How To Shop For Computer Stuff

I'm frequently asked to give suggestions for computers and equipment.

here are some useful links I use for shopping:

Dealnews.com is a good site for various things, like timely deals on computers from dell, hp, etc. Also good for electronics. They have some other associated sites, dealram.com, dealmac.com and more.

Pricewatch.com is a good source for OEM and other cheap computer parts. broken out into categories, and ranked by price.

I also use this forum posting from overclock.net that ranks video cards. Coupled with pricewatch, it is a great way to shop for a video card upgrade.

Update on Gparted live

I just figured out (DUH) that the Gparted Live CD that I recently wrote about can not only resize partitions, but it can also copy partitions. So this disk turns out to be an even better too to upgrade a hard disk in a PC.

You could, for example, put a new hard disk in a usb caddy, hook it up to your computer, boot the live cd, copy AND resize the partition in one operation, set the 'boot' flag on your new disk's partition, and then physically swap the disks. A windows partition will then run a scan disk on boot, but you should be good to go with a new bigger hard disk after that.


Even more good stuff!

Clonezilla FOSS For Partition / Computer Cloning

If you are familiar with Symantec Ghost, then you already know what Clonezilla can do for you.

Ghost is a partition copying utility for windows. It geared toward making and restoring complete copies of individual system's hard disks. There is an open-source alternative called Partimage. Symantec also offers a corporate edition designed to use for cloning multiple machines out over a network. This is exactly what Clonezilla does for free - and it is open source.

Ghost has a nice GUI, and a nice polished package. Clonezilla is all text (but menu driven), and harder to use. But it also has many more options, and supports more file systems - such as the kind typically used by Linux.

By itself, Clonezilla requires a server backend. Setting this up is probably more work than it is worth for most small/medium business IT folks. However there is an excellent Clonezilla Live disk, which runs all by itself. I use Clonezilla live for almost all my partition work. Clonezilla actually uses several open-source utilities (including Partimage), so It can copy and restore partitions to/from external usb disks, firewire disk, smb (windows) shares, just about anything you can think of. You can copy the partitions directly, or to archived images. It is the all in one partition toolkit, except for resizing that is.

I use Clonezilla Live to image multiple machines each week, sometimes up to 20 at a time. On the Clonezilla Live site, they warn that if you are imaging multiple machines, you should use Clonezilla with its DRBL server. From what I've seen, for my needs, Clonzilla Live's performance has been more than adequate.

Resize Partitions

For quite a while now I've been using BootNG's demo disk to resize NTFS partions.

It comes at no cost, and works pretty well.

But I recently discovered that there is a GParted Live CD which can both boot your machine, and run the same GParted that you run in Linux.

Why would I choose one over the other? Well, first I had to go find Gparted Live CD, because BootNG would not work on a Dell D620 I was working with the other day. Second, GParted will handle almost any type of partition you can think of for a PC.

And it is completely open source, released under the GPL which is great because you don't need to worry about some comercial entity deciding to pull the plug on their free product. (you only need to worry about the project dying off!)

SOLD


update - this thing does even more!