Saturday - June 23, 2007
This past week: A Couple PC Issues, Data Recovery, Audio Editing, & Music Production (and of course the beach!)
Well, it appears that my desire to only fix Apples has been superseded by my desire to make money! :)
This past week I worked on a few different PCs (Window's XP machines). One such PC was located in the Glendale Galleria at a restaurant called Red Robin. Their office PC had suddenly stopped being able to connect to the internet (dial-up AOL). They thought it had something to do with their recently upgrade POS servers and/or their external dial-up modem had died. I checked all the (hundreds) of connections with their new servers and they seemed to be completely separate from their office computer, so I ruled that out. I was able to hook up the external modem to my computer and dial out, so I ruled out the possibility of the modem not working. The computer itself was VERY slow and it was very difficult to open applications and simply navigate around. I figured there had to be viruses. So I installed Avast and scheduled a boot time scan. It ended up eradicating more than 70 viruses. When the computer started back up, I was able to connect to AOL. As I guessed, the viruses were indeed blocking the computer from accessing the internet (both ethernet and dial-up). ** BTW... thanks for the free food Red Robin!! I highly recommend the Teriyaki Burger! **
I got another PC this week from Francisco. His daughter's PC was having some problems connecting to various web sites (sounds like a virus to me) and Francisco thought he would be able to fix it. He ended up reinstalling XP, but something went wrong, and the computer became completely unusable. Francisco was exhausted and his daughter needed her computer and files for school. After dropping the tower off with me, I removed the hard drive and backed up all his daughter's important files to a spare drive. Then I replaced the hard drive, reformatted, and re-installed XP. I spent about 2 hours installing updates (including SP2) and finding the appropriate drivers for the various devices in the computer. I also installed Avast, saved a Restore point, scanned for viruses, moved the backup up files to the desktop, and verified proper internet connectivity (the reason for the computer's problems in the first place).
I got three drives this week for data recovery services. From John I got another Lacie Bigger Disk (the long drives with 2 internal hard drives inside - STAY AWAY FROM THE LACIE D2, i think that's the name - if one drive goes bad, you can't recover the data from either drive, you lose everything!). Unfortunately, the primary drive inside had mechanical problems and I was unable to recover any data. I got two other drives from Stan... one with the same fate as Johns - mechanical failure. However, the other drive from John didn't have mechanical problems, instead it had a very corrupted file system. Using special data recovery software, I was able to grab just about everything from the drive (45gb), but it took about 16 hours, as just about every file had to be repaired because of the severe corruption.
I gotta thank Craigslist for hooking me up with Bill who had a 10 hour mp3 from a doctor's conference that he needed normalized and cut up into 7 separate mp3s. The original MP3 was extremely low quality, almost inaudible, and had lots of transients (clapping, speakers hitting the mic stand, coughing). I ended up spending about 8 hours so I could do a great job for Bill. First I separated the mp3 by speakers at the conference. Then I edited each speech, removing transients and dead air. I used WAVES X-Noise to remove a lot of the background noise, then normalized the files. I used WAVES Q10 for EQ, RVOX for compression/limiting, and another EQ for final mastering - I also changed the mp3s to mono to decrease file size. Since the mp3s might be posted online, I ended up giving Bill two sets of mp3s - high and low quality.
I think this is a good time to mention that lately I've been working on the music for the LA Alliance conference coming up in September. It's been really fun to get out of the hip hop style and move to a more cinematic/classical style. So far I've got 2 songs completed and hope to have at least 12 done by the date of the conference as I plan to sell these songs at the conference (with a portion going to the LA Alliance charity) - they will also be playing in the background of the conference in the morning, lunch, and evening.