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You don’t have to lose everything. And you probably didn’t.

I’ll just say this before I go any further. If your hard drive totally crashes, as in you dropped your computer and it makes this horrible noise when you try to turn it on, You’re Screwed!

Otherwise, a simple crash that keeps the system from booting doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve lost all your files and pictures stored on your computer. I believe that most people are under this impression. Although you will have to replace the hard drive, you can most likely recover most of your data. If any sectors were damaged, it will probably take the files that were there along with it.

This article is for those who are at least a little computer savvy and have at least opened up their computer case a couple of times. If this frightens you, then get some help, but don’t let someone just wipe out your hard drive without saving your files first. It happened to me, and I’d hate to see it happen to you!

Here are some common signs of a hard drive about to crash. I’ll give this list in order of early signs to critical signs.
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This post is a bit out of my niche. Well, it IS about the Internet I suppose!

I just can’t get over how many different ways there are to make money on the internet. Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve seen a number of different ways to put advertisements on your blog. Imagine how it would feel to wake up in the morning knowing that you made money while you were sleeping.

The main thing here though is to keep priorities straight. The money is the bonus to blogging. There has to be a much deeper motivation if you’re going to succeed. The most important part is the quality of the content in the posts. I personally feel that you need to be providing some quality information to the reader. Otherwise you’re cheating your readers, and quite frankly, I doubt if you’ll have any return visitors anyway, if they’re not being enlightened or entertained by what you have to say.
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If you’re into Photoshop, and have never used the DreamSuite plugin created by Auto FX, then you just don’t know what you’re missing! I tend to be a bit of a fanatic for the plugin filters. I’ll take a custom shape, or a shape I may have created myself, and put it into DreamSuite. You can just keep tweaking all day and keep coming up with all sorts of different looks. Although, I actually created the gel designs in about 20 minutes or so.

I created this first set of images using the DreamSuite Gel / GelMixer filter located by clicking the “Special Effects” button. If you have a design that’s in need of the gel look, this will do it for you!

This next set of images is done with the DreamSuite 1 / MetalMixer filter. Also located by clicking the “Special Effects” button. This filter has endless possibilities for creating the metal look. As some of you can probably see, I’ve also touched up the red ones with some beveling effect. I come up with some of my best stuff just playing around!

I’ve only touched on two of the filter effects. There are actually more than 20 other effects in this one filter. There are also many other Photoshop filters available from Auto FX. Such as:

• Mystical Lighting
• Photo/Graphic Edges
• Mystical Tint Tone and Color
• Auto Eye
• Pixtivity & Xtivity

Now, I have to be honest with you, I usually talk about cool stuff you can get for free. This is not the case this time. Even still, it’s a great addon to your Photoshop tools if you have a need for this type of graphics.
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We’ve all heard the horror stories of how someone lost all their important and irreplaceable information when the hard drive died, or worse yet, your computer was stolen, or completely wrecked by fire or whatever! Are you prepared? If not, let’s get prepared right away. Read on, it’s not that difficult to do, and you’ll be happy you did.

I highly recommend doing a daily backup. There are some nice backup software utilities you can purchase. There are also some nice one’s that can be downloaded for free. You can use the one that XP provides, but personally, I’ve found it to be unreliable.

I’m not going to go into an extensive list of different backup utilities here. You can do a search in Google or Yahoo for that. I will however, recommend the freebie I found, EZBackitup, it works great for me, and has a very easy User Interface.

1) Internal Drive
I don’t recommend using an extra internal drive for backup. Some do, but if your computer were stolen for instance, so is your backup!

2) Firewire and USB External Drives
These drives are a great choice for backup. Some are even entirely powered from the USB cable. They come in a variety of storage capacity to fit your needs.
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My daughter lives in Brighton, England. I can call her anytime from the U.S. for absolutely nothing and we can talk for as long as we want to. Ain’t the internet great?

This is all done by Skype user to user through the internet. All you need is a set of headphones and to download the software onto your computer. I might add though that it will definitely be a plus to have a high speed connection.

There’s no lag or distortion, and the quality of sound is great. Skype also offers a landline service for a very reasonable price, but we’re talking the free stuff for now!
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This sounds like a great contest! I know I won’t miss the opportunity. He’s giving a cash prize of $25.00
3000 Entrecard credits
He will review your blog
And he will put links back to your blog from his high traffic blog.

Sounds like something pretty great. Check it out at TysBlog.com’s Entrecard Credit Contest

See ya there!
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