How to Repair Windows XP

If your Windows XP installation becomes corrupt and you cannot boot into Windows normally or through Safe Mode, it may be possible to repair Windows without having to completely start over with a fresh installation. A Windows XP repair installation will overwrite the operating system files back to the original state, while leaving your programs and documents intact. This guide explains the process for repairing a corrupt Windows XP installation.

A Look at Popular NAS Units

Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been on my mind quite a bit in the last year. With the birth of my son last May, my wife and I are going crazy with our digital camera, and what used to be a nice and spacious hard drive is no longer adequate. What’s worse, we’ve found that video is a much better way to capture all the little things we want to remember, which probably increases our storage needs by a factor of 100!

On the business side, we’re encountering the same thing. As our company grows, the 200GB network share we all use for shared storage has become both too small, and dangerously difficult to back up. As we expand our website with more and more multimedia content, the need for “scratch space” has grown exponentially.

Both at home and at the office, we need more space, and we need a good level of protection from data loss. A NAS is a natural choice.

Sound Cards: Creative Labs, and Alternatives

The last few days have seen a lot of negative press surrounding the largest sound card manufacturer on the block, Creative Labs. Here’s a little background on what’s happened:

Creative Labs has had a near-monopoly on the sound card market for a long time. Barring onboard sound controllers (like those integrated into almost all Nvidia and Intel based chipsets), Creative cards make up an overwhelming majority of audio cards currently in use. Creative has not done a very good job of getting Windows Vista sound drivers working which offer the same amount of features that their XP drivers have had. A lot of people have been really frustrated by this, since their expensive audio cards weren’t working or were giving reduced functionality.