IT Expert Voice

Usually, tuning up a PC requires a lot of work, spending much money on new components, or both. ReadyBoost can speed up slow or overwhelmed PCs without either one.

There’s no such thing as a fast-enough computer. No matter how hot your CPU runs or how much RAM you have, eventually you’ll run out of performance — usually, just when you need it most. Fortunately, Windows 7 comes with a cheap and easy way of improving system performance: ReadyBoost.

Windows 7’s ReadyBoost is Microsoft’s latest take on a very old idea for improving computer performance: caching. With a cache, you gain speed by keeping frequently accessed data as close as possible to the CPU cores. The faster the cache, the closer it should be to cores. That’s why high-end processors, like the Intel i7 quad-core CPU, have their own on-board cache.

Caching used to be easy. You used caching on uniprocessor, single user systems to free yourself from the slow I/O jail, whether that I/O was from the system bus to the processor or from the hard drive to the bus. As multiple-CPU and core systems became more common, simply placing fast RAM between system components with varying I/O throughputs was no longer enough. System designers had to contend with making sure that the available data to the processor was the real, newest data. READ MORE

Virtualization has many an upside, not the least of which is its value to disaster recovery efforts.

“Before virtualization, disaster recovery was so expensive to implement that organizations had to choose only the most critical applications to protect and hope for the best for the rest,” says Jeff Nessen, practice director of platform virtualization for Logicalis. “With a carefully planned virtualization strategy, disaster recovery can now be provided for a much broader range of applications and data.”

However, if virtualization isn’t executed with thoughtful precision, the whole virtual mess can tumble even the mightiest of corporate recovery plans.

“When implemented and designed correctly, a virtual environment is an armored bunker 200 feet below the surface where all your eggs are stored; incorrectly, it is a basket on the edge of a wall with very high crosswinds that may cause the basket to tip over at any time,” says Gregory L. Smith, senior product architect at SunGard Availability Services. READ MORE

It’s not especially easy to deploy, but Windows 7 supports simple software RAID. Here’s how to do it, using low-cost storage you already own: a bunch of USB flash drives. (I’d say I created a RAID array of USB drives simply to demonstrate the technique, but really… one reason to do this is because, well, I could. We techies can be so easily amused.)

There’s no such thing as enough disk room or a safe-enough hard drive. The moment you think you have enough hard disk space, you find yourself collecting high-definition videos or your hard disk starts whining and clicking. One solution to both problems is to use an ancient computing technique that dates back to when a big hard drive was 5 MBs and came in a casing as large as a washing machine: redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID).

RAID has several benefits. The first is that RAID has the potential to deliver vastly increased data transfer rates. In theory, the input/output transmission rate of a RAID system can be more than ten times greater than a ordinary hard drive.

RAID pulls this trick off by “striping” data across the array’s disks. In English, this means that a file can be distributed across the array so that it can be read or written much more quickly. For example, With RAID, the system will place a file on the media so that while the first part of the file is being read from disk on one array, the second portion is already being picked up from disk two.

By enabling parallel data transfers, data throughput can be multiplied by the number of drives in the array. For example, a four disk RAID could have four times the throughput of an equal-sized single drive. A RAID that’s designed for speed and nothing but speed is called RAID Level 0.

The other major advantage of RAID is that you can mirror data from one drive to another, the most immediate form of backup one could imagine. Its disadvantage is that on RAID Level 1 you can use half a RAID’s maximum drive space for data storage. You also don’t gain the speed boost you get from RAID 0. Advanced versions of RAID let you retain more of the drive room while maintaining your data security. Unfortunately, in Windows 7, you can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. READ MORE

Mobile users face large obstacles in keeping up with reasonable backups. There are several solutions available, each with a common denominator that requires us to remember to perform backups in the first place.

In some cases, Windows 7 BitLocker aids your capacity to encrypt removable and backup media, depending on the media involved.

Portable Hard Drives

Ranging in size from small to huge, portable hard drives are a fairly easy way to keep backups in order—especially backups consisting of just data. Windows 7, as in prior Windows editions, contains the infamous Backup.exe software in Professional+ editions. Backup.EXE allows compressed and regularly scheduled backups (so long as you remember to plug in the drive); drives can also be BitLocker-managed and encrypted. You can do a quick backup of just data files (example, your /user directory), or mixtures of the whole enchilada and all the data, or just those files that have changed, in your favorite backup combo.

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Though Windows 7 is still pretty much a newcomer to the desktop operating system scene, it’s been around long enough that IT pros will encounter the occasional circumstance that demands — or at least calls out loudly for — a complete reinstall of this much-touted OS. In the sections that follow, I lead you through some cases where a reinstall is highly recommended (if not absolutely required) to make a PC work properly.

Windows 7 has been around in full commercial use for several months, depending on how you count: since August 2009 (MSDN release) or October 2009 (commercial release). Though it may seem that reinstalling Windows is unnecessary, in some cases such a maneuver makes good sense. These include a switch from 32- to 64-bit environments, changing your BIOS hard disk access mode, and for classic Windows degunking maneuvers. READ MORE