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I’m Leaving Mozy for Jungle Disk

Posted on April 14, 2010

I have finally come to my wits end with Mozy.

This time it was me logging into my account and seeing that my Mac Mini only had 80GB backed up as opposed to the 500GB it was supposed to. After some digging it seemed that it wasn’t backing up my external hard drive – again.

After doing a little research I figure out that it must have been when I change the hard drive cable from USB to Firewire. It was the same enclosure and same hard drive but just a different cable. Lame.

I tried to reconfigure Mozy so that it would now backup my hard drive but it got stuck. I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed it and tried to reopen it – fail. I restarted 3 times over the last 3 days and it refused to restart.

I uninstalled Mozy.

From there I fired up Jungle Disk and it saw my external drive – like always. It wasn’t afraid of a simple cable change. I told it to start backing up and it did, no questions asked.

So why didn’t I just use Jungle Disk from the begining? Well I did but it gets pricey especially since you have to pay for the actual storage space you use and for the transfer of the data as well. Amazon is cheap for the most part but 500GB is about 3 times the amount then what I was paying with Mozy.

I guess you get what you pay for.

The other big difference between the two is recovering your files. I am fortunate that I have never had to recover an entire hard drive from either service. I have read though that recovering files from Mozy is a pain. I have downloaded around 10GB from Jungle Disk and it was a breeze.

In the end I may pay a little more but Jungle Disk with Amazon is much more reliable then Mozy.

Microsoft Word and Outlook 2003 100% CPU When Opening, Closing, and Sending Email Fix

Posted on February 13, 2008

Microsoft Word and Outlook 2003 have been jumping to 100% CPU usage when opening and closing Word and especially when sending emails from Outlook for about a month now. It just started from one day to the next and just seemed to get worse over the last week. I searched on and off during the last week for a solution and finally found it today.

The Problem

I had a corrupted Normal.dot file.

The Normal.dot file is the template file that Word uses when initially opening and presenting a blank document to you (or an email if you use Word as you email editor). I can across this thread where a guy mentioned that his Normal.dot file was 3.6mb so I decided to check out how big my file was.

The Fix

I searched and found my Normal.Dot file under:

C:\Documents and Settings\dmasters\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

The size of the file was an amazing 3.6mb as well. I delete it and left the folder open to see how big a new Normal.dot would be. I opened Word and then closed it and the new Normal.dot was created. It was a whopping 31.0 KB. That was a significant difference!

The next test was to see how Outlook performed with the old bloated file gone. Outlook opened quickly and sending out a new message was like a dream. Problem solved.

Possible Reasons for the Problem

I think there are several things that could have caused this issue but I think powering off my computer without shutting it down with Word open could caused this. I was having some issues a while back with my laptop getting stuck because of another program and I held the power button down to kill it.

Another possible solution is a virus. We have pretty good virus scan software here at work and I haven’t seen my computer do anything that would cause me to think that I had one.

Resources

Here are a couple of articles that outline possible causes along with a couple of other items that may help if the above solution doesn’t work.

• Outlook 2003 and MS word suddenly use high amount of Memory
• Loading Word Slow – 100% CPU Usage
• Tech Republic Search Results About Outlook Issues

Technorati tags: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Windows XP, High CPU, Normal.dot, Troubleshooting

Lookout for "Priority Service" on Your AT&T Wireless Bill

Posted on October 4, 2007

I was combing through my cell phone bill since I had just changed my rate plane and came across a charge that I did not recognized. The charge was for “Priority Service” to the rune of $4.50 for the month. I called up At&T to find out what it was.

The lady at AT&T that I was connected to had no idea what it was. She had to look it up in their database of features. She started reading what it was to me and basically it is a feature that gives your number priority access during times of disaster when the phone lines are usually jammed up.

I was thinking about keeping until she started reading who qualified for it. Basically it is for government agencies like Fire, Policy, City & State Governments, and the Federal Government. I do not fit into any of those and did not want to find myself in any trouble over having the service so I asked to have it canceled.

It seems that I had been charged this fee for the last 5 months. In the end I ended up with a $31.59 credit towards my account. The moral of the story is – CHECK YOUR BILL(S) – REGULARY. You never know when a company is charging you for something that you didn’t order.

Technorati tags: ATT Wireless, ATT, Cell Phones, iPhone, Bills, Charges, Money

How to fix the black bar on the side of a Phillips Plasma TV

Posted on May 21, 2006

We recently got a new Phillips Flat Panel Plasma TV.

We got it for a great price as an open box from Circuit City. I hooked it up with the composite connectors for the best quality (see this article on what that means). Then Time Warner came out and installed a high definition DVR which I connected via a HDMI cable.

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