In the past, Microsoft released a new version of Windows approximately every three years. In the interim between Windows releases, Microsoft would release their monthly security and bug patches to maintain a healthily, secure, and modern operating system. Following the routine monthly updates, Microsoft would release a Service Pack which helped update the operating system with new features, tools, and sometimes offered drastic interface redesigns. Service Packs were a refresher for the user, but often caused more issues than it fixed. Other times it was to correct a mistake such as the one made with Windows 8 to Windows 8.1…
Author: Justin Vendette
Just because you’ve deleted a file on your hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD), doesn’t mean it’s been removed for good. It may be gone from your view, but the bits that make up the deleted file still remain on the drive. Deleting a file first sends the file to the recycle bin where it will remain untouched and unaltered just in case you change your mind and want to restore the file. When you are certain that you no longer need that file, you can clean out the recycle bin, and the file will appear to vanish…
The thing I love about music is that there is always that new catchy song that we fall in love with. If you are like me, you will play that new catchy song over and over again until you never want to hear it again. Then you find that one song that is so catchy, so special, that you could listen to it all day, every day. You know the lyrics like the back of your hand. For me, that song is Fortune Teller by Robert Plant. Close your eyes and take a listen to this song. It tells a…
It was a casual Thursday afternoon, and it was just a few days before our senior infrastructure administrator was scheduled to be moving on in his career and start somewhere new. As his time with us counted down, he was asked to help clean up unused data to ease our storage woes. Having only 20TB of physical storage in our server room and quickly approaching that threshold, it was a team effort to clean up around 5TB of data to prevent maxing out our storage environment. As the senior infrastructure admin started to clean up old server backups, he, truly,…
Windows 10 is arguably Microsoft’s greatest operating system ever. It’s modern design, universal compatibility, and revised upgrade scheme allowed the operating system to quickly become the new standard. With Windows 7 soon falling out of support and headed towards the fate Windows XP suffered, many should consider the switch to Windows 10, if you haven’t already. Luckily, the upgrade process is easy, robust, and quick to do. One of Windows 10’s strongest features are their built-in Apps. These apps are Microsoft certified apps that are downloadable through the Windows 10 Store. Most Microsoft Apps are preinstalled with Windows 10 and…
I don’t know about you, but I cannot stand my alarm clock. That blaring, headache-inducing, screech that is found on all too many alarm clocks just make the mornings even more challenging. Growing up, I remember watching the Drake and Josh comedy show, and there was one episode where Drake was waking up one morning to his alarm clock going off. Instead of getting up, he took the trophy that he had sitting on his nightstand and used it to bash the alarm clock until it had stopped making a sound. This is how I feel in the morning. It…
I was coming home one evening, down a hill and the next right was into my neighborhood. As I came down the hill, my car unexpectedly shut off and displayed absolutely nothing in terms of power. Luckily, I used my momentum to roll into my neighborhood and got out of the way of the fast, hilly two-way street. Weird that the car just shut down like that. After I came to a safe stop, I pressed the Start/Stop button, and the engine and car roared back to life as if nothing happened. What could that have been I wondered. Confused,…
The internet is changing all around us. We’ve gone from reading daily news to daily downloads to daily streaming content. As the internet continues to evolve with mankind, it’s becoming more and more a part of our daily routine. Practically every job out there requires some sort of internet-connected device. Whether it’s an electric picking system for pickers at Amazon or a machine to clock in for work, we’re all a part of the internet now. At the place I work, we have internet connected tablets everywhere. The distribution center simply cannot function without them. In the morning, the workers…
It’s common for PC gamers to pull a tongue-in-cheek joke about how console gamers should convert to the dark side and join the PC Gaming Master Race, but the underlying reality is that most PC gamers themselves started on a console. I sure did, all the way back on the Nintendo N64 as I am sure most of you did too. After that, I made the jump to the original Xbox and upgraded later to the Xbox 360. Hours upon hours of games were played on the Xbox, with one of my favorite games being Battlefield Bad Company 2. When…
If you work in IT, you will be familiar with what a standard business server room sounds like. For those that aren’t so familiar, let me give you some insight. A server room is often a medium-sized room that contains rack-mounted computer equipment. This equipment is expensive and works around the clock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You’ll find networking switches, cores, and firewalls as well as storage racks and virtual machine hosts. As this equipment is meant to run non-stop, it gets hot. To keep the equipment cooled and functioning, the racked mounted equipment holds high…