Have you ever wished you had an extra Hard Disk to store files, share, or set aside as an encrypted vault? Lets take a look.
What is “virtual Drive”?
A virtual drive in computing is a device that to the OS appears to be an ordinary physical disk drive, with disc images substituted for disc reading hardware through the use of software called a disk emulator.
A virtual drive may emulate any type of physical drive, such as a hard drive, tape drive, key drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD/BD/HD DVD or a network share among others.
Virtual hard disks are most commonly used in on the fly disk encryption (”OTFE”) software such as FreeOTFE and TrueCrypt, where an encrypted “image” of a disk is stored on the PC. When you enter the disk’s password, the disk image is “mounted”, and made available as a new drive letter on your PC. Files written to this virtual drive are written to the encrypted image, and never stored in cleartext.
The process of making such an encrypted disk available for use is called “mounting”, the process of removing it is called “dismounting”.
Create a Virtual Drive:
To begin, Right-click on My Computer and select to Manage. Alternately you can type diskmgmt.msc into the Start search box and enter.
The Computer Management screen opens click on Disk Management then Action and Create VHD.
Browse to the directory you want the disk to reside, choose the size you want it to be, and select dynamic or a fixed. If you want the disk to expand in size as you add files to it, then pick Dynamically expanding. Check Fixed size if you want a specific size and for it to stay that way.
In Disk Management you will see the virtual drive listed as unallocated space.
To begin using it you’ll need to Right-click and select Initialize Disk.
In the initialize disk box just keep MBR selected and hit OK.
Create a Volume
Now it is time to create a volume by Right-clicking the unallocated space and select New Simple Volume.
The New Simple Volume Wizard starts up and it’s just a matter of completing it.
Choose the amount of space you want to use for the volume.
Assign it a dive letter that is not currently being used.
The wizard is complete, click on Finish.
If you have AutoPlay enabled it should pop up for you to open up your new virtual hard disk.
It will be listed with the other disks in Disk Management.
Of course you will also see it listen under My Computer.
This is a cool new feature that will let you use the disk as you would any type of real disk. You can encrypt it, share it out to other systems, store files to it…however you would use an extra disk connected to your system.
This is a cool new feature in Windows 7 that will add extra functionality and options to your current system. There are several ways you can use your VHD including making it bootable. If you have used your geek imagination and have come up with unique ways to use a VHD, leave a comment to tell us about it.
Reference:
[1]http://www.howtogeek.com
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/
Net Worth:$1.4 bil
Fortune:self made
Source:Google
Age:45
Country Of Citizenship:United States
Residence:Atherton, California
Industry: Internet
Education:San Jose State University, Bachelor of Arts / Science, Stanford University, Master of Business Administration
Marital Status:divorced, 2 children
Early life
Omid Kordestani was born in Tehran, Iran and grew up there, attending an Italian Catholic school in Tehran that emphasised education and language skills.He moved to San Jose, California at the age of 14 after the death of his father. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree from San Jose State University and went to work for Hewlett Packard as an engineer. Several years later in order to pursue a business degree, he entered Stanford Business School and earned his MBA in 1991.
Career
As the individual responsible for Google’s revenue generation efforts, Omid Kordestani is the tireless leader of an international sales effort that has brought Google to profitability in record time, generating more than $10 billion in revenue in 2006. Kordestani has more than a dozen years of high-technology consumer and enterprise experience, including key positions at Internet pioneer Netscape Communications. As vice president of Business Development and Sales, Kordestani grew Netscape’s website revenue from an annual run-rate of $88 million to more than $200 million in 18 months.
Kordestani joined Netscape as director of OEM Sales, and during his four-year career at that company he was responsible for establishing major customer relationships with Citibank, AOL, Amazon, Intuit, Travelocity, Intel, @Home, eBay, and Excite. Prior to Netscape, Kordestani held positions in marketing, product management, and business development at The 3DO Company, Go Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard.
Kordestani received an MBA from Stanford University and a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from San Jose State University.
Refrences:
1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omid_Kordestani
2-http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=220736
3-http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html
Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware. IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.
Today, the term information has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term has become very recognizable. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems.
When computer and communications technologies are combined, the result is information technology, or “infotech”. Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information. Presumably, when speaking of Information Technology (IT) as a whole, it is noted that the use of computers and information are associated.
In recent days ABET and the ACM have collaborated to form accreditation and curriculum standards for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field of study separate from both Computer Science and Information Systems. SIGITE is the ACM working group for defining these standards.
From: www.Wikipedia.com
You are no doubt reading this article because you are wondering why on earth there are nearly a dozen processes running with the name svchost.exe. You can’t kill them, and you don’t remember starting them… so what are they?
So What Is It?
According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”.
Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective this makes more sense for reusability… but the problem is that you can’t launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (.exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born.
Why Are There So Many svchost.exes Running?
If you’ve ever taken a look at the Services section in control panel you might notice that there are a Lot of services required by Windows. If every single service ran under a single svchost.exe instance, a failure in one might bring down all of Windows… so they are separated out.
Those services are organized into logical groups, and then a single svchost.exe instance is created for each group. For instance, one svchost.exe instance runs the 3 services related to the firewall. Another svchost.exe instance might run all the services related to the user interface, and so on.
So What Can I Do About It?
You can trim down unneeded services by disabling or stopping the services that don’t absolutely need to be running. Additionally, if you are noticing very heavy CPU usage on a single svchost.exe instance you can restart the services running under that instance.
The biggest problem is identifying what services are being run on a particular svchost.exe instance… we’ll cover that below.
If you are curious what we’re talking about, just open up Task Manager and check the “Show processes from all users” box:
Checking From the Command Line (Vista or XP Pro)
If you want to see what services are being hosted by a particular svchost.exe instance, you can use the tasklist command from the command prompt in order to see the list of services: tasklist /SVC
The problem with using the command line method is that you don’t necessarily know what these cryptic names refer to.
Checking in Task Manager in Vista
This will flip over to the Services tab, where the services running under that svchost.exe process will be selected:
The great thing about doing it this way is that you can see the real name under the Description column, so you can choose to disable the service if you don’t want it running.
Disabling Services
Open up Services from the administrative tools section of Control Panel, or type services.msc into the start menu search or run box.
Find the service in the list that you’d like to disable, and either double-click on it or right-click and choose Properties.
Change the Startup Type to Disabled, and then click the Stop button to immediately stop it.
You could also use the command prompt to disable the service if you choose. In this command “trkwks” is the Service name from the above dialog, but if you go back to the tasklist command at the beginning of this article you’ll notice you can find it there as well : sc config trkwks start= disabled
