COMPUTERS
Back up important data files
The specter of a hard-drive crash should haunt you if you’re aware of how it can mess up your life. Few events in the computing world are worse than a hard drive that goes south, gets damaged when you drop your computer or develops bad sectors for no good reason for the files you need most. Corrupted sectors on a hard drive can destroy crucial email from your boss. While you can reinstall applications, it’s near impossible to resurrect your data without spending more money than you paid for your PC. And even then, it may be easier to restore a da Vinci.
To protect myself, I back up important data files to three cloud services — SugarSync, Carbonite and Dropbox. I also keep a USB drive and external hard drive plugged into my PCs for irreplaceable files. If you must know how obsessive I am about back-ups, I have three external drives for my Mac’s Time Machine feature.
Imagine if you could make an exact image of your entire hard drive on an external drive. Once you’ve made that mirror image, you could restore everything from your old hard drive (before it crashed) to your new one, applications included.
Several commercial programs will do that. Norton Ghost comes to mind. It’s inexpensive and easy to use, even for newbies. After it makes an initial image of your hard drive, it periodically backs up new files as you create or change them. A key element is its feature that guides you through making a boot-up disc. After you’ve installed your new hard drive, you insert the boot-up disc and run Ghost in reverse. It’s available for $70 at http://us.norton.com/ghost/.
— By Noah Matthews,
McClatchy-Tribune News
Texting is possible on iPads
Q: My daughter, who is hearing-impaired, has been told that she can text from an iPad. Is this possible? My daughter also wants to take the iPad outside her building, which doesn’t have Wi-Fi, and somehow still get on the Internet. What would she need to do this?
A: Any iPad using the current iOS 6 operating system, or the previous iOS 5, can send text messages using Apple’s iMessage function. But text messages can be sent only between Apple devices, so your daughter could only text people who have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Macintosh computer using a newer operating system. Your daughter could broaden her reach a bit with iPad apps such as the free Textie, which will work on iPads using an operating system as old as iOS 3.1; but everyone she texted would need to have the Textie app, too. There are two ways to get on the Internet with an iPad: Wi-Fi, or, if you’ve bought the more expensive cellular iPad model, via the cellphone system. Using a cellular connection requires setting up a separate cellphone account for the iPad.
— Steve Alexander,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
real estate
Confusion about short sale
Q: I completed a short sale on my home, and the agreement didn’t address whether I still was on the hook for the forgiven debt. I was just served with a lawsuit from a mortgage insurance company that wants me to pay the deficiency. What’s going on?
A: A common misconception about private mortgage insurance is that it protects the borrower. In reality, while the borrower pays for this insurance, it actually is designed to protect your lender if you default on the mortgage. Not all loans have PMI. But if yours does, and you complete a short sale or lose the home in foreclosure, your lender can make an insurance claim with the PMI company. The company then can stand in your lender’s shoes to try and collect the money back from you, a legal concept known as “subrogation.”
The theory is that because your actions resulted in the insurer having to pay the claim, the company can seek repayment from you. You can respond to this lawsuit by making the company prove it has the right to collect the deficiency, just as you would make the lender prove it has the right to foreclose.
— Gary M. Singer,
Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel