Posted 10/23/09 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

What's the first thing you're going to do after installing the Windows 7 operating system?  If you live in Japan, perhaps you'll go celebrate your new, wallpaper-shifting desktop with some cardiac arrest.  If you're one of the stalwarts still clinging to your XP or Vista operating system, well, you're probably going to spin your chair around in smug defiance of Microsoft's latest bit of software.  And if you're a Maximum PC reader, I would hope that you're going to treat your fresh new installation of Windows 7 as an October spring cleaning of-sorts.

In fact, I urge you to.  One doesn't often get a chance to reinstall an operating system from scratch.  Or, rather, it's always easier to think of the hundreds of reasons why it's just not the right time to wipe-and-reinstall the contents of your primary hard drive.  Resist the temptation to take the easy route.  Backup your drive, give it a good format, and install Windows 7 onto your clean-as-a-whistle partition.

And once you've done that, read the rest of this article.  While my colleagues at Maximum PC have given you some good first steps into your new Windows 7 world post-installation, I'd like to go one bit further and list out my typical post-installation routine for any Windows operating system.  There are a number of key freeware choices that you'll want to slap onto your system to establish a baseline environment that's as efficient as it is secure--that, and you should really take this time to establish preventative measure that will keep your PC as clutter-free as can be throughout its new Windows 7 lifespan.

After all, bloated systems make Kylie sad.

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Posted 10/14/09 at 03:00:00 PM by Will Kraft

Regardless of the operating system you are using, data loss is inevitable. Sooner or later, it will happen to you—the only question is how much data you will lose. Although RAID can act as an insurance policy for hardware failures, it was never designed to serve as a backup and will not perform this task well at all. Human error is always the greatest concern since important files can be accidentally overwritten or deleted at careless moments. It is easy to fall behind on your backups or get complacent; without recent backups you have no recovery strategy. This guide will help you automate your backups on your Linux rig so you will always have your files up to date.

Read on to get started!

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Posted 10/12/09 at 09:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

I am starting to back up all my files to CD in anticipation of buying a new computer this fall when Windows 7 becomes available.

I have a Windows 98SE system using Office 2000 and I cannot find my Outlook 2000 .pst files so I can save them to CD and then move them to the new system when it arrives. I have searched the entire disk for “*.pst” and the only thing it shows is the “default.pst” file which is way too small (300KB) to be the file I want. Also, is there a way to save my Outlook settings so they can be moved to the new Outlook?

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Posted 10/01/09 at 01:30:57 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

How do I, at a reasonable cost, back up all of my data? Long ago, when hard drives were 40GB, 4.7GB DVDs were a reasonable means of backup. But now with multi-terabyte hard drives there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable backup method. Right now I’m using RAID 5 rather than backing up my data. I have a RAID with five 1TB drives in it and I’m relying on the redundancy as the backup. I looked into tape backup drives and found that the cheapest 800GB LTO-4 drive was $1,800 and the tapes run $50 each. As it turns out, I could build another system, put together a duplicate array and back up one to the other for less than the cost of the tape drive. Is there any such thing as affordable backup anymore? I can’t find anything. Blu-ray isn’t even affordable yet, and it’s already too small for backups.

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Posted 09/29/09 at 04:34:18 PM by Mark Edward Soper

With Windows 7 coming down the pike in less than a month, it's time for Microsoft to update its Windows Home Server product to support new features in Windows 7, such as Libraries and image-based backup. Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 (announced in July and now available in beta via Microsoft Connect) provides the Windows 7 support Windows Home Server needs, but that's not all that's new.

Windows 7 and Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 are designed to play nicely together, thanks to updates that support Windows 7 libraries and WHS backup that's Action Center aware (so Action Center will no longer nag a Windows 7 user that backups aren't happening when WHS does its backup thing). To find out what else is new in Windows Home Server, and for the latest on when "beta" comes off the title, join us after the break.

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Posted 09/12/09 at 04:45:29 PM by Justin Kerr

It still hasn’t been formally announced yet, but if these Chinese shaky cam photos are to be believed, Asus might soon be following Acer into the Windows home server market.

The new Asus Mini TS is about 600 MHz faster than the Acer easyStore unveiled back in May, but the trade off is two fewer internal SATA slots. This drawback might not be as bad as it sounds however because it cuts down on the bulk of the device, and the 6 USB 2.0 slots, and 2 eSATA ports might actually make it a better option for some.

So far Asus hasn’t confirmed the authenticity of the photos which leads us to believe if these pictures are legit, it’s likely still in the prototype phase meaning it won’t hit store shelves until 2010. If you’re looking for a portable home server option in the future however, this might be one to watch.

Click the jump to see a full breakdown comparison between the Acer and Asus offerings.

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Posted 08/06/09 at 12:54:14 PM by Paul Lilly

Maximum PC readers have long had the importance of maintaining backups beat into their heads, but apparently photo-hosting service isn't a subscriber to the magazine. How else do you explain losing thousands of user photos with no way to restore them?

Or at least that's the case if you believe a purportedly scorned user who claims to have had his Flickr account hacked and then terminated. According to Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan, he woke up to discover three concerning emails in his inbox:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!
2. Your password has been changed!
3. Your account has been terminated!

After contacting the Yahoo-owned service about the security breach, Tepsic said he was told "it isn't possible to restore the content of the account." Flickr did offer to restore his screen name and URL, "but unfortunately the images, comments, and other content isn't recoverable."

There's a lot more to Tepsic's customer support nightmare, which you can read here, assuming you're not offended by big, bolded F-bombs.

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Posted 08/04/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Windows Vista replaced the antiquated, tape-oriented Windows NT Backup wizard with a new backup system optimized for external hard disks, and some editions also included true "bare metal" disaster recovery. However, Vista's Backup and Restore Center was missing some vital functionality: there was no way to create a Recovery Environment disc to boot your system (you were expected to use your Windows Vista DVD), file and folder backup and system image backup were performed with different programs, and Home Premium users who needed image backup had to purchase a third-party program.

To find out how Windows 7 has completed the transformation of Windows Backup from awkward adolescence into full maturity, join us after the jump.

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