"Tips and Tricks to Get The Most Performance
From Your Computer System" Part 1

Complete Transcript of
Jeremy Buck - Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
November 22 2008

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers we are starting a new series of interviews entitled, "Tips and Tricks to Get the Most Performance From Your Computer System." Our guest Today is Jeremy Buck, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Jeremy.

Jeremy:  Thanks again for having me, Alan.

Alan:  Well, Jeremy, when you think about it your computer system is very much like your car. As long as you perform all the proper maintenance it’s going to give you years of good service. But if you don’t, it’s going fail at some unexpected time.

Computers have reached the point where they are easy to use and because all the technology that goes on behind the scenes, it doesn’t take very much to keep the computer from running smoothly. When they run, they run well, but when they start getting flaky, it’s really difficult to know what to do.

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right. Performing just your regular software maintenance – virus scans, backups, defrags, all the like is very important.

Alan:  Well, let’s just start with the desktop. A lot of people have a desktop computer and they kind of push it underneath their desk and they don’t think anything about it; because they can get to the CD/Rom and they can see all the fancy lights on the front, but they don’t realize that the fact that the computer is sitting up underneath the desk and the effect of that is that dust bunnies are coming out of the woodwork and going into the computer, aren’t they?

Jeremy:  It’s very easy to forget about the mechanical parts of the machine because it’s such a virtual environment that you are working in. Both sides, both the mechanical, and the virtual all need a little touch of maintenance every once in awhile.

Alan:  When you’re looking at the back of the computer you have fans in the computer; you have fans that both such the air into the computer and they blow the hot air out of the computer. If that is not flowing exactly right, you’re going to have major problems, aren’t you?

Jeremy:  Yes. Overheating is one of the leading causes of corruption and disk loss. It’s right up there, certainly say in the top ten.

Alan:  When we take a look at someone’s computer and the first thing I do is open it up and you would be amazed at you would be amazed at all the dust that has accumulated around the fans and in some cases the fan can’t even turn the blades.

Jeremy:  It’s astounding. It’s interesting that we’re talking about this and I just opened up my case on my old XP machine and after having not done so for the past five or six months and in just that time, the accumulation of dust was horrendous!

Alan:  Well, we’re talking about something that seems as silly as "dust bunnies" in a computer system, but I’ve seen people that actually go out and buy a new computer system because their computer shuts off periodically and they have no idea why it does that and every time maybe the computer system shuts off, it corrupts the operating system.

The only thing that is wrong with it is that there is no airflow which means that the CPU and maybe the disk drives run hotter than what they are supposed to. This is just little tip that a lot of people don’t even think about and it may save the life of their computer system by just making sure that they have proper air ventilation of their computer system.

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right. Any area where you can just open up the flow of air around a machine and you’re going to do that much better. We’re moving into faster fans or larger fans to increase the air flow and just keep the machines from overheating. Some people are even going the liquid cooled route, but that’s certainly a very important scenario.

Alan:  What you really need to do (just periodically when you’re thinking about it) first of all is to turn your computer off and make sure it shuts down properly. And then you need to unplug the computer, because with most of the new computers the motherboard stays on all the time. If you start picking that up and start moving around, there’s still voltage on the motherboard.

And then disconnect the power cord from the back of the computer and then take the vacuum cleaner and basically vacuum out the fan blades and it will make it run a lot smoother, won’t it?

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right and you actually brought up a huge point. It’s easiest to learn from other people’s mistakes. Going through my learning phase in terms of machines, I’ve certainly thought that I had it all down to a science. I tried “monkeying around” with pulling cards out and swapping things out on a motherboard where the power was still going to it and I ended up shorting out just about everything I could. Please do not do that.

Alan:  That’s a hard lesson to learn and on that same train of thought, shutting down a computer and people think, "Well, if I basically just pull the plug of the computer of if I have it on a switch that has multiple outlets where I plug my computer in and I just turn the switch off, I’m just shutting down my computer." Well, the Microsoft Windows Operating Systems do not like to be shut down that way, do they?

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right. You can incur a few bad scenarios and usually it will err on the side of bringing back the system with a minor bit of maintenance to get it back in line. However, it’s always worse to be in that small percentage of people that just can’t bring that machine to life.

Alan:  And in the best possible scenario if you do that, more than likely when you turn your computer back on again it’s going to run Scandisk, which takes a lot of time and you don’t want to abort a Scandisk, you want it to go completely through, because Windows is saying "There’s a reason why I’m asking you to run Scandisk."

If it’s trying to write to the hard drive at the time that you basically pull the plug, you don’t know what has been written to the hard drive at that point – because computers keep a residual amount of electricity. They are like a whole bunch of capacitors in there and they store up so just because you pull the plug, that write head is still going to have enough energy to keep writing!

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right. It’s a common misconception to think that you can just yank the power if the machine is not actively doing something. But this misconception leads to trouble when you consider that there are often times a lot of processes going on in the background and there things loaded up into memory that are going to be impacted by the loss of power.

