Find and fix the hard drive problems

If your computer creating problems to read/write on the hard drive or may become unstable then it is possible that some lost clusters and bad sectors are on your hard drive. To check your computer hard drive for any errors, you can use scan disk utility. You should scan your hard disk on regular basis to maintain the status of missing cluster and bad sectors. In windows 2000 and XP, you can use the error-checking tools to check the health of your hard drive. 

• Follow the given steps to run the error- checking tools: 


• First open the My Computer then right click on any drive that you want to check. 


• On the right click menu select the Properties option. 


• Here select the Tool tab then run Check Now in the Error-checking dialog area. 


• Under check disk options you can select both check box ”Automatically fix file system errors” and “scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” then press Start button.


• This test will prompt you, if there is any problem on your hard disk and automatically fix it now.

 

How to make Greeting Cards with Word 2007?

You can make homemade cards for your friends and family on any occasion if you don't get time to buy cards from the shop. You can make greeting cards with Word 2007. You can make greeting cards with Word 2007 for many occasions and events as well as the Get Well, Friendship cards etc. As you decide to make greeting cards with Word 2007, you can make one card for everyone or a customized one for every individual. You can later print them on a greeting card paper or just the regular one. Follow these steps in order to make greeting cards with Word 2007:

Click on the Office Button from the top left corner.

Click on New. The New Document window will open.

From the list under Templates, click on Greeting Cards.

You can choose the option you want from under the Greeting Cards section.

You will be connected to the Microsoft Office Online site. You can select from hundreds of templates or you can go to this website in the browser and download the templates from there. 

You can preview every template in Word and then click the Download button.

The Office Genuine Advantage validation dialog box will appear. You might also have to download the updated version of OGA to be capable of downloading a template.



You can customize the downloaded card by changing the colors, fonts etc or adding  your message before printing it.



Now you can print the card. 



You can make the holiday card even more personal by adding your own photos to it. You should always have greeting card paper by the side of your printer for ceremonious events.

Free Public DNS Servers from Google

Do you know Google also provides two free public DNS servers that you can use on computer to resolve domain names or URL, so that you can do website browsing faster and secure? Well.. these servers can be used as alternative to your current DNS service provided by your ISP. If you are not satisfied with your current DNS service, you can try to use this and compare the performance.

You can enjoy following benefits by using these servers:

Speed up your browsing experience:

- Provisioning servers adequately to handle the load from client traffic, including malicious traffic.

- Preventing DoS and amplification attacks.

- Load-balancing for shared caching, to improve the aggregated cache hit rate across the serving cluster.

- Prefetching name resolutions, overcome the limits of conventional, passive caching and aim to serve the majority of requests out of cache.

- Providing global coverage for proximity to all users.

Improve your security:

- Securing your code against buffer overflows, particularly the code responsible for parsing and serializing DNS messages.

- Overprovisioning machine resources to protect against direct DoS attacks on the resolvers themselves.

- Implementing basic validity-checking of response packets and of nameserver credibility, to protect against simple cache poisoning.

- Adding entropy to request messages, to reduce the probability of more sophisticated spoofing/cache poisoning attacks such as Kaminsky attacks.

- Removing duplicate queries, to combat the probability of "birthday attacks".

- Rate-limiting requests, to prevent DoS and amplification attacks.

- Monitoring the service for the client IPs using the most bandwidth and experiencing the highest response-to-request size ratio.

Are you ready to proceed? Make sure you write down the current DNS server addresses before configuring Google Public DNS, so that you can revert the change later if something goes wrong.

So how to set it up? It’s very simple! What you need to do is to change your DNS servers information on your computer or router to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Here is the screen shot on changing the DNS setting in Windows XP.



If you have problem going to above TCP/IP properties page, check out these articles on how to set opendns information in Windows 7, Vista or XP.

If you want to learn more about this Google public DNS, check out this Google site.