PC Maintenance Round 2

Ahoy there, mateys!

This be Cap'n Jacket here for the second installment of art and computer maintenance. this week we're going to delve into some software to help with your computer.

There's some general things to help out with the health of your disk drives.

These days hard drives measure in terabytes (TB) and each terabyte is approximately 1000 gigabytes (GB). Now you can leave these drives alone or you can split the drive into smaller portions called partitions. Splitting them up into smaller portions allows for quicker searches and usually faster load times. There's a lot more that goes into this such as write speeds, read speeds, and rpm of the drive though we're not worried about that for now. there's many great programs out there to manage the partitions of the drive, you can use the disk management utility built into windows but I prefer EASEUS Partition Master. The free version is good enough to help manage the size of partitions and manage your disk layouts. This isn't something you need to use all the time but it's useful when you get a new drive or manage the size of an old one.

Speaking of hard drives, when information is written (saved) to the hard drive it isn't saved in order or even all together. Most of the time the information is fragmented and saved in various locations of the disk. After a while your hard drive will start slowing down when trying to load various files depending on how fragmented they are. This fragmentation also increases the chance of file corruption by having the computer accidentally write two separate bits of info to the same location. To help prevent this you'll want to defragment your hard drive. Windows has a built in defragmenter that will work but I recommend using a different tool. I've found Auslogics Disk Defrag performs better than the defrag utility built into windows. It's faster (which is good when working with larger hard drives) and has a good visual and user interface. Depending on how much info use save or delete during the month you'll want to run a defrag every month or two. After a few times you'll find a good schedule that works for you.

That's enough for this week on general PC maintenance. Onto the Art!

This week we have a little illustration I did to create a quick handout for the MSU Comics Forum 2011. I've had this concept in my head for the past few years and finally found a good combination of Comics and a Spartan helmet.





Speaking of the MSU Comics Forum 2011 pop over to the MSU Comics Forum website for more information about this years event. Also any comic creators who would like to be part of the artist alley table spaces are still available, more info can be found on the Comics Forum website.

Hell why not give you a peak at the quarter page flyer that the art was done for.



Now I bid you Adieu for this week, be back next Tuesday night.

-Jacot