Tips and Tricks-December 2004

I am always happy and surprised when I find more tips and tricks for Windows XP. Keep in mind that I don’t find this stuff on my own (at least not always), but I find little tidbits here and there in newspapers and magazines that pique my interest and take care of some annoying, but not devastating, problem.

From Smart Computing magazine, I picked up this one. Because I work in two different offices, I use MSN Messenger to keep in touch with one of my assistants and also with my husband while we’re both at work. With two offices and a home computer, I have to start Messenger three times a day. If any of you use it, you know that not only the Messenger window opens up, but also the MSN Today window.

The stories don’t interest me much most of the time (I’m not very interested in Brittany Spears or fixing my fashion faux pas) so it’s just one more thing to do before I can start working. Can you keep the window from opening--sure enough, if you go to Tools, Options in the MSN Messenger window and click on the General tab, you will find a check box that lets you turn off the MSN Today display. Un-check it to get rid of the window.

A simple way to get rid of an annoyance, but why didn’t I discover it sooner? For the same reason that most of us don’t use all the capabilities of the operating system or the software applications—I learn what I need in order to do what I want to do and never go any further. The worst part is that I keep doing the same thing.

I recently decided to be brave and upgrade two of my work computers to Service Pack 2. I am not so brave that I wanted to do the upgrade without backing up my files. Most of the applications I use at work are standard enough that I wasn’t too worried about having to re-install them if anything went wrong. I decided it was time to try using the backup tool in Windows XP. I recently purchased a 120 gig external hard drive and thought it might be nice to try that out also.

You can find the backup tool by going to Start, Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance, Back up your data. A wizard starts up and you can use that if you like.

It will step you through setting up the back up. It appears to not allow you to select your drive C: for the backup, however when you select browse at the point in the dialog where you are asked to specify the back up location you can pick just about anywhere.

If you want to do a little more customization, select the Advanced Mode.

You are present with some additional wizards and selections that allow you to select the files and settings to be back up with a more precision. There is also a wizard that will create a floppy with your system settings and put the remainder of the backup on other media. The advanced mode allows you to create a schedule for backing up.

I was only interested in backing up the data files, email, word documents and the like, along with some programs that I have downloaded.

First, I set up the external hard drive, a Maxtor One Touch drive. The directions say to install the software before connecting the drive, which I did. The drive installed without incident—Windows XP recognized it as soon as I turned it on. Because the drive is USB 2.0 and the computer has a USB 2.0 port, the back up was reasonably fast. It also compressed the data so that it took up slightly less space than the total space of the original files. I had to back up a second computer with USB 1.1 to the same external hard drive and it took three times longer for a similar amount of data.

Both installations of Service Pack 2 went fine and I did not need to do a restore from the external hard drive. I certainly felt a lot more confident about the process because I had done the back up. Of course, there is this little voice in the back of my head saying, “You never had to restore the data so how do you know if the back up actually worked?” You may hear more about that later. In the meantime, I am pledging that I will try to explore the software I buy and install on my computers.

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Copyright 2005

Banner Photo by Charles Scamahorn