What is the Best Backup for Windows in a Small Home or Office? (SOHO)
This is the question I asked myself over two years ago. At the time I recommended the SynologyDS210j and I still would if they made it!
It’s now been replaced by the DS212j, that’s it on the left.
This though, is essentially the same as my old one and in fact, in appearance it’s the same. My DS210j has functioned perfectly for well over two years. It just sits there, quietly doing its own thing and has never let me down.
My friend has just bought a D-Link ShareCenter 2 Bay Cloud Network Storage Enclosure since they didn’t want to spend so much…
It’s less than half the price of the Synology and tomorrow evening, I get to set it up!
The specifications, included software, and operating system functionality are almost identical to my Synology. You know, stuff like media server, web server, iTunes server, backup drive, security camera monitoring, the list goes on..!
The reviews, however, say that it is noisy, though my friend says this isn’t an issue since it’s going in a cupboard with the router and internet gateway. It does seem to have a smaller fan than my little white cutie, so that could be it.
Some reviewers had difficulty setting it or its software up. Well actually, I’ve had a few difficulties myself with the DSM software from Synology – if you’ve not done things like this before, it can be difficult and confusing. It’s not Windows after all!
So, watch this space. I’ll get back later when it’s all done.
What is the Best Backup for Windows in a Small Home or Office? Which Windows Backup? A History. Over the years I’ve tried many systems for backing up crucial Windows data. Currently for small-scale backups I use the ubiquitous and almost bullet-proof flash drives, my current one tipping the scales at 8Gb. But for major...
Another day, another Microsoft security alert.. This morning, another raft of advisories arrived in my mail from Secunia, this is one; Internet Explorer Data Binding Memory Corruption Vulnerability This rivetting title is like deja-vu. Time and again we’ve seen this. This is the fault of a company, Microsoft, that puts form before function, functionality before...
For some time now, any web page that uses Flash has resolutely refused to work correctly in the Chrome browser for me. I use Windows 8 – 64 bit. Amazingly it all works fine in Firefox, 64-bit Firefox Nightly, Opera, IE10 in 32 & 64 bit incarnations….?
The solution from the chrome help page, is to enable Flash from the plugins menu. You type this the address bar to get show all the plugins.
chrome://plugins/
Chrome Plugins Normal
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work!
Checking the plugin, I see it is apparently working alright! See the screenshot.
Testing, Testing
I decided to try a “flip” – turning off Flash still didn’t make it work – and neither did it work when I turned it back on. There’s an Enable/Disable toggle link for this which you can see in the screenshot.
But then, in the top right of the plugins screen, I spied a “detail” link! So I clicked it to expand it – and all is revealed!
Chrome Plugins Expanded
Problem Solved!
Adobe Flash Now Working
The issue is that there are two Flash plugins; one is the default “pepper” that comes with Chrome; the other is installed manually and works in all other browsers.
The solution, after a little trial and error, is to disable the native, cross-platform Flash player, “Pepper”, and to enable the manually installed, most-recent, version. It still won’t work if Pepper is enabled and the installed version disabled. The Adobe Flash test page now works in Chrome, as you can see.
Below is a screenshot of how it should look (well for me at least!) to get it all working properly.
Testing Firefox 64-bit Right Now! Actually, I tried the 64 bit installs of Firefox and Internet Explorer soon after I installed this Windows 7 64 bit Operating System. They were both pants and summarily removed from my hard drives and I haven’t revisited for over 2 years…. But now things seem on the up. 64-bit...
Possibly More Cool Than You Think It Will Be With the tag-line “Possibly More Cool Than You Think It Will Be”, Browser Ball is a demonstration of the work going on at Google specifically at their new Chrome web browser. See this page. It’ll also take you to some other demonstrations of the Chrome Experiments. ...
FTC Permanently Stops Six Operators from Using Fake News Sites that Allegedly Deceived Consumers about Acai Berry Weight-Loss Products
Above is the FTC’s own headline from a news release yesterday. The story is that they’ve hammered six operators of fake news sites into making settlements that surrender their assets. They’ve also halted the six operations plus those of four others, making ten by my calculation!
What Is a Fake News Site?
Do you really need to ask? !! (These are for news7digest, see more below on this!).
Anyone who even casually browses the web will have seen these news exposes, quite often advertised down the right side on Facebook and in banner adverts on even the most sensible of websites – like this one, say!
How the adverts work is that they are paid for by the operators. They deliberately pay to get premium visibility slots, using Google often, but not exclusively.
The fake news site itself will be plastered with well known icons of top companies (like CNN, BBC, CBC, ABC, Google even!) and purport to be a serious investigation by a journalist into whatever the scam may be. A short list of such scams that we’ve revealed here are:
…produces several links to the actual Channel 4 in the UK, and the scam site….
This shows the deliberate, deceptive and despicable way in which the site name has been chosen to closely imitate a legitimate and bona-fide news organisation. Fraud, in other words – as the definition says – “an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual”
Amazingly, if you click the link several times, each effort takes you to one of three different landing pages for a new site, the actual fake news site of,
news7digest.com
This shows up in the header image in two, but confusingly is called Consumer Reporter in the other! They are all visually quite different.
The three screenshots near the top of this article are indeed the three fake news sites which you’ll land on by clicking on channel4online.co.uk.
Here they are again, to save you scrolling:
Conclusion
Is this the end of the fake news sites? Well, obviously not.
They are still very very current and still very very visible. The highly photoshopped images adorn well known websites to the point of irritation. However, the settlement was only yesterday. The note on the FTC statement goes on the say;
A settlement order is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by the defendant that the law has been violated. Settlement orders have the force of law when approved and signed by the District Court judge.
Despite this, it appears the six defendants are caving in as no appeals have been launched. They are and the details of the settlements are as follows:
Ricardo Jose Labra Labra’s $2.5 million judgment will be suspended when he pays $280,000 and records a $39,500 lien on his home.
I see it as a warning shot. The actual wording of the terms against the six goes as follows. It’s quite onerous and specific, I think, which means that these News7Digest screenshots at the top of this posting put the operators in deep doggy do if they don’t get their act together pronto. The highlights are mine.
As part of its ongoing crackdown on bogus health claims, the proposed settlements will require that the six operations make clear when their commercial messages are advertisements rather than objective journalism, and will bar the defendants from further deceptive claims about health-related products such as the acai berry weight-loss supplements and colon cleansers that they marketed.
The defendants also are required to disclose any material connections they have with merchants, and will be barred from making deceptive claims about other products, such as the work-at-home schemes or penny auctions that most of them promoted. The settlements also require that these defendants collectively pay roughly $500,000 to the Commission because their advertisements violated federal law. This money amounts to most of their assets.
A Sample of My Previous Posts Mentioning Fake News Websites
This all proves that what I and others are saying is wrong – and the FTC is proving it! Virtually everything that the scammers do the FTC has now taken issue with and imposed heavy penalties. It’s now, as they say, case law, as well as being the law of the land. Let’s hope that Willms who chucked his power derived from ill-gotten wealth at me making me pull a page or two for a time, gets his just deserts – sometime this year would be nice.
Just Think Media Settles With Google Over Trademark Infringement Last year Jesse Willms threw the lawyer dogs at me which forced me to pull some posts. I’d been calling him a scammer which was obviously in clear contradiction of his (now public) self-vision as a charitable philanthropist. However yesterday, Google, who had originally sued 50...
PreScript Advice If you think you’ve had your bank ‘cleaned out’ by any of a multitude of ‘life cleanse’ or ‘colon cleanse’ type internet scams, there is only one real remedy… Ask for a charge-back against the company through you credit card company. Your reason, when asked, is that the company has either: Not adhered...
I’ve finally decided to test the next Windows edition, probably to be called Windows 8, although things like that are never certain in Microsoft-land.
Virtual Box
Win8 Dev VirtualBox Installation
I did a Virtual Box install, which is fairly straightforward. There are many tutorials on-line now which show how to do this, so I won’t do a walk-through. I installed the 64-bit version which I downloaded from MSDN using my licence. You can get the installs from the Microsoft Website here, which come in ISO format. You can also find out more from the horse’s mouth here.
You can also set aside a partition on your hard-drive and install to that. However, Virtual Box is the safe way to go should the partition install fail and corrupt your current installation somehow.
