One Reason to Buy an iMac

Over at Gizmodo, there’s a Photoshop mock up about the next iMac. You do remember what the iPhone looks like right? Well, imagine a much larger one for a screen. It looks pretty! If iMacs weren’t so expensive, this would be one reason I would buy one, for that nice shiny screen!

Okay, so that wouldn’t be the only reason to buy one. There are plenty of other reasons to buy an iMac and one of them would be because Microsoft is bringing Windows down with its newest release, Vista. Hasta la Vista right?

Mobile Widget Service for the iPhone

Plusmo is a free mobile widget service. They offer a start page for cell phones. For you iPhone users, it has been optimized for the iPhone and have thousands of widgets available.

I tried this out by creating a widget for my blog. Of course, I don’t own an iPhone, but after creating the widget, it shows me a preview of what it looks like on the iPhone. Makes me wish I had one. Click the iPhone below to subscribe on your iPhone or another cell phone if you don’t own an iPhone!

Google Phone

Supposedly, Google seems to be creating a mobile phone to help with mobile ad distribution. It sounds like it will be a free service, which will include advertisements.

Even though many people don’t like advertisements, I think The ‘Gphone’ would be very popular in that it would be a free service. I don’t know about everyone else, but I would like a free mobile service. This could mean I could take all of my e-mail with me since I have all of my accounts going to my main Gmail account.

Will this mean a drop in the iPhone’s popularity? I don’t think it will right now, but eventually, it could.

Hard Drive Failing?

Well, after my previous entry, BSOD & NTLDR Is Missing, I turned on my monitor this morning and there’s that blue screen again and my hard drive magically disappeared. Now, I know I did not bump my case since then, so it can’t be that a cable is loose. But, I open up my case, push the cables in, start up and there’s my hard drive.

Maybe it’s the cable? Maybe it’s the hard drive? I don’t know yet, because my hard drive started clicking and then Windows locked up and displayed a blue screen. There was no file on the blue screen this time. I decided to not start Windows back up again, because that’s the second time I’ve heard this clicking and I read somewhere that you could possibly lose any chance of backing up files. Although, maybe that’s their way of getting new customers.

The only files that are important to me right now on that hard drive are my e-mails. I haven’t had a chance to export them.

There are a couple of blog entries over at Geeks Are Sexy that discuss recovering files if your hard drive has failed. I don’t know if I would ever try this unless I was really sure (told by an expert) that my hard drive doesn’t have a chance of recovering files any other way. Supposedly, if no other method of recovering files works and you really need those files, putting your hard drive in the freezer gives you a few minutes. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem to give you long enough unless you only have just a few files to backup. This may not work for everyone.

Note: Geeks Are Sexy moved to www.geeksaresexy.net, the entries above are on the old blog.

BSOD & NTLDR Is Missing

First off, yes, it’s Friday the 13th. I’m not very superstitious on this date, but I’ve also never had anything horrible happen on this date either. Until today. Note, I didn’t even know today was the 13th until after the following happened:

Last night I backed up Windows. (Lucky me, or subconsciously I knew something would happen.) This morning, I open up my desk, turn on my monitor to find a blue screen, something I don’t see often. I scan it, seeing something about scsiport. I didn’t pay too much attention to it, since I know blue screens happen, but I did figure that scsiport has to do with hard drives. So I restarted the computer to find “NTLDR is missing”!

That’s no big deal I thought, I backed up Windows last night. I load Norton Ghost, clicked on Recover My Computer and I see two hard drives. Two hard drives? Where’s the third? I check the sizes, 160GB and 80GB, but no 250GB. I start panicking even though I have a backup, because that hard drive is only a year or less old! And, I had bought it because my 80GB always had problems when Windows was on it. I don’t even use it for backups, only temporary backups. Looking at the list of backups I have, this is where I notice that it’s Friday the 13th.

My next step was to check the BIOS and find my hard drive. No 250GB hard drive there. Only two hard drives available. So, I e-mail David telling him what happened and he says a cable may have come loose. So, the next thing to do is to check the cable. If that doesn’t work, replace the cable. If that doesn’t work, cry because my hard drive is gone!

I checked the cables of all my hard drives to make sure they aren’t loose. Started up the computer and the hard drive was there again. I was happy! I just didn’t understand how the cable could become loose, but then again, I’ve had a cable on my motherboard come loose before. I may have bumped my case and nothing happened until later I guess.

Anyway, let that be a lesson to everyone who doesn’t make backups. If this happened to you and your drive actually died, what would you do without a backup and all your files are gone? Online backup solutions are available.