What Happens If The Cloud Goes Down
GMail, an online application we all care about deeply here at StarterTech, suffered an outage yesterday that kept some people from accessing their email for approximately 15 hours. While cloud computing may be all the rage, this does raise the spectre of what one does when they can’t access said cloud.
I have personally thought the [...]
Electronics And Storms
What should you do about your electronics when a storm is coming? Well, that’s easy and it isn’t.
We’ve talked before about how you should have power back-ups, but those aren’t always going to protect you from electrical surges that can accompany a storm. A good example was in 2002 when my house was hit [...]
Keep Your Software Updated
We’ve talked briefly before about the importance of keeping your software up to date, but this is so important, it deserved it’s own post.
Software updates can be minor fixes, but sometimes they can be extremely important secuirty updates, and those are the ones you have to be most mindful of. Once a security hole has [...]
Discover Who Is Calling
Ever gotten a phone call that you have no clue it is from? Your caller ID shows a number you don’t know, but you have “Unknown” as the name. Well, oddly this is something Google can solve for you easily.
All one needs to do is head over to the popular search engine, type in the [...]
What Is A Thumb Drive
They have many names such as thumb drives, jump drives, memory stick, USB drives and more, but they all serve the same puprose, and that is being very useful.
These drives have been around for quite awhile, and while they started off as a niche item, they have grown more and more into the mainstream for [...]
What Is A USB Hub
USB, short for Universal Serial Bus, is an easy, and universal way of plugging devices into your computer. However, if you’re like me, you never have enough ports on your computer, so what do you do?
USB 1.0 was introduced in 1995, but was badly flawed, never quite being as “plug and play” as they claimed [...]
Why Does Equipment Just Fail
There are times where you have a piece of equipment that sits there quietly for years, and then one day it just stops. What causes this? What did you do wrong?
When we previously disccessed what a switch it, we mentioned smaller ones that feature 4 or 8 ports for home use. At our [...]
Are Extended Warranties Worth It
There was a time when extended warranties for electronics made sense, but has that time come and gone?
With the ever decreasing prices for computers and gadgets, extended warranties have gotten to a point that they seem pointless on anything except really high-end desktops or laptops. For instance, on a $499 Dell right now, it would [...]
General Computing Tips For Storing Computer Software
The other day we mentioned our computer failure on my personal laptop, and that a new hard disk drive was on the way to me. Well, now that it is here, I am having the grand fun of reinstalling all of my computer software again. This is a process I went through just [...]
Minding Our Own Lessons
Normally at StarterTech we don’t delve in to the normal blog style posts where we relate personal stories, but this was just too odd not to.
Just two days ago we talked about making backups of your system. I was prompted to write that piece by my having just signed up for Backblaze, and I [...]
