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04/11/08
Yet more in the
ongoing saga! This week again we've seen a
client who through hard drive failure ( another
SATA drive...a saga in itself) will need their notebook
rebuilding....but for whatever reason they never
saw or chose to ignore the
prompt to create their
Vista recovery software
when their notebook was shiny new.
Now with the hard drive practically dead and the
recovery partition inaccessible, they can't
create the disks. Yes we can put a new hard
drive in to the notebook but we don't have the
clients Vista
software to put on it. The only break they
have short of us supplying new software is to go
back to the retailer under the warranty as it's
only 10 months old and try to get a fix.
As it happens, we were able to recover most (but
not all unfortunately) of the clients 1000+
photos and files from the hard drive to DVD
before it expired, which is something I suppose.
Yet again it comes down to making sure that
should disaster happen, you've got some cover.
If you buy yourself a new notebook or pc and
you'd like our assistance in setting it up
properly and making sure that you've got those
valuable recovery disks, please give us a call
on 01279 724192
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27/10/08
I've been
concerned by the number of
SATA harddrive failures
that we are seeing occur these days. Most of these
are on fairly new, well certainly under 18 months
old,
notebooks, but one or two desktop / tower
machines have also been affected.
One of my clients who is a games software tester
has similar concerns and won't now have a SATA
drive as his boot drive, preferring an ATA/IDE
drive to hold his operating system...claiming
that reliability is better with the ATA/IDE
drives. Now this is fine if you have a
desktop / tower PC, you can fit alternative
drives, but what about notebooks with SATA
drives?
Industry claims that SATA is no less reliable
than ATA/IDE, so what to believe?
Well the bottom line is whatever you choose,
both SATA and ATA/IDE drives are
electro-mechanical devices and will undoubtedly
fail at some point...so to protect your data and
reduce the stress when it all goes wrong, you
must regularly...BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER!
If you need assistance or advice in choosing the
right equipment to do your data backup, please give us a call on 01279 724192
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20/10/08
You're probably
aware that we "do
stuff" with PowerPoint for clients,
well we were asked to amend a presentation for a
consultant chap. He'd had the powerpoint
designed somewhile ago and it needed some
updates to the slide master and he wanted to add
some new sound tracks and video clips. After a serious
amount of scratching of heads we were unable to
remove the old sound track from 3 slides.
It would appear that the sound clips had been
"embedded" in to each of the slides. Any
amount of fiddling about just wouldn't delete
the sound and it ran for a full 8 slides....
There's a bit about this on the Internet if you
Google it, but it needs some tinkering with
visual basic invariably to fix it, so what to do
eh?
In the end we through caution to the wind and
inserted a number of blank slides before the
slide with the embedded sound, recreated the all
slides affected, added the new sound (not
embedded this time) and then deleted a whole
shed load of old slides. Yes it worked...
then repeated the process for the other 2
instances...I have to say, it may have been
quicker to scrap and start over to be honest,
but hey, one happy client and no doubt repeat
business for us...
If you need a presentation built or changes made
to any PowerPoint slides, and you're needing
assistance, please give us a call on
01279 724192
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