TO-Tech Blog

I’ve been trying to clean up and organize my home office. In the process I found a bunch of old Iomega 100MB Zip Disks. I also found my old parallel port model Iomega Zip drive. The problem was finding something with a parallel port to plug it in to. It turned out that the PC I had upgraded to Windows Vista has a parallel port. Unfortunately. Iomega does not support Vista and the parallel port drives (not a huge shock). Fortunately, I have an old 2001 era HP notebook running Windows XP Pro with a parallel port that Iomega supports. So, I plugged it in and move all the files off the Zip disks. It turns out I had 45 disks in my collection. That’s roughly 4.5GB of total storage or roughly the capacity of the 4GB USB flash drive sitting in front of the disk collection pictured above. About one-fourth of the disks were empty. And, of course, none of the Zip disks were at capacity. It turned out I had 12,061 files taking up 1.03GB on the Zip disks that were used.

I was lucky to have an old PC (notebook in my case) with a Parallel port still running an OS supported by Iomega (Windows XP). I’m already out of luck if I want to deal with 5.25 inch floppy disks. And even the 3.5 inch disks are getting more problematic. It was also fortunate that only 1 of the 45 disks (which are 10+ years old) was unreadable. And, even more fortunate was the fact that it looks like 95+% of the files I found had been migrated to other media over the years. Still, I found a couple of old photos and even two short video clips of my daughter that I don’t recall seeing in my collection.

Paper photographs may be difficult to preserve. But, they are accessible by any sighted person without any special tools. What happens to digital family photos decades from now when the person who organized them is gone and the retrieval technology is difficult or impossible to obtain and use?

I rarely use the HP Photosmart C6250 printer/copier/scanner connected to my Vista PC. Moreover, if it is turned on when I boot the PC, Vista locks up. So, the Photosmart is usually turned off and stays that way until I need it. This has worked out ok for the past couple of months.

However, something happened after this week’s monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday. If the printer is off, the HP Digital Imaging Monitor uses nearly all CPU resources if the printer is not turned on. This brings the PC to a near grinding halt. I’m not sure what the specific cause is. But, this definitely started happening only have the Patch Tuesday updates were installed.

Yet another reason I am never buying another HP printer.

PCs running Windows XP or Windows Vista take a long time to boot up. This is especially true if you use a Mac which seems to be responsive soon after its boots. I’ve used a variety of Windows PCs over the years. And, everything including the Dell Latitude D620 with a Core 2 Duo processor took many minutes from booting to being usable. In fact, the much older and less powerful Dell Dimension 2400 with a Celeron processor booted much faster and was usable much sooner than the Dell notebook. This was because the Dimension ran Windows XP while the D620 ran Windows Vista. And, the Dimension had a faster 7200rpm hard drive while the notebook had, if I recall correctly, a 5400rpm drive.

A third factor that messes up boot times are the various security and call-home-for-update processes that all fire at start-time. If you look at the processes running soon after boot (as soon as Ctrl-Alt-Del can actually work since it is stymied by the slow boot process too), you will see all kinds of junk apps calling home for updates while various security apps perform their tasks too.

This all leads to what for me is up to a 5 minute wait until my various Windows PCs are responsive and ready for actual work.