Normal problems I can spot in advance. These were highly unusual problems. And so far I have not seen that any data were lost. Duplicates were stored on various computers.

The main problem occurred when an old custom built computer fashioned from parts of other computers got some type of address conflict for some of its components. And Windows XP would partially load and then just quit. I got it running to some extent by loading Windows 98 into the computer and then running it in the safe mode. For some reason XP would not run in the safe mode. Unfortunately, 98 won’t talk with Flash drives or many other modern devices etc. So copying blocks of files to other computers is difficult. I haven’t decided how to address that problem. I don’t intend to copy everything by using 1.4 Meg disks.

The second major problem occurred with my fairly expensive terabyte external hard drive. Virtually everything that I have was backed up onto that drive. And it still works. But for some reason its root directory, like C:\ on a computer, got destroyed. And there did not seem to be any way to recover it. So I had Windows reformat the entire drive and started using it again.

I use Dragon Naturally Speaking for voice to text. And that program developed problems. So I had to go back and train it again, this time using a blank dictionary file to start. The normal dictionary file contains tens of thousands of words. I manually entered all of the words that I need to use for forecasting efforts. That eliminates the problem with the program printing the wrong word when it doesn’t recognize what you said. For some reason it could never identify the word “orange” with the standard dictionary. It seemed to be allergic to that word and would substitute anything else it possibly could for it even after I repeatedly trained it to recognize the word.

BENEFITS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This was a learning process. Some valuable things were learned. And here are a few recommendations.

1. If you are working with important data, it is probably best to own at least two massive drives. Either or both can be internal or external drives. Just back everything up onto both of them. If you do some searching you can locate your Windows E-mail and Newsgroup directories. Back them up as well. And Windows has a special file for your E-mail addresses. Back that up. If any of your other systems or either of those massive drives fails you are covered.

2. The data can just be backed up onto one of the drives. And all of the important data can then be copied over to the second drive. There are several ways to do that.

2A. Computer USB ports can be used to copy data to external drives. It takes a while. So, that can be done overnight or when you are doing the laundry etc.

2B. Extremely large Flash drives, even up to 256 Gigabytes can be purchased and used for storage or for data transfer. The flat external Flash drives that are used for cameras seem to develop contact problems if they are used a lot. Rewritable CD ROM disks and rewritable DVD disks can be used for data transfer. But that can be a little more difficult and is a very slow process.

2C. There is a special computer cord that you can purchase that will let you connect the USB port from one computer to the USB port on another computer. Then entire directories or the contents of the whole computer can be copied through that special connector cord. Software for running it has to be installed. Since it is limited by the USB port speed this is a fairly slow data transfer process.

2D. If you know how to do it you can use an Internet Ethernet Router to connect two computers with one another. Then tremendous amounts of data can be copied from one computer to the other fairly quickly. This is tricky the first time it is tried. You have to become familiar with how to organize and run Local networks using File Sharing.

2E. For anyone doing a lot of computer work I would recommend that the person purchase an Internet Ethernet Crossover Cable. It lets you connect two computers with one another through the computer Internet Ethernet Port without having to use a Router. Again, you need to learn how to organize and run Local Networks to use it. My computers will transfer 2 Gigabytes of data in about 5 minutes using a Crossover Cable.

3. I don’t know what Windows 7 and 8 require. But if you are running Vista and don’t have 4 Gigabytes of Ram Memory in the computer then you are going to have very poor performance based on what I have observed. Best to upgrade any Vista or higher Operating System computer to at least 4 Gigabytes of memory. My primary Vista computer has a Dual Core processor. Nice. The next one will have a Quad Core processor. More processors keep the computer from getting confused or bogged down when it has to do several things at the same time.

4. I use XP with most of my computers. And with one of the XP systems I paid for an upgrade to 2 Gigabytes of Ram Memory. The extra memory lets you do thing a lot faster. The other computers are used mostly for word processing etc. And for that 400 Megabytes of memory is usually adequate for XP. From what I have heard, Microsoft plans to drop XP support in early 2014. Half the computers on the planet might stop running!

5. I use a special Perl language Virtual Operating System program I created myself over the years for doing easy backups. But if you don’t want to learn how to use Perl then you can create backup programs using Windows Batch Files such as backup.bat. They are easy to create using DOS commands. I have never worked with Linux. And I wonder if it is easy to use. Perhaps one of the board visitors has an opinion on that. I don’t know how anyone using computers can even mange to exist without that Perl language Virtual Operating System program. And some day if and when time permits I might try to get it rewritten into a program that can be sold. For example, you press the F1 key and the program starts running. Then virtually anything you want to do using the computer can be accomplished by just pressing one or two other keys. For example, F1 plus “r” automatically displays this EarthWaves board Web page. F1 plus “t” plus “f” stores the latest copy of the program itself on a flash drive so that it can be transferred to my other computers. F1 plus F8 starts my word processor program running. And then Insert plus Right Arrow saves a copy of the current word processing file plus a backup copy. When doing lots of word processing you don’t want to have to stop and look down at the keyboard to do things like that. It interrupts your train of thought and slows you down. On my external keyboards, Insert and Right Arrow are next to one another and easy to locate without looking down at the keyboard.