Free Backups For Your Data

Last year, the folks at Neobyte, makers of Titan Backup, offered the full version of their excellent backup software free for a limited time. I’m happy to report that they’re repeating the offer with a little different slant.

You can now get the full retail version of Titan Backup v.1.5 free from Neobyte. Note that this is not the current version of the software (v2.5), but IMO it’s still a great deal. The older version worked fine and you can’t beat the price!

You can download the free version here (opens in a new window):

http://www.neobytesolutions.com/trial-versions/free/titanbackup15.exe

After you install the software, use the following key to register and activate it:

000020-ACM8KK-1YXPMT-JZT49Z-05Z6JZ-7C68TR-9Y7FU9-6PD2P8

If you decide to upgrade to the latest and greatest, Neobyte is offering a coupon for a special upgrade price. Use this link to get your discounted price:

Special Titan Backup Upgrade Discount

I’ve got Titan Backup on all my machines and I recommend you jump on this deal.

John The Geek

Web Site Traffic Magnet

Web site traffic and how to get more of it is a hot topic for Internet entrepreneurs. The problem is that the discussion tends to begin and end with the number of visitors.

Traffic to your web site is less than half the battle. These days getting people to your site isn’t nearly the whole problem. Once they’re there, you need a way to keep them there, or better yet, keep them coming back!

Offering your visitors something of value is the best way to get and keep them as regular visitors. What’s the most valuable commodity on the Internet? Information!

That’s what the Internet is all about, folks…providing information.

The challenge has never been that there isn’t enough information. It’s finding the information you want quickly and easily.

Someone once described the Internet as a huge library with the books scattered all over the floor! Sure, there are search engines and repositories, but you have to use a number of them to find everything you’re looking for. Now you can provide your web site visitors a way of searching not only for information, but information in multiple formats…all from a single window!

Check out the widget below. It’s called Page Magnetizer and it’s a way of giving your web site visitors a kick-butt concentrated source of information. Enter a search keyword in the box at the top. Notice how the related search links below change instantly.

Page Magnetizer immediately returns the relevant references from all the major information resources for text, video, audio, and more. In one area less than 500 pixels square, you have access to targeted research on any keyword you can think of!

Play with it a while and see what it’s capable of. I think you’ll be amazed. I certainly am.

There are hundreds of potential uses for this little gem. It’s just launched so the price is currently as low as it will ever be. If you want one for your site, click the link at the bottom of the widget and grab yours before the price goes up.

Secunia Personal Security Inspector (PSI) Released

Secunia’s Personal Security Inspector (PSI) is now out of beta. I’ve been using this handy application for quite a while and have found it to be extremely valuable for keeping my applications updated.

Secunia PSI scans the applications installed on your PC and warns you if any are outdated and contain known security flaws. It also flags applications that are no longer being supported by their vendors.

Windows users typically keep their machines updated with Windows Update or Microsoft Update, however, Microsoft Update only scans Windows and Microsoft applications. Secunia PSI scans not only Windows and Microsoft applications, but a long list of other applications from other software vendors such as Apple, Adobe, Sun and many others.

This latest version of Secunia PSI adds a “Simple” mode for non-technical users. The Advanced mode gives the user extensive control over the patching process while Simple mode makes the process, well, simple for the average PC user.

Secunia PSI runs in the background and constantly monitors your PC, scanning periodically to determine if the status of any known applications has changed and warning you if it does. The program is unobtrusive and doesn’t seem to consume noticeable quantities of resources.

This is not an anti-virus scanner. You still need AVG or another good anti-virus application. Secunia PSI compares the versions of known applications on your machine with its list of the latest secure versions. If there’s a mismatch, i.e. you have an older version of an application installed, PSI will warn you and tell you how severe the threat is.

The user interface is clean and straightforward, showing you graphically which programs are insecure or at end-of-life (no longer supported), how severe the threat is, whether there’s a direct download for the update, and very importantly, where the application is located on your machine. The latter information is very helpful when PSI shows that you have two instances of the Java runtime, for example.

I highly recommend installing Secunia PSI on your PC and keeping your applications updated with the latest security fixes. You can download the latest version here:

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

John The Geek

Google Chrome First Impressions

Yet another shot has been fired in the ongoing browser wars. You may or may not know that Google has launched its new browser Google Chrome. I downloaded it yesterday and installed it on two different machines, one running Windows XP Professional and another running Windows Vista Home Premium.

The first thing I noticed about it was the significant increase in the speed of GMail in Chrome. According to a blog post I read, which was one of the things that convinced me to give Chrome a try now rather than wait, Google has done some very serious optimization of their Javascript implementation. Since GMail is an AJax application which makes very heavy use of Javascript, this makes sense and explains the difference in speed vs. Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Firefox is my browser of choice for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is the vast array of add-ons available for Firefox, many of which have become integral parts of my daily activities. I don’t know of any add-ons for Chrome yet, but given that it’s open source I expect there will be many very soon.

