Five New Year Tech Resolutions for 2009

Posted at: Saturday 3rd January 2009 by Alex Watson

We bring technology and tradition together to come up with five noble aims for the new year

1. Backup everything

Backup is boring. It’s maths test dull. In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s factorising quadratic equations while watching Big Brother re-runs and doing the ironing dull. We’re not trying to make you interested in it, we’re just going for an old fashioned haranguing approach, because backup matters. Increasingly, we live through our computers. You’ve spent hours, if not days perfectly configuring the PC you’re reading this website on, and it also stores your games, your photos and your music, so don’t leave it uninsured.

One aspect of backup that typically puts people off actually doing it has been the need, in the past, to choose what to backup because of the high cost of extra storage. Given that you can now get a 1TB Samsung drive for £75, this has ceased to be a problem. Simply buy a massive hard disk that’s as big as your PC’s main drive, and backup all your data. That way, if your hard disk fails, you can just get a replacement and copy across absolutely everything from your old system. As well as a disk, you’ll also need some back-up software such as Acronis, and a cheap USB caddy (such as the Enermax Jazz) can also come in handy as it allows you to make your backup drive portable.

2. Stop being a fan-boy

A lot of things ruin the internet – record companies suing people, rubbish broadband speeds, the willingness of people on forums to compare anything everything from cakes and traffic jams to the Nazis – but fan-boys are definitely on this least wanted list.

With their incoherent forum flames, ranting in game chat channels and overly aggrieved website comments, fan-boys take the fun out of everything. What’s worse, they seem incapable of realising they’ve pledged their undying loyalty not to good causes, noble ideals or even princesses trapped in towers, but multi-million dollar corporations.

So, if you’ve ever been tempted to go beyond the rational in defending a company you once, twice or even regularly pay to buy from, just stop. If you’ve got an Intel system, give AMD some praise – they invented the 64-bit extensions to X86 and were first with an integrated memory controller. If you’re in love with AMD, consider how good Intel’s Core 2 CPUs are, and the consider they’ve gone more than one faster with Core i7. If ATI is your amorta, praise Nvidia for actually getting game physics on a GPU working and their excellent Folding performance, while Nvidia acolytes, get ready to praise the red team for their storming 4000-series GPUs. What’s more, next time you see a forum post you think is begging for a ‘you suck, Company X rulez’ reply, just remember to post in moderation and that giant, multi-million dollar semiconductor firms don’t need your unthinking devotion, and almost definitely won’t develop better products because of it.