IT and technology

This brief guide will tell you how to restore your Dell computer to Factory state, which includes all drivers, applications and settings.

If you own a fairly recent model of Dell desktop or laptop computer, most likely you have a Dell Recovery partition. It is usually hidden from the user and is not visible in the Windows Explorer, but can be found in the Disk Manager. This operation works on Dell Vostro, Inspiron, Optiplex, XPz, Latitude and other Dell computers.

1 - make a backup of your system. Even if it is infeted with a virus, not booting, has no files you care about - MAKE A BACKUP! It is often the case that only hours, days or a week later you will need something from the old installation. So make yourself a huge favor, buy a copy of Acronis True Image software a USB hard drive and make a full backup of the system.

2 - Once the backup is made (you did read the point #1 above and listened to the advise of a seasoned professional, right?), disconnect the backup drive and restart the computer.

3 - During restart, you will see Dell logo appear - start pressing F8 as the computer boots and you will be presented with a list of Advanced Boot Options.

4 - Select Repair Computer. You will see Windows recovery environment booting.

5 - Once presented with keyboard choice - select yoru keyboard layout and press Next

6 - Once presented with user and password screen, select your user, enter password and press Next

7 - On the next screen you will see various recovery and repair options and the last one will be - Dell Backup and Recovery manager. Click on it.

8 - in the drop down field you should see Dell Factory Image preselected for you, so all you need to do is press Next and wait about 5-15 minutes for recovery to take place.

9 - Enjoy your clean system!

For a while I have been using ZoneEdit as my DNS hosting service for name resolution. To those of you who have no idea what DNS is all about here is a very short intro: DNS (domain name system) is a Yellow Book of the internet – it matches names (such as www.google.com) to internet addresses such as (8.8.8.8) . Without DNS we would have no user friendly names for websites sites.

So, this perform this basic but very important function I have been using ZoneEdit – a company providing reliable DNS service. However a while back it announced that they have been acquired by DynDNS ( a competitor providing paid services) and will be moving to paid services for majority of its users. You see, DynDNS with their ridiculous prices could not grow while companies like ZoneEdit provided the same quality of service for free. So to remove the threat – they started buying them one by one.

Through a connection at the company just got a word of a massive data loss at the 000webhost.com with customers loosing their database and website files. Users postings about the issue on the support forum are being deleted and users banned for repetedly bring up the issue.

Early estimate is several hundred sites, but this may rise into thousands since most of websites are small and only have a few pages. Looks like a server may have died and the backup is not functional or corrupt.

The official reply from the company is that the data is permanently lost and can not be restored. Due to limits of liability, the hosting provider does not believe they did anything wrong.

Moral of the story - don't use cheap hosting and make backups.

Some people may be unpleasantly surprised to find out that they can't print any PDF file from Adobe Acrobat (paid version) after installing 9.4.2 update.  It appears that Adobe has missed a bug in their update release, which causes the program not to print PDF files (mostly to HP, network printers, but has been noticed to affect other printers as well).

You can fix it in two ways:

First the long way - Uninstall the Acrobat, resintall all updates except for 9.4.2

Second is the fast and easy way:

1.) go to the installation directory of Acrobat (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat)

2.) Look for the file "Adobe.Acrobat.Dependencies.manifest"

3.) Open it and delete the line <file name="atl.dll" />

4.) Reboot your machine after saving that file

This should fix the issue of being unable to print PDF file after installing 9.4.2 update for Adobe Acrobat.

As a photographer who is paranoid about the safety of my work, I’ve been looking for the best possible backup system for a while. I’ve tried it all – online backup companies such as Carbonite/Mozy , tried many types of external storage devices, custom built systems, etc.  At the end I’ve finalized the specification list for the ultimate digital content professional storage and backup system:

1.    Redundant hard drives
2.    Fast network transfer speeds
3.    Ability to automatically synchronize with device or service in a different geographical location
4.    Low power consumption
5.    Easily replaceable hard drives
6.    Support for Windows and Mac backups
7.    Support for Windows and Mac file browsing
8.    Access permissions
9.    Ability to back up the backup device
10.    Ability to access backups/files over the internet
11.    Ability to access images from networked TV to play slideshows for clients/friends
12.    Failure notification
13.    Ability to increase capacity on the fly

Surely this seems like a tall order for any system, but I have found just the perfect device line up by storage manufacturer QNAP, which makes these systems for home, small business and enterprise use. I have acquired two units from Amazon.com (the place with the lowest price and best return policy) – one single drive QNAP TS-119 Pro and a second one QNAP TS-259 Pro. (Full spec list of features)
Here is how and why QNAPs fit the bill:

1.    QNAP systems come with space from 1 to 8 hard drives. Each system supporting 2TB drives or larger. All models with 2 or more hard drives can be configured for RAID 0/1/5/6/5+hot spare. This allows one to configure the desired level of fault tolerance on the unit in order to safeguard the data.

2.    These units come with 1 Gigabit network adapters, in fact most of them come with 2 built-in network cards. These cards can be “teamed” to make a single super-fast connection (requires switch that supports this feature). To top it all off – QNAPs put more memory and faster processors in NAS devices than any other manufacturer at this price point. This combined with well written software results into very fast network transfer speeds. On a 2 drive unit TS-259 Pro I see sustained speeds of 60+ MB/s range with only a single gigabit connection in use. A single 7GB file can be copied in less than 2 minutes.

I was having major problems with streaming Netflix on our new Sony Bravia internet enabled TV recently. It used to work great, but at some point it started to take really long time to do “speed test” that Netflix uses to determine the compression level and picture quality your connection will support as well as load the movie itself. I’ve reset TV, removed TV from Netflix account, restarted firewall, restarted my cable modem, did speed tests, checked my cabling and switch…and more. At the end – everything looked right, but Netflix was still very slow to start the movie. After getting finally fed-up with the situation, I’ve decided to use network packet sniffer to capture traffic on my wired gigabit home network to see what TV was doing and why it was taking so long.

This lead to several interesting discoveries, which I’ll tell you about in a second, but, first – let me describe my home setup:

Cable modem<-> SonicWall<->gigabit switch<->Sony TV

As you can see – all the network traffic is flowing through the gigabit switch, to the sonicwall and then through the cable modem right out to the internet. One of the great features of the SonicWall firewalls, is that even in low end models like mine, they have enabled “network packet monitor” that shows you individual packets that are going through it. You can see every piece of data passing through your network in these “packets” and on occasion – you can derive some very interesting information about the network traffic itself.

But let’s get back to my Netflix streaming problem. Once I’ve configured the packet monitor to only show me data sent to and from my TV, I’ve quickly discovered that some DNS packets from the TV were dropped and as a result, the name resolution on TV would have problems.

Just ran into a small issue while trying to export JPEG files made from RAW files provuded by 25 megapixel Sony Alpha 900. Every time I've tried to save or export the JPEG, Picasa would say that there is a disk error or it's full. After trying a few things here and there the solution finally materialized - you need to run Picasa as an "Administrator".

To make this a permanent fix - right click on the Picasa icon, go to properties, go to Advanced and put a checkmark to always run the program as Administrator. Now you should have no problems exporting or saving files from Picasa!