No matter what Best Buy’s Geek Squad, or Circuit City’s Firedog tell you, it’s very simple to make recovery cd’s or dvd’s. All you need are a few blank DVD-R’s or CD-R’s, and a little time. It takes no more than 5 minutes of user-input to start the process and insert blank discs as required.

HP’s recovery CD creator can be located by clicking the Windows Vista ‘Start’ Button >> ‘All Programs’ >> ‘Recovery Manager’ >> ‘Recovery Media Creator’. Double-click ‘Recovery Media Creator’, then follow the instructions on the screen. Basically, all you need to do is open the CD tray, put in a blank DVD and click ‘Next’. The burning process could take up to 3 hours, so you don’t want to start the process if you’re pressed for time. Click the images below for a larger view.

1) HP’s recovery CD creator can be located by clicking the Windows Vista ‘Start’ Button > ‘All Programs’ > ‘Recovery Manager’> ‘Recovery Media Creator’. Double-click ‘Recovery Media Creator’.

2) The program will calculate the number of CD’s or DVD’s necessary to create the recovery image. In this case I am using DVD+R format. It doesn’t matter which brand you use.

3) The disc is recognized as DVD+R. Now just click ‘next’.

4) The DVD burning process has started. You’ll need to be very patient - collecting the files and burning the discs could take up to 2 more hours. The tray will pop-out and the program will prompt you to insert a blank disk when a disc is done recording. Once it’s finished, just click ‘ok’, and you’re all done!

I don’t know. I think that the website itself does not cause problems, but the associated sites that offer free templates and customization probably do have spyware/adware as part of the deal. In other words, just visiting MySpace won’t hurt your computer, but logging in a downloading programs from other pages designed for MySpace is probably not a good idea.

It’s great to have a computer guy you can trust. In today’s world you have no option but to understand technology yourself, or pay someone who does. But what if you could be more self-reliant, without actually knowing any more about technology than you do now?

Enter Zonbu, the data-safe, environmentally-safe, compact PC that runs on open-source (non-Microsoft) software. What’s so unique about it? Well it’s not really the product itself that is remarkable, but the concept. It’s one of the first commercially available computers that is sold with a contract, similar to a Cellular phone. $99 gets you the device, then you choose a plan and sign a 2-year contract — sound familiar?

Now, why would anyone want yet another monthly bill to worry about? That’s a good question, and therein lies the reason to why this type of product could replace me, the traditional ‘computer tech’. Consumers are paying for data security or recovery, privacy protection, online safety, etc. Significantly fewer people are really paying to have the physical hardware repaired as it is becoming more disposable each year. The parallel between cell phones and subscription based products like the Zonbu is that it’s not about the device — it’s about the service. Why waste time and money dealing with computer techs, when you could have prevented the problem in the first place?

In the future, I predict that this is the biggest change we will see in computing. Sure, technology will improve, but moreover, people will start improving how technology works with people.

Read more about this topic in this article by Matt Hartley.

One of my friends recently told me about a customer of a big box store. Apparently, he bought a new computer or his old computer died, so he wanted to transfer his favorites from Internet Explorer to another PC. Of course, the tech were more than happy to charge him more than a hundred dollars to perform this exceedingly difficult task ; ) Although they did have trouble figuring out how to get the files to a floppy disk! The moral of the story is don’t use Internet Explorer (that’s always the first rule) and secondly, download Firefox and install Foxmarks.

The Foxmarks add-in for Mozilla Firefox Web Browser is a very nifty little program. It really accomplishes two things at the same time. First off, it makes a back-up of your favorites or bookmarks every time you close your browser. As soon as you create your free account name and password, it uploads your data to a remote server and creates a sync file that it uses to compare your local file to the remote file. Secondly, it will keep your bookmarks consistent across multiple computers, even on a Mac. When you install it on a new computer, it will ask if you want to keep, discard or merge your bookmarks, and that’s it! No more paying someone else to retrieve your bookmarks.

Remember when you could watch the little rectangular segments move around on your screen when you ran a defrag on the hard drive? Good old Windows 98. Well, those days of being hypnotized by the defragmentation process have been replaced by ominous Windows Vista messages such as,”This may take a few minutes to a few hours…”

But there are alternatives! Enter the new, free Deffragler program from the makers of CCleaner. To be honest I’ve only used it once, but hey, it’s got little segmented blocks for indicating drive fragmentation and a progress indicator (i.e 50% completed). Try it out. It’s so much more satisfying to run. Plus you can choose which files you want to defragment, or just defrag them all!