Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the team via chat room or BBS at www.thepcgurus.com. There are usually members present in the chat room after 8:00 PM every evening and you can post computer questions, comments, rants etc. on the bulletin board 24/7.
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The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
7-15-04
Another week, another recycling tip ;) This one is time sensitive but reader Jane Schaftlein advised me of a grant program from Dell. She sent the following press release:
“Dell Inc. is
offering $220,000 in grant money to support
computer recycling events in the
fall of 2004.
The Dell Recycling Grant Program is designed to
provide financial support to communities interested in staging a one-day,
no-charge computer collection event. The purpose of the program is to raise
awareness of responsible end-of-life options for unwanted computer equipment, to
keep
computers and related equipment out of landfills, and to empower
communities with a model and the experience for staging collection
events.
The company will award a series of $10,000 grants to select
state, provincial, and local governments; universities; and other nonprofit
groups. Grant recipients will also receive technical assistance from the
National
Recycling Coalition.
Both U.S. and Canadian communities
are eligible for these grants. Applications for U.S. grants are available at the
Dell Web site. Details for the Canadian application and grant awards are being
developed and will be available by September.
RFP Link: http://dell.com/recyclinggrant”
The deadline to apply is July 30th so if you think your community would be interested you’d better hurry. Thanks Jane!
Last week I promised a section on the Guru website listing places you can recycle or donate electronics. It’s up and online as we speak at www.thepcgurus.com. In the Guru Navigation section just click the Recycling PCs link and you’re there ;)
Also as I promised last week I’m going to delve a bit deeper into the importance of wiping your data from a PC before you donate or recycle it, ensuring prying eyes won’t be able to recover your tax records or love letters from the old machine.
When you delete a file from your computer it goes to the Recycle Bin. Once the Bin is emptied most people assume the file is gone and that’s that. Not so. The OS simply flags the file as safe to overwrite and it sits on the hard drive until something else needs the spot it’s using.
Due to the way various file systems work, the deleted file isn’t even residing on one spot. As an example, a FAT 32 drive (the native file system for 98 and ME) partitioned hard drive is divided into 4 kilobyte chunks. A 200 kilobyte file will therefore be in 50 pieces. Even if half of those pieces are overwritten the other half still exists on the hard drive and can be recovered using the right tools.
A recent study by a couple of MIT students illustrated this problem quite well. According to http://tinyurl.com/45yvn the two students analyzed 158 hard drives purchased from eBay and the data they were able to recover was shocking.
They found 28 of the drives to be all but fully intact, complete with OS. 117 had data that was recoverable even though 57 had been formatted. 29 didn’t work at all and 12 had been wiped correctly and contained no data.
They pulled out financial data, medical records, porn, email and apparently more than 2800 credit card numbers among other little tidbits. Not good things to have nightmares about after you drop your PC off at the local Salvation Army.
I’ve mentioned a utility called Autoclave from http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/, which is a Linux based tool to overwrite your hard drive as many times as you wish with 1s, then 0s, then 1s etc. The image file you get from that site requires the use of rawrite2 to uncompress, which involves some command line switches that can be a bit dicey for the average user, so I’ve made a floppy image similar to the Killdisk for download, hosted at http://www.troyoverton.com/downloads.
Simply download the autoclave file to your hard drive, insert a blank floppy disk in the A drive and double click the file. This will create a bootable diskette you can use to completely erase any system. Do not download the file to a floppy or just copy it to a floppy. That won’t work.
Put the diskette into the system you want to donate and fire it up. When you get to the first warning screen hit Enter. The next warning screen requires you to type in “I understand.” without the quotes (note the period, that’s also needed). Do so and hit Enter again. These screens are there to remind unwary users that this is permanent and not to be used as a quick and dirty format utility.
From there you’re asked what drive to erase. Choose disk 1, which is all most users have, and hit Enter. At that point you’ll be prompted for a level of confidence ranging from 1, effective against non-hackers, to 5, probably secure against the NSA. Just choose your level and let it run.
Walk away and let it cook. Level 5 can literally take days to complete but you can rest assured that your hard drive is totally free of personal data. Now you can donate that PC and not worry about the picture of you with the lampshade on your head ending up on the Internet ;)
Kevin Mefford,
Editor
In the wake of
recently-discovered security flaws in Internet
Explorer, it would seem that
the browser has lost just a little of its
overwhelming lead in users---or has
it?:
http://news.com.com/IE+usage+drop--slip+or+blip%3F/2100-1032_3-5267858.html?tag=nefd.top
Microsoft
announced this week that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP will
be late
again. If all goes according to plan, we should see it
in
August:
http://news.com.com/Windows+update+will+be+late%2C+Microsoft+says/2100-1016_3-5265378.html?tag=nefd.top
You've
undoubtedly heard the term “spyware”. Ever wonder what that
really
means? Read on:
http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php?act=view&article=spyware&p=1&
The
fellas over at DesignTechnicia give us tips on how to be a good
Netizen,
including some tips on wireless networking. Some of this
stuff is
common sense, but it’s nice to see people writing and talking
about
it:
http://reviews.designtechnica.com/guide26.html
Even
though we normally cover recent news in this column, I thought
that we would
change the format a little this week by presenting the
links to two
“educational” pieces. If you like this kind of thing,
let us know and
we’ll try to include one weekly.
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
Mp3ext http://www.mutschler.de/mp3ext/
This week’s download tip is
another gem for all you music lovers out there.
I know you download music
off the Internet. We all do. You may even have a folder on that PC that has a
few hundred of your favorite songs, with all kinds of clutter in between, making
it hard to find the song that you are looking for. Maybe you know what song you
are looking for, you just need to get some information, like who it's by or what
album it's on. Just so you know what to ask for at the record store, right?
:)
Well, then mp3ext is just
for you. It’s a handy little program that will show you all that pertinent
information just by moving your mouse over the file. You can even change the
info easily, because it adds a tab to the properties dialog box of the file, and
there you can add or change the track information.
If you have a lot of music
on that computer, and it’s in a big mess, then mp3ext is just the
ticket!
Thanks again, and happy
downloading!
Troy
Got some spare brownie
points with the boss? Looking to kill some time? I found a ton of free
time-wasting games at http://www.candystand.com/.
Q: I'm running Windows 98 and am having
troubles with my mouse. It works fine for a while then it jumps from where I am
on the page all the way
down to the corner...any ideas? I run adware and
spyware scans and it
seems to be ok in that department. Not a huge deal, just
very annoying.
A: I'm going to make an assumption here ...
is this a laser mouse? If
so, what kind of surface are you using
it on? The reason why I ask
is that laser mice (also called optical
mice) are very sensitive when
it comes to the surfaces they're on. If
you're using something that
is shiny or reflective in any way, it can cause
these problems.
Here's a good way to test it out:
Grab a thin
t-shirt or something else that isn't reflective or shiny.
Use the mouse on
it and see if it continues to jump around. If it
doesn't, then you need
to change your mouse pad to something that has
a non-reflective
surface. There are mice pads that you can purchase
that are
specifically designed to work with laser mice.
If the mouse does continue
to jump around, I would recommend removing
all drivers that came with the
mouse and try re-installing.
Ed Engelking II
ed@thepcgurus.com
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