September Newsletter

Virus of the month

Another month, another virus. This time our nomination is Lanieca, a mass mailing worm that includes its own email sending engine. Take special care if you receive emails with attachments including ZIP or EXE files, and keep those antivirus programs up to date. It's not surprising that many people opt to eschew Windows for alternatives that are less vulnerable to malware.

What's in a Hard Drive?

The humble hard drive is often overlooked, but without it your PC would be useless. It holds all your data files, plus those necessary to run Windows and all the applications that you have. But what exactly goes on inside one?

A hard drive consists of a series of magnetic discs stacked one on top of the other held in place by a central spindle. These rotate around the spindle and can receive magnetic imprints on either side. Read and write heads can move over each platter, being suspended on the end of mechanical arms.

Consider each disc to be an old style vinyl LP on a record player. The record turns around the central pin, the stylus picks up the musical data. Hard drive platters are similar; the read/write heads behave like the stylus. However, the analogy isn’t perfect; old records carry just one groove that spirals towards the centre or the disc. The stylus would follow this track until it reached the end of the LP or someone intervened by lifting it up. The read/write heads in a hard drive can move towards the centre and back again of their own accord, and the spinning disc enables them to cover the whole surface of the platter. Current hard drives have many of these discs, each with read/write heads dancing across its surface.

When you get a hard drive from its manufacturer, it hasn’t been formatted, or certainly not in a manner that Windows can understand. Drives usually receive a very low-level format at the factory and they need to be formatted  before you can use them. The low level format creates tracks, sectors and cylinders, which are physical structures on the hard disk. Tracks are like the lines on an LP, only instead of spiralling into the centre of the disc; these are concentric circles. Each track is sub divided into sectors by imaginary lines coming from the centre of the disc, like the spokes of a bike wheel. Each sector holds a certain amount of data. You get larger sectors the further away from the centre of the disc you go, just as wheel spokes get further apart. It’s very wasteful to assign the same amount of data to such varying sized spaces, which is why zones were developed. They groups tracks together based on the distance they are from the centre of the disc. The further away the zone is from the hub, the more sectors are allocated per track.

In case this is all a bit too much to take in at once, bear in mind that you don’t need to understand how a hard drive works in order to use it. The most you really need to know is how much space is left for your data. To do this click Start, My Computer and right click the hard drive you want to examine, choosing Properties. If you need more space, fear not. Prices are tumbling and it’s possible to buy a disk that holds a mammoth 200GB for under £60. Visit the price comparison site PC Index www.pcindex.co.uk to find the latest deals.

In fact getting a new hard drive is one of the most cost effective upgrades available. The extra storage gives you the opportunity to back up data from your existing drive to the new one or to use it for storage of big files, like high quality video. If you want to use the new drive as a replacement, you’ll need to copy the data you’re your old drive to the new one. We can advise and help with the upgrade process.