It’s always a good idea to wipe clean your hard disk before you pass it on to someone. Can you just imagine the harm that someone could do if they got their hands on all your data? And this is even more the case if you’re passing it on to a complete stranger.

So, how do you get down to it? Deleting your files is a start; but it may surprise you to know that when you delete a file, your computer doesn’t actually delete it; it just deletes a pointer to it and marks the space as available. There are a number of tools on the market that let you undelete files; so you really need something a bit more aggressive; something that permanently wipes the data by overwriting it with garbage. One such product is Drivescrubber, a specialised product that overwrites your data up to 100 times. No way anyone can retrieve your data after that. Drivescrubber is currently on sale for around $10. That’s not a high price to be paying for securing your data.

There are a number of options for taking backups of your work, ranging from online options, all the way to network attached storage on your own network. All the options have different capabilities and different prices. I don’t think an online option would be ideal in this case though. Your files are bound to be too big to take advantage of online storage.

A good idea would be to get yourself a large internal disk that you can store all your files on. I just found one on sale at Buy.com that just might fit the bill for you. It’s the Hitachi SimpleTech Desktar Hard Drive and you get 2 Terabytes of space for under $170. It’s pretty astounding how cheap storage space is getting nowadays and getting this sort of disk you can take advantage of all that space right at your fingertips. It’s a 3.5″ drive, so you’ll need a caddy if you don’t have the right slot available in your machine. So make sure you check what’s available. The disk has free shipping, so might as well avail yourself of the offer.

I had to do some reading up on this to tell you the truth, as I had no idea that Adobe Reader used Javascript. Turns out it’s quite easy to turn off, and if you come across a document that really needs it, you can always turn it back on again. Here’s what you do.

• Start Adobe Reader
• Click on the Edit menu
• Click on Preferences
• Click on Javascript in the left-hand column
• Untick the box labelled: Enable Acrobat Javascript
• Click OK to save the changes

Pretty simple really, if you know where to look; so if you start seeing strange things when you open a PDF document, like a popup taking you to a colon cleansing website; try turning Javascript off to see if it cures the problem.

Turns out that it is possible to upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Premium. The downside is that you won’t be able to use the Upgrade wizard to this this. Instead you’ll have to perform a clean installation of Windows 7 and reinstall all your applications from scratch.

Take a backup of all your files and data, wipe your disk and perform the installation. You’ll then need to install your applications again and install your data. Please make sure you back up all your data before you do this, so to make sure you have a complete copy of everything; you don’t want to be losing your alli review or high school assignments .. that is, if that’s what you have on your machine.

This is caused by a part of Windows XP that lets you display a web page on your desktop. Web pages are designed to be viewed in a browser though and I’m pretty sure most web designers never test their pages in this way. It does give you extra functionality that an image can’t offer; however you need to know how to remove it. Taking it away is actually quite simple; clicking on the page itself will show a border around it, and click on the X in the top-right corner will get rid of the page. Pretty simple huh? I wish it was that easy to get some allergy relief, but well, thank goodness for anti-histamines

UAC (User Account Control) is a mechanism to alert you that a program is requesting elevated permissions to perform some sort of function. Most programs run with a normal level, so this shouldn’t be appearing whenever you run a program. If you’re certain you don’t need any prompting when a program starts up, you can disable these prompts by giving the program full permission. Here’s what you do:

1. Right-click on the program and choose Properties
2. Click on the Compatibility tab
3. Click the box labelled “Run this program as an administrator”
4. Click OK to save the changes
5. Confirm in UAC you are happy to make this change

And there you have it. Don’t forget that UAC is really there to protect you, much like fastin helps you keep in shape. You should only turn it off when you’re sure you trust a program, but I can understand your frustration of having to give a program the all-clear over and over again.

There’s a bug in Windows that causes this to happen at times. There are a few reasons why this can happen, but here are the most common three:

• You upgrade a computer to Windows Vista or install Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
• You install or uninstall CD or DVD recording programs.
• You uninstall Microsoft Digital Image.

There’s an Knowledge Base article on Microsoft’s website that has a program that an fix the problem for you. Just head down to the article and see if it will do the trick. There’s a fix for Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, which means the problem can occur in any of those operating systems.

It’s fairly easy to fix so head down to the website, click on Fix this problem, light up one of your Dutch Master and let your computer do the work.

There are two different kinds of backup. One is to copy files one by one and the other is to make an exact copy of the hard disk. Copying files only requires the amount of space the the files take up and some backup programs can reduce this using compression. You can make this type of backup manually as you describe by copying folders onto a DVD or external hard disk. Dedicated backup software, such as Comodo Backup, can make incremental backups where only the files changes since the last backup are copied, which can save time and storage space.

These backups make sure that documents are safe but an exact copy of the hard disk saves time if there is a problem with Windows. The copy can be restored to the hard disk, returning it to the exact state it was when the backup was made.

The ideal is to use both kinds of backup. This 2-factor approach means that you can recover single files, or the whole hard disk if you need. The exact copy of the disk only needs to be made every few months and the file copy backup more regularly.

I hope this clears things up.

This question came from someone I knew who was off to Florida for a few days taking the family and himself for a much needed break. Anyway, the question didn’t contain much information, but I do know that in order to back up MySQL you can use mysqldump which is a backup program for MySQL.

Here’s a cute little script that will backup and Zip up your database:

#!/bin/sh
date='date -I'
mysqldump -u <username> -p <password> <database> | gzip -a > /home/mysql-backup/database-$date.sql.gz


where

<username> is a user who has access to the database
<password> is the password for this user
<database> is the name of the database that needs to be backed up

The script will save the backup with a timestamp so if you need to run this more than once it will make sure each database has a unique name.

There are a few desktop management tools out there that can help you schedule the job, but cron will do just fine. And next time you go on one of those Disney vacations, please, please .. can I come with you?