It’s mid year check up time!

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It’s middle of the 2022 year and it’s time to take stock of your computing needs and wants and what might need some upgrades.  Now before you think I’
[See the full post at: It’s mid year check up time!]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Lars220, SueW, Alex5723, Kathy Stevens, windbg

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In the case of my office I take backups home, or in the case of home, you may even consider putting a usb external hard drive with critical information into your safety deposit box at the bank. You may even want to consider adding some cloud service as an additional backup location

Just to add my $.02. I used to store backups at my parents house and also a safe deposit box at the bank. After a major hurricane, I couldn’t access my safe deposit box for a month. That’s when I decided to do online backups in addition to local backups. You need them in a different geographical location if at all possible. I was fortunate that I didn’t need them but it woke me up!

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Susan

We use external Western Digital Black HDD and SSD drives for backing up. Some backups are done daily, some weekly, and others monthly.

How do determine that it is time to replace an external drive?

And what about replacing internal drives?

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On my physical servers I have a five to six year comfort level… after that I make sure I have spare hard drives on hand.  Same for workstations.

For western digital external usb, often it’s my need for bigger external hard drives that drive my upgrades.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Kathy Stevens

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Kathy Stevens wrote:

How do determine that it is time to replace an external drive?

You can test the drives health with free apps like portable CrystalDiskInfo …
It is advised to replace drive with health status < 80%.

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CAS

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You should check the data on your external drives regularly to ensure it hasn’t degraded in your “not so perfect” storage. SSDs in particular as they don’t have the power off longevity of HDDs.

See this post for details: #2318643

cheers, Paul

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We have one more semiannual hardware task.

Every six months we open our desktops and blow out any accumulated dust.

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Lars220, SueW

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I know a couple of guys (there are many many more) that clean install Windows every 6 months claiming their Windows PCs slow down after 6 months of use.

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I’d like to have that much spare time to waste! 

cheers, Paul

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Are those printer setup screenshots from Windows 11? I don’t recall that particular list format within Win 10, and can’t locate it in Settings or Control Panel. Maybe just my aging brain, but I am wondering ….

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[Bob99]

I think they’re from a print server for Susan’s firm, so most home users won’t see either one of those screens unless they have reason to be running their home computers off of a server along with their printer(s).

See @PKCano ‘s post right below this one.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by Bob99.

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Control Panel\Devices and printers
Right click the printer, choose Printer Properties, click on the Ports tab.
(That’s the two screenshots on the main blog page)

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WSJohnHa, Bob99

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Ahh, I see !

Thanks for the clarification! I must’ve been leading a privileged life to not have had to go into that tab of a printer’s properties! 

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Ah yes … thanks! As you indicated, it’s not the usual ‘Properties’ at the bottom of the context menu, it’s under the ‘Printer properties’ choice.

 

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