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Internet Safety Tips for Teens

GuestPost — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:55:00 +0000

It’s a wild world out there, and it can be especially dangerous for teens who are not yet equipped with the life experience necessary to protect themselves from the unknown. The Internet is no exception, as it presents a multitude of risky situations to teenagers from the seeming safety of “virtual” reality. What many teenagers don’t realize is that what happens on the Internet does not just stay on the Internet; it pervades real life and can cause some serious real life damage. Fortunately, there are some basic precautions teenagers can take to avoid some of the web’s common pitfalls. Here are some Internet safety tips for teens.

Watch what you share. Think twice before posting any personal information on social networking sites. You never know who might get a hold of that information. For example, never post your home address or personal telephone number; your friends should have that information already, and no one else needs to know. Also, don’t ever post about going on a vacation, as it is not a good idea to let the whole world know when your house will be empty, and for how long.

Site safety. Most creditable companies won’t ask for your social security number or credit card information without first verifying that they are who they say they are. When in doubt, ask an adult to research the company for you. Don’t ever just assume that a site is safe – especially a site that is asking for sensitive information.

Virtual strangers. It can be easy to feel that you are getting to know people you’ve never even met when you share conversations with them online, and the ease of Internet chat rooms makes sharing intimate conversations with virtual strangers a commonplace occurrence. However, it is never safe to assume that you know any more about the people on the other end of that chat than they want you to know. Keep in mind that the Internet is full of predators pretending to be people they aren’t – and they are preying on people like you, who might be too young to be suspicious. To protect your safety, don’t ever give out personal information in a chat room, or even in a private chat with someone you don’t know in real life, and never agree to meet someone from the Internet privately.

As a teenager, it is important that you are especially cautious when it comes to using the Internet. There are a lot of predators out there, waiting to take advantage of teens who only take things at face value, so you owe it to yourself (and to your family) to approach virtual reality with a suspicious eye and an interrogative mind.

About the Author: Ernie Bruley has 3 teens, all of whom had to listen to his safety lecture before they were allowed to use the web. Ernie is a computer pro who installs hard drive recovery software and makes simple home repairs.

5 Tips for Effectively Backing Up Your Hard Drive

GuestPost — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:50:16 +0000

If you are not backing up your computer’s hard drive, then you should be – and the statistics say so. Eight percent of hard drives fail at some point or another, and you could easily be that one out of twelve. Most likely (and this is my experience), that hard drive failure will occur right when you need your computer the most – like when you have an important deadline to meet for work, or during finals week at school. Trust me, it’s no fun having to compensate for the time and work lost when you lose your hard drive – not to mention the money. You can save yourself from this nightmare by simply backing up your data, and you might be surprised to find just how easy it is. Here are five tips for effectively backing up your hard drive:

Choose your backup device. You may opt to use either an external hard drive, or a flash drive. These days, flash drives come with so much memory for so little money, and are so easy to use, that they are probably your best bet.

Decide how much memory you need. If you look at your computer’s memory storage, you will know how much memory your flash drive (or external hard drive) needs to hold. This is relatively simple to do. For a Windows PC, simply right-click on the drive you which to back up (in the Windows menu), then choose Properties to find out how much memory the drive is taking up. For a Mac, click the hard disk icon, then (Command + i) to get the information you need.

Choose your data. As the old saying goes, better safe than sorry. I say back everything up, even if you are not sure how important it is to you. I once spent an entire afternoon searching my computer for a short story I’d written several months earlier, only to remember that I hadn’t backed up that folder before my hard drive crashed.

File backups versus mirror backups. A file backup is just as it sounds – it only backs up files. A mirror backup will cover not only your files, but also your entire operating system as well as any programs you choose. A mirror backup can save you a lot of time if your hard drive does crash, as one simple reinstall can have you up and running in a matter of minutes.

Choose a backup software. One of the best ways to choose a great backup software for your particular computer and operating system is to serve online for program reviews.

There you have it, a simple breakdown of hard drive backup basics. This should get you well on your way to protecting one of the most valuable assets you have: all of the data and hard work you have stored on your computer.

About the Author: Russell Ruark is a computer specialist who constantly does Mac data recovery and harddrive repair for those who forgot to make a backup. He recommends getting an external hard drive and making a copy at least once per month.

Western Digital and Seagate to reduce hard drive warranties in 2012

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:47:58 +0000

Seagate and Western Digital are reducing hard drive warranties for hard drives shipped next year.

Now is the time to buy hard drives to get your warranties locked in.

The Western Digital Scorpio Blue, Green and Caviar Blue will be available with only a two year warranty rather than the current three year warranty. WD will however allow you to have a better warranty if you would like to pay an additional fee.

The Seagate Barracuda XT, ES.2, Constellation 2, and Momentus XT hard drives ship with an awesome 5 year warranty. However in 2012 the warranties are expected to drop to three years. Most of Seagate’s hard drive lines are also seeing warranty cuts. The less expensive Barracuda, Barracuda Green and the 2.5-inch Momentus hard drives will ship with only a 12 months warranty.

These warranty changes are probably as a result of the flooding in Thailand which caused prices to soar. Maybe eventually prices will drop, but I doubt that warranties will ever creep up again.

4 Terabyte Hard Drives Announced by Hitachi

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:09:24 +0000

Hitachi has announced pricing and availability for their 4 terabyte internal and external hard drives. The 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 requires special software so that Windows, Apple and Linux can see it correctly. I hope the software doesn’t provide an overlay to make the systems see the hard drive because I remember how painful that was. The drive is a bit slow running at 5900rpm. You can also get this drive as an external with USB 3.0 to help with the transfers of the massive amounts of data that can be saved on the drive. You also get 3GB of cloud storage for anyone who purchases the drive. The Deskstar is supposedly available now for $399.99, but I couldn’t find it by searching Google. The external Touro drive will be available in January at a cost of $419.99.

Your Hitachi Hard Drive is now a Western Digital

admin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:21:12 +0000

Hitachi and Western Digital will soon be one company. The European Union regulators have given a conditional green light to Western Digital’s plans to buy Hitachi’s storage division for $4.3 billion. Western Digital is the second largest hard drive manufacturer and Hitachi is the third largest manufacturer of hard drives in the world. Seems like all of the hard drive manufacturers are consolidating. Seagate is the largest manufacturer of hard drives and it just purchased Samsung’s hard drive division in April. Regulators only approved the Western Digital’s purchase after assurances that the company would sell off some its plant assets, which includes a manufacturing plant as well as they need to transfer some intellectual property to the new division being put on the auction block. The final purchase will take place after Western Digital sells the necessary assets.

So basically we went from 4 to 2 hard drive manufacturers in under a year. This can only mean that competition will diminish and prices will go up even further. The floods earlier this year already caused manufacturing issues and created shortages of hard drives. This will only compound the problem.