I’m limiting my use of Chrome to Google applications for now. It’s a bit inconvenient having to have Firefox open at the same time to make use of all its plugins and Roboform (which doesn’t work with Chrome yet, either), but the speed difference in the Google applications is worth it. I fully expect that gap to close quickly as developers port their add-ons to Chrome and create new ones.

One interesting glitch: when I installed Chrome on my XP laptop, Chrome asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks, history, etc. from Firefox. Since Firefox is my default browser, of course I did so.

When I installed Chrome on my Vista laptop, I was only given the choice to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer. Firefox was nowhere to be seen in the dropdown list. Needless to say, this is an annoyance, but since I’m only using Chrome for Google apps for now anyway, not a show-stopper.

The bottom line: if you like playing with new software or you really want GMail to be faster, download Chrome and check it out. If you want it to replace IE or Firefox, wait a while. Because Chrome is in beta, I expect things to be pretty fluid for a while. I’ll keep you posted on significant news as it happens.

John The Geek

Backup Program – Full Retail Version Free Until July 1

Just a quick one to point you to a terrific freebie I found on Gizmo Richards’ Tech Support Alert site:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/neobyte.htm

This is the full $40 retail value Titan Backup program available for free if you download and register it before July 1st, 2008. Get all the details at the Tech Support Alert site:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/neobyte.htm

Enjoy!

John The Geek

Firefox 3 – XP vs. Vista and CYA

My laptop at work runs Windows XP. My laptop at home runs Windows Vista Home Premium edition. I didn’t have a choice with the latter machine so I’ve been trying to reach some sort of truce with Vista since I bought the machine back in February.

My wife’s laptop also runs Vista, so if nothing else when she has a problem I have some clue how to deal with it. Usually, I’ve already been there on mine.

The reason I bring up that dreary subject is that I installed Firefox 3 on my work laptop first. As related in my previous post there was some consternation with add-ons that were no longer functional under Firefox 3. Other than that, Firefox 3 installed just fine and runs great now that the add-ons situation is straightened out.

Because things were going swimmingly on the work laptop, I decided to upgrade Firefox on my home laptop, as well. I expected the same heartburn with add-ons and felt like I had a pretty good handle on how to deal with it.

Silly me.

I ran the Firefox 3 installer and did not get the expected dialog listing the add-ons that no longer worked and the helpful “May I look for updates?” button. Instead, Firefox simply started up as usual and I was looking at the blank Firefox 3 interface.

I went to the Tools menu and click Add-ons to bring up the Add-ons dialog. I was greeted with a list of add-ons, most of which displayed the message “Incompatible with Firefox 3.” Some of them had the Uninstall button active, others didn’t. All had the Disable button greyed out along with the Options button.

I clicked the Uninstall button on one of the now-defunct add-ons. Firefox did its thing then displayed the familiar message “Add-on XYZ will be uninstalled when Firefox is restarted.”

I restarted Firefox. The browser came back up. I went to the Tools menu and clicked Add-ons. There at the top of the dialog was the add-on I’d previously uninstalled, its Uninstall button now greyed out, happily displaying the message “Add-on XYZ will be uninstalled when Firefox is restarted.”

Huh? I’d have sworn I just did that. Okay, restart Firefox again. Check the Add-ons dialog again. Same result. This is beginning to look suspiciously like an infinite loop.

After trying a few things and getting nowhere, I decided the better part of valor was to simply uninstall Firefox 3 and go back to Firefox 2 which had been working just fine previously. The result of that exercise was Firefox 2 coming up looking as expected.

Since I knew Google Browser Sync was dead, and I’d been impressed with Foxmarks, I figured I’d go ahead and install Foxmarks and make the switch now. I visited the Foxmarks site, clicked the Install button and got an “unexpected error -203″.

Mind you, this is the first time I’ve ever had an add-on install fail for any reason. Obviously, something was amiss. After some research, the consensus seemed to be that my profile was trashed.

Thinking that perhaps this was one of those Vista-isms where something should have been run in Administrator mode, I re-ran the Firefox 3 install as Administrator. Firefox 3 came up okay. The install of Foxmarks failed again with the same error message.

By now, it’s apparent that the only way to get Firefox 3 and its add-ons sorted out is to create a new profile. Now, mind you, had I thought to BACK UP my existing profile before starting this odyssey, I probably could have simply restored it and been good to go.

Ya gotta love 20-20 hindsight.

Creating a new profile solved the problem, but of course, I had to reinstall all the add-ons I wanted, not to mention redoing all my preferences since I couldn’t find a way to copy them from the old profile to the new one. I wasn’t real confident that it would have worked anyway since I don’t know what part of the old profile is still good and which is corrupted.

The moral of the story is, of course, to back up important things like your Firefox profile before upgrading things that might affect it. I get lazy just like everybody else, even though I know better, and in this case it bit me in the keister.

Was it Vista that caused the corruption? Who knows? It really doesn’t matter, it’s my bad for not properly covering my aforementioned keister and making sure I had a backup to fall back on in case things went awry. That seems to happen a lot more often in Vista than in XP, at least in my experience, so if you’re thinking of upgrading Firefox or any other software, for that matter, do yourself a huge favor and make sure you’re backed up before you start!

John The Geek

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