Another Day With My PC

Do you remember the days when the floppy disk was the most preferred (if not the only) portable storage device on the planet? This question of mine might have fished a nostalgic smile from those who grew up during the days when 1MB seemed to be an enormous storage size already. But for the current USB-drive generation, the floppy disk days seem like an awful time to be in.

I remember that data was always at risk back then. It’s easy to write data on floppy disks, but it’s hard to keep them in it. The Norton Disk Doctor was a hit back then. The chances of having a bad sector on your disk is as big as getting a pimple on a hot humid summer.

Defragmenters were also a hit during those days. It might seem absurd to defrag a storage space that can’t even sufficiently host a standard MP3 file. However, floppy disk drives were not as fast as the optical ones that we have today as far as reading and writing data are concerned. Hence, it could definitely use all the help it could get, even if it’s just arranging the files sequentially.

Bu don’t think that present storage devices don’t need help from defrag programs. Applications today are sometimes preposterously large. It’s important then that their files are arranged in such a way that the data reader won’t have to rummage through the whole media just to piece through all the related files to load and run the software. There’s always a need to optimize regardless of the speed of your processor or storage device.

With all the frenzy with the Vista launch last month, how can we not have this cartoon?

Stuck on dial-up? Don’t fret. While you really won’t be able to watch the videos at YouTube seamlessly, you would still be able to pretty much do anything that can be done in cyberspace without noticing your nails grow.

Web pages should load without any quirks at 50kbps. Of course, a few head-scratching moments cannot be avoided if the page you’re accessing contains multimedia presentations. Worry not though. Chances are, the Web site that your accessing doesn’t contain any audio or video. If there is any, it usually doesn’t automatically run.

The maximum speed or capacity of a typical dial-up modem is 56Kbps. The largest dial-up bandwidth that my ISP and laptop’s modem frequently give me is 50.6Kbps. I haven’t experienced getting the maximum speed yet. You should be getting 46-50.6Kbps on the average. Don’t settle for anything else. Disconnect and try to establish another connection if you’ve been provided with a smaller bandwidth.

This method of optimizing or speeding up your connection may be crude, but hey, if you’re on dial-up, every kilobyte counts.