For example, your CD/ROM driver is operated by its drivers. Hopefully engineers of each of these hardware device companies worked with the engineers at Microsoft (and paid big bucks) to insure compatibility.

You have no options about your hardware drivers, except to visit your hardware manufacturer’s web site, if you have trouble with a piece of hardware – in order to download and install a newer driver (hopefully a better one). Some hardware manufacturers write excellent software drivers, even though software is not their main skill. Others make good hardware and write poor software – beware.

All you can do about software drivers is to choose the best manufacturers from which to buy hardware. This implies that you buy your computer from a computer manufacturer that understands which manufacturers they in turn should use for the many parts of their computer.

Or, to be sure of quality, you can buy from a local computer assembly company – with or without your very own computer design specification. Of course most of you will not do the research or have the expertise to discover all the currently best brands (this in in constant flux) and to create your own design spec. But you can still create a design spec with the help of the assembly company, or a personal computer consultant. You will tell them what your computing needs are and how much you are willing to spend to get the best. Many best-of-breed products cost no more than their competitors.

A great place to check hardware quality is Tom’s Hardware.

Operating Systems:
Today, you should get a 64 bit computer and run a 64 bit operating system. It’s hard to find a system with the fine Windows XP installed anymore, because Windows 7 is the current Microsoft operating system, following after Windows Vista.

Microsoft’s Windows Vista had a poor reputation at first, and some annoying “features”. But most of its early problems have been fixed, so I don’t recommend that you avoid it, if you can’t find a computer you like that has Windows 7.

If you have a computer assembled for you than you can get whatever you want. In that case, get Windows 7 or Windows XP Professional 64 bit.

Microsoft has recently released Windows 7, which is much better than previous versions of Windows. Usually I recommend not being an “early adopter” of any software. As usual in the PC business, you should avoid the “bleeding edge” and attempt to stay on the “leading edge”. That means waiting a month or three for the bugs to be worked out of new software products. Operating systems are among the most complex beasts every created by humans and it’s thought to be impossible to produce one without built-in problems. Early adopters are too often really product testers. However Windows 7 was released in very good shape and I began installing it for my clients in Early December of 2009 – with great success.

Utilities:
Here are the utility programs (including security) I couldn’t live without:

Backup:
Acronis “True Image” Home edition.
www.acronis.com
You must make backups onto another drive, because your live data (when your computer is powered) and the magnetic image of your data on your hard drive (powered or not) are way too fragile to be depended on.

It’s not enough to back up just your work. Think of the hours of effort that have gone into setting up your operating system and programs. What about all you favorite webs sites, your years of emails and contact info, your music and photos, those programs and games you don’t have CDs for, all the things you’ve forgotten you have, but still need from time to time.

Do you really want to find all that stuff, install Windows all over again, re-install as much of your stuff as you can find and start over from scratch? You’ll be limping along for weeks trying to get it all back and buying programs again you already own.

Much better to make a full backup – one from which you can (rather quickly) restore any file or folder – or your whole operating system, applications, utilities and all – the whole shebang. For most people, the best policy is to do such a full backup once or twice a week, with “Incremental” in between. Incrementals save just your newest work and take a much shorter time to complete than a full backup. And be sure to set your backup software to “Validate” your backups after they are made. Even though this takes about twice as long, you don’t want backups you can’t trust.

An even safer backup policy is to keep both the current backup and one or more older ones. In case of a natural disaster or fire and if your information is really critical, you should use removable drives (like external USB drives) and swap one, then the other out to a remote location, like a bank vault.

I do my backups to a very large internal hard drive, but using a fast external USB hard drive is good too. The newest computers let you use a standard SATA hard drive externally as well. This is somewhat faster and more reliable.

For me, the time has come when I just have too much stuff on my hard drive. You can always get larger drives in order to hold more. You can even get a monster enterprise network storage box. For example, my main (“C:” boot drive) is 750GB (750,000 millions of bytes – think of a byte as 1 character in a word). And, the way I like to do backups, I have an identical internal drive installed just to hold backups.

Recently that filled up to the extent that it would hold only 1 backup. I like to save the most recent backup and the one before it – at a minimum. You never know when something might go wrong or missing which you don’t catch right away, such that it becomes part of your next backup. Without a previous backup, or an “archive” (a backup or software copy saved to another, more or less permanent medium) you are screwed.

So, I just installed the largest consumer drive available, a Seagate 1.5TB (Terabyte = 1,000s of GB) unit. But more storage space is a limited solution, since with a large enough place to store your backups, the limiting factor becomes how long it takes to MAKE such a large backup.

Mine are taking way too long now, such that my backup program is sometimes overlapping the scheduled time when my anti-virus scanning program should be running. Then they fight over who gets to hog the CPU (“Central Processing Unit” or “Microprocessor” the “brains” of any computer). That slows them both down. I’m a night person, so my backup program fires off at 2:00 am and should finish by 8:00 am – but now it doesn’t. This in spite of my having to run backups and anti-virus scans on alternate nights now.

Next: The fix and a utility program that comes to my rescue – just in time!

…Continued in next post…
Please feel free to comment below..

_jim coe