SON SON
The Emergency Repair Kit has been the most popular, it provided a set of tools and techniques that let you revive and repair a dead or dying computer. The goal of the repair kit was and still is, to provide a quick and easy way to fix the sort of problems that come up on computers all the time, virus infections, spyware, bad drivers and lost or corrupt files. The computer you fix may be your own or it could belong to friends, coworkers or other unfortunate victims. Having a repair kit is especially important if you’re a mobile worker because it can be tough to get this kind of help on the road.
Data Store Galore
Originally, I mentioned two options for storing the repair kit, a CD/DVD-ROM or a USB flash drive. Well, flash drives have become so inexpensive that they are definitely the way to go today. It used to be that a 2 GB flash drive, the smallest drive you’re likely to find on store shelves is 256MB, and those are often sold in packs of three or four at very low prices.
As you’ll see, the amount of space you need for system utilities isn’t that big a 2 GB model will have plenty of space for just the repair programs; however, you will probably want a larger model so that it can store backups of your data. In the worst case, such as a hardware failure or an incapacitating Software failure, recovering your data is the most important priority. By keeping backups on the USB Drive you’re prepared for any disaster.
One important note about the software on the flash drive, if an application requires installation or uses a background program to operate (such as antivirus), it should not be run from the flash drive, You might put the setup program on the flash drive and install it to the PC’s hard drive before using it, but that approach can be risky if you’re trying to recover data on a damaged PC. Installing new files may make the problem worse and also prevent you from performing operations like file undelete.
Fixer-Uppers the most critical role of a portable repair kit is to save your bacon when the computer is fried, with malware such a big problem nowadays, it’s useful to have some tools available to diagnose and repair problems. This is true even if you already run antivirus and antispyware on the computer. Something may slip through their defenses, particularly if you’ve been on the road and unable to update signature files for several days.
For malware cleanup, McAfee offers its free Stinger utility that fits nicely on a USB flash drive and does not require installation. Just run it from the flash drive. That’s an important consideration for any application you run from the USB drive. If it requires installation, it may affect the system setup, and you generally don’t want that on a utility being used in a rescue situation.
For manual malware cleanup and general investigation, I recommend HijackThis from Merijn(merijn.org/files/hi jackthis.zip). A HijackThis scan generates a lot of output and can be difficult to interpret if you’ve never seen it before. What I recommend is to generate a log file using HijackThis When your system is known to be free of malware and save that on the USB flash drive, Later, when you think the system may be possessed, you can generate a new log file and compare it to your known-good log to see if anything has changed.
Tech site has a free one-stop download of a Great set of utilities that can prove useful for repair and diagnosis. All totaled they are about 15MB zipped and twice that size once unpacked, so they’ll fit handily on almost any USB flash drive. It includes Restoration, a file undelete utility that can recover files from disk or flash drive. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use all the tools in this download. Several of them are specialty tools that are used when tracking down severe spyware infestations or rootkits, if you go to a Web forum for help, such as the PC Pitstop forums (forums.pcpitstop.com), an expert there may ask you to run one of the tools to get more information.
Easy Backup
In the land of the nonfunctional PC, the backup is king. Any time you spend more than an hour working on a spreadsheet, presentation or important document, you should be thinking about backup, that work could be lost because the PC is lost or stolen, damaged, has a drive failure, or loses battery power.
If there’s a backup on USB drives are getting so big that you could almost back up the entire contents of a hard drive to one. That could take some time, though, so it’s usually more practical to save just your critical files. Usually those will be in your My Documents folder and perhaps on your Desktop if Flash drive, it’s not a problem. Some people keep their data on USB drives by using the files there directly from the applications they run. If you like to save files there
Apps on the Fly
For the ultimate in PC software portability, you can run your applications from the USB drive, there are dozens of apps that have been designed so that they can run without permanent installation on the System where you run them, It takes a bit of work and thought on the part of the developer to do this because most apps expect to be installed and make liberal use of features such as Registry keys. A great (and free) set of USB-ready applications is available at PortableApps.com, along with setup instructions.
The site offers categories such as games, development tools, browsers, mail clients, and media players. If you have a large drive, you can download the PortableApps suite, a 256MB collection that includes OpenOffice, Thunderbird email client, and Firefox browser. On a melancholy note, this will be my final column for PC Today. I’d like to thank the folks at PC Today for giving me a place to talk to all of you for the past few years and thank you for reading.