April 02, 2008
Fix IT Newsletter Alert April 2008 Issue 0005 News New Pages since last newsletter...
Articles Have you considered having a server for your business? Ever wonder what is involved when you build and setup a server? How to go about creating the Domain? How to setup Shared Applications or a Web Host for Web sites? Well now you can find out, I have written a comprehensive book on how to Build a Server. Even if you decide to contract out the process this book is a great guide for the business owner, it gives the complete run down on the 'How to..' If you are a
student or just want to build a server then this guide is for you! Hello This week I was reading some posts in a forum, there were some posters asking about virtual drives, this lead me to write a page about Virtual Drives for the web site.
But there is more to the story than the page I wrote. There is another type of virtual drive I did not mention on the web page, it is called a Ram Drive. This is also an emulation drive but uses a portion of the physical memory in your computer to make a drive that you can load programs or data into when your computer starts. There are different ways to make the ram drive, as mentioned on the web page you can use Daemon Tools or Farstone's Virtual Drive to also make a ram drive. Or you can use a system driver to make the ram drive. Microsoft has stopped updating the driver for the ram drive after Windows 2000 version of it's Operating system. To make it work takes some hacking so I do not suggest you use the program unless you know about what modifying the registry entails and the risks involved, also the Microsoft driver only allows for a 32 Meg ram drive (pretty small by today's standards). I will suggest if you are thinking of utilizing a ram drive be aware that it takes memory away from the Operating System. If your computer has enough memory that 500 meg or a Gig will not slow it down then a ram drive will enhance the performance of some systems. So why would you want a ram drive? Well if you are a gamer you could load your game into the ram drive and it would be extremely fast when it loads the graphics and changes screens. You could load sensitive information into the ram drive and when you power down the computer it will be erased. Or if you have a large document you could put it in the ram drive and then access to the document would be faster than reading if from the hard drive. (If you do this be sure to save the document to the hard drive before shutting the computer down or you will loose all your modifications!). In the past I have used ram drives for things like loading up a lot of little programs that a computer need to start with instead of waiting for the CD to load each one (back in the day when cd drives were 2x or 4x speed). I like to play games and in the days of DOS I would load my games in to a Ram Drive because the hard drives of the day were slow, this made playing a game much smoother. Lately I haven't had enough ram to make a ram drive that was big enough for a game (some games are over 6 gig!) Other news: Cut back on the spam in your inbox. Spammers rely of a couple of 'tricks' to get your email address. One is to trick you into using your email address when you purchase an item or go to a 'protected' page. To get around this go to Yahoo! or Google and sign up for a free email account. If you need to give out an email address for something that looks shady then give them the Yahoo! or GMail account. Only give out your real email to those that you know will not spam you. Another thing you can do is to go to the properties of your email program and turn off the 'read receipt' and 'delivery receipt' features. These feature will return receipt when you open or delete a message. The spammers know that most email users don't know about this feature. Only email program that I know of that warns you about the auto-reply is Eudora, it will notify you when the ' delivery receipt' is present and ask if you want to reply. With Microsoft Outlook to turn off the two features go to Tools then options, under Preferences click the E-mail Options, then the Tracking options, at the bottom of the page you will see 'Use this option to decide how to...' and check the radio button 'Never send a response'. Now when one of those spam email hits your in box and you delete it the spammer doesn't know if you read it or just deleted it. After a while they will drop your email address from their list. It may take a while but eventually your in box will have less spam. I received this little tid-bit from a news letter I subscribe to:
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