What I will say, is to use more memory allocation to the virtual installation than recommended elsewhere or as the default, and to use as many virtual processors as your host machine has.….. My machine is an AMD 955BE, which is quad-core running at around 3GHz. In other words, if you don’t want it to run like treacle, give it plenty processor and memory room; at least the recommended values for Windows 7. You can see all of this in the VirtualBox settings screenshot above.
Fast Install (added 24/11/11))
Windows 7 vs. Windows 8 time to upgrade
Microsoft, on their MSDN blog, have made a big thing about the rapid installation for Windows 8, particularly for the upgrade route. See Improving the setup experience. I can say now that the clean install into the VirtualBox environment was very fast….
Briefly:
You make a virtual machine in Virtual Box
You set it’s parameters – processors, memory size, footprint size, IDE/SATA storage etc
You set the downloaded ISO image to boot from in the settings.
You boot by “Starting” the virtual machine.
You install Windows into the filespace that you’ve previously set aside for it – I gave it a dynamic sized 50Gb.
After that, let windows do it’s thing. It took 10 minutes or so.
Let it reboot.
Win8 Dev Loggged On Screen
Following this, you get a green screen from which country specifics are added, a username and finally, you enter your Live.com identity, if you have one, and if you want to!
Appearance
It’s a big green screen. I don’t have a touchscreen, but it’s obviously designed for one. It has massive buttons to a host of online services like weather & stocks, plus a few to your computer’s functions.
Win8 Dev Logon Screen
If you log off, you get presented with an American Rockies vista of a lonely winding road. Essentially, the entry into Windows 8 is like a smartphone. But what’s it like beneath the surface?
Windows 7 Legacy, and Vista Too!
Win8 Dev Double Click Control Panel Screen
Obviously, this is a development preview release, and we can expect more of the same to come.
Win8 Dev Double Click Explorer Screen
But most work has gone onto the main intro screen because beneath the surface, all the various apps and settings controls are the old (current) Windows 7 interface.
Bizarrely, some screens even have vestiges of the green Vista, notably the main screen itself.
Personally, I think it’s very, very dour. I can’t believe that two years of effort has gone into doing something that Android does on a more than twice-annual cycle….
Win8 Dev Left Corner Hover Screen
Accessing the menus is the most unintuitive thing I’ve seen for ages! Following on from the impressive Windows 7, it’s truly not just a user let-down, but somewhat infuriating as well……. Whereas previously I just typed into the run bar to do almost anything, now I can’t even find programs or files! No doubt there’s a way – but after Win7, it’s not intuitive and not helpful either.
I hope that’s not the end of the run box, because that feature in Windows 7 is awesome.
Control Panel
Win8 Dev Double Click Control Panel Screen
I haven’t checked through many apps (except a few desktop ones like the weird child-like paint thing and the weather which won’t do anywhere except California) but this is the control panel.
Win8 Dev Control Panel More Settings Screen
You then drill-down to get the old Win7 control panel on “More Settings”.
Initial Investigation Ends
Well that’s it for now. To say I’m un-impressed by the big green monstrous front doesn’t give my opinion justice. There doesn’t appear to be an easy way out of the front-screen apps and to have an app made for a 3-inch screen sat on a 23 inch desktop monitor really demonstrates the infantile apps for what they are.
Way back in the nineties Microsoft tried their in-house Microsoft Network (MSN) which was a disc install that gave you a black desktop that gave dial-up access to features giving almost the same as this big green toy-town monster.
Windows 7 Ultimate Install To say that I’m seriously impressed is an understatement! Having an MSDN subscription confers certain benefits, but for most Microsoft stuff that I have to use, it’s usually an exercise in teeth-gritting somewhere from the banal to the infuriating as I plod on through. My personal experience of Vista comes into...
How to Convert a Windows 7 Dynamic Disk to Basic Disk When Microsoft says It’s Irreversible! Firstly, Do Not Dance with the Devil! I made the mistake (again!) of trying dynamic disks with my new Windows 7 installation. I must have been asleep – the use of this system is seriously frowned upon for most...
Decent people everywhere will be appalled to learn that the charity Mencap recently sponsored an award at the first ever ERSA Employability Awards. ERSA are the trade body who were formed in 2005 to lie on behalf of the money … Continue reading → […]
The Civil Service Rank and File Network have called a rally outside the PCS conference this week to demand action from the union on the vicious benefit sanctioning regime. Benefit sanctions are set to become a huge issue for public … Continue reading → […]