Alan:  Well, one of the rules that I always tell everybody at the PC User’s Group is that if you have a desktop computer, you need a UPS for that desktop computer. Otherwise, you may have the scenarios is that the power goes off and because you don’t have a UPS so does your computer go off right in the middle of "who knows what?"

Jeremy:  That’s a great point. You can also save yourself a lot of grief of going through a complete blackout or even a brownout by having a UPS device. Essentially, if all power fails and your UPS is active and plugged in your computer doesn’t miss a beat; it simply goes over to this battery power source so it doesn’t just shut down.

How long you have on that battery life can make a difference, but at least it will afford you the chance to safely shut down instead of having to go through this detrimental, forceful kind of cut-off to the machine that can sometimes hurt the environment.

Alan:  And speaking of UPSs, you want to makes sure you have a strong enough UPS to give yourself at least ten minutes to shut down the computer correctly. And you do not - you do not want plug a printer into UPS, ever!

Jeremy:  Right. You are just draining that much more power!

Alan:  We had one computer that periodically and for no reason whatsoever, it would just shut down. The UPS would not keep it up and it would just shut down and crash. Well, we happened to be standing over there one time and I heard gurgle, gurgle, gurgle - POW! They had brought in one of these water coolers and plugged it into the wall, not realizing that that line was actually tied to a dedicated UPS. When the water cooler turned on it was just enough to crowbar the UPS. So, you don’t want anything else on that UPS, other than your computer and your monitor.

Jeremy:  That’s it, that’s it; you’ve got it!

Alan:  It makes a big difference on that because you want that time to be able to shut down correctly.

Jeremy:  Yes, that "last safe lily pad" that you can jump to before the whole lake fills up.

Alan:  People don’t realize that they make a lot of setting changes or even the applications make setting changes to their computer while it’s running, but the only time it gets saved back to the registry or gets saved back to an INI file or some kind of configuration file is at shut-down. If that doesn’t get written then everything that you’ve done; everything that you’ve changed gets thrown out the door.

Jeremy:  That’s right. Also, it’s a perfect example of why I mentioned backup as a true maintenance procedure. Somebody looks at maintenance as just the standard upkeep of a machine to avoid a scenario where you would require a backup, but you know what? You’ve got to throw backing up your machine into that list of maintenance because without any sort of a fail-safe you have no where to turn to and that’s an awful feeling when you have months of work or months of family history stored up in a particular machine. That’s a horrible loss.

Alan:  Of course, talking about maintenance on a computer, you really need to have a way to recover any of these deleted files that happen on your computer, no matter how they get deleted. When you come in, in the morning, and you find out that Microsoft did a system update overnight and now your computer is sitting there with a "blue screen."

Jeremy:  Yes, that happens too. Luckily, in some of those cases you can just recover with the reboot and possibly go through a Scandisk.

Alan:  Well, that’s where your Undelete 2009 comes in because anything that gets deleted on our home computer system no matter where it is, is going be stored, isn’t it?

Jeremy:  That’s right. With our Product, Undelete 2009, what we will do is we will stand in place of the Recycle Bin and help to capture files that are being deleted, but probably the nicest part is we’re not only capturing the files that you specifically visit and delete - but we’re also capturing files that are being deleted in the background that you don’t see or notice.

You would actually be surprised at the number of files that applications themselves will delete or purge out. There’s a scenario of an update where some files are manipulated or changed or removed. We’ve got a situation similar to a backup that will help you work on the fly to go back to our Undelete program and drill down and recover those files so that you don’t necessarily miss a beat. You can go back to where you started before things went south.

Alan:  Because if you’re using the Windows Recycle Bin you have a choice of either using it or not using it. But, there are files that are being stored on our computer system that we do not want to ever recover for instance the temporary internet files for instance or the temp directory at Microsoft uses, or other applications that use a temp holding area.

It is useless to be able to recover those because of the scenario that we’re not going to be able to recover what we’re not going to be able what we need to recover with the Recycle Bin.

Jeremy:  That’s right. And what’s interesting is that if you were to liken your drives' free space to a sponge, there’s only so much information it can hold. Why dedicate free space to hanging on to temp files or files that you will never in a million years deal with or necessarily care about? People should be given the opportunity to decide that factor of what they want to keep and how long they want to keep it and how much space they want to dedicate to keeping those items.

That’s one the nice flexibilities of a program like our Undelete in that you get an option to say that these are the items that I do want to maintain and these are the files that I don’t. This is exactly how long I want to keep them for, before Undelete decides to purge them and this is exactly how much space I’m willing to give up in order to maintain all those files so that I can go back to them at any point in time.

Alan:  What are we looking as far as the price for Undelete?

Jeremy:  Our Home Version is going for $30.00. Our Professional or what would be a Workstation Version is $60.00

Alan:  Can we get a full-featured Trial Version of Undelete to try out?

Jeremy:  You certainly can. It’s good for 30 days and it has all the functions of the full Undelete and that is available at www.undelete.com.

Alan:  Jeremy, we are out of time and you’ve got so many more good tips about how we can speed up our computer system and how we can maintain it so that we have our computer become more efficient and more enjoyable. We will have to continue this conversation next time.

Jeremy:  You’ve got it. Thank you so much for having me.