Tips & Advice

While every effort is taken to provide useful and accuracte information, the LEU cannot guarantee or assume legal responsibility for tips and advice provided here. Always use due caution before following any tip or advice from any source. 

Frequently Used Disks
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As a professor, I frequently transfer files from the departmental computer to my home computer by use of floppies. After a while, I began to notice that these Frequently Used Disks (FUDs) suffered from all sort of problems. These included errors in copying files and so forth. A quick check of these FUDs revealed no viruses, but a quick run of Norton Disk Doctor revealed all sorts of problems. Clearly, frequent use of a floppy makes problems more likely. Of course, it is likely that disks with important information will be used quite often, so that creates a serious problem. The solution is to always keep backups of the files on another media. When backing up to another floppy, be sure to avoid making that floppy into a FUD. It is a good idea to occasionally "refresh" a backup disk by erasing it and then transfering the files back onto it. Needless to say, the files should be copied to another medium (such as a reliable hard drive) before doing this. It is also a good idea to replace frequently used  back up disks every so often. A second solution is to take good care of the disks in question. Regular use of a disk utility, such as Norton Disk Doctor or Central Point's software, is a good idea. When your disks start exhibiting problems, it is a good idea to no longer trust them as keepers of your valuable information, even if you have fixed the problem. Being thrifty, I typically use such disks for non-vital purposes. -MCL

Tip for Finale 3.0 users
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If you have 200 fonts like I do, you might wanna get rid of some of them. I've notied that Finale will actually scan through all of them (I guess it's looking for Petrucci and the other one). So it can take about a million years if you have 200 fonts to launch. -DTC