Consolidate Multiple Email and Contacts Into One

For various reasons, we often end up with multiple email accounts: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. It gets confusing and hard to keep track of. It also takes a lot of time to check for new mail on all the services.
The good news is that it is possible to consolidate all those email accounts into one, without losing anything stored on the other services.
You probably want to keep your email accounts active and receiving mail, at least for 90 days. You have had those addresses for a while, and, if people don't know your new address, they have no other way to reach you.
I chose Google's Gmail for my One Address. It's reliable, the gmail.com name is respected and widely used by both personal and business users. Gmail is searchable in many useful ways, and its spam filter is among the very best. Best of all, Gmail now lets you consolidate all your other email accounts very easily.
Of course you want to import to your One Address all your email contacts from the other services, AND your old email saved on those services. Gmail lets you do all that with a few simple steps.
Use the Gmail Import Feature
After logging into Gmail, in the upper right corner, click on Settings, then click the "Accounts and Import" tab. Next, click on "Import Mail and Contacts" and just follow directions. One by one, you will enter the email address and password for each of your other accounts.
You'll be given the option to import contacts and old mail; import new mail arriving at the old address for 30 days; and to add the old mail address to the imported mail as a tag to tell you where it came from. Click "Start Import" and go do the same for your other email accounts.
Google advises you that the import process may take several hours, even up to two days, before you start seeing imported mail. In actual practice, I started receiving imported old mail within minutes. Your experience may vary. But importing goes on without you, you don't even have to be logged on to Gmail.
Since Gmail has a "filters" function, you may want to set up a rule that routes mail from each old account into a specified subfolder, rather than have everything pile up in your main Inbox.
From here, you have only one webmail site to bookmark, and just one username and password to remember. Email checking will go much faster with only one account to check. And you'll have all your contacts and messages in one place.
Frankie On Call uses Gmail every day and can help with any support or questions you might have.

How Can I Tell If My Hard Drive Is About To Fail?

Your computer's hard drive is its permanent memory, the critical repository of all your important data, the programs and operating system that make a computer "smart". If the hard drive doesn't work, the whole computer is just a brick. How can you tell if your hard drive is close to failing and needs fixing or replacement?
The bad news is that hard drives may give no warning of imminent failures. Like a car that runs over a nail, a hard drive most often just dies, leaving you stranded suddenly. The sudden burnout of electronic components; a bearing that blows in a second; a "head crash" in which the read/write head touches and scratches the magnetic platter; these sorts of catastrophes usually happen without warning. Fairly uncommon but, we do see “dead drives”.
Here is an interesting bit of data. Modern hard drives last a long time. Look on a drive's label or in its technical specs and you will find a value labeled MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures. That's the average (mean) number hours a whole bunch of drives spun at full speed before something broke in each of them. An MTBF of 50,000 hours is the minimum acceptable today; 100,000 hours is not uncommon. There are about 2,000 hours in a typical employee's work-year.
This average" does not mean "guaranteed minimum." An exceptional drive that runs 400,000 hours may be offset in the average calculation by one that burns out after only 5,000 hours - and that early departer could be yours. We just don’t know.
Warning Signs of Hard Drive Failure
If you start getting read/write errors, i. e., "cannot write to disk" or "cannot access file," THIS is bad. It may be the drive's firmware, or it may be corrupted, cross-linked files; run CHKDSK to find and fix such things. These are the easiest and cheapest problems to fix.
CHKDSK comes with Windows, and it's pretty good at detecting bad files and physically damaged sectors. It will lock damaged sectors so that the computer will not attempt to write to them. To run CHKDSK, open a command prompt (Start, Run, CMD, Enter), then type CHKDSK C: /F /R then press Enter. This tells CHKDSK to scan for bad sectors, and fix any errors found. There are free utilities out there that run more thorough tests. One of the highly recommended utilities is Seagate SeaTools for Windows.
Listen to your computer. If you hear a clicking sound, especially during startup, that's often a sign of a damaged hard disk, and impending doom. Just like you can hear when a car engine is "laboring," you can often hear when a hard drive is working too hard. That means it's wearing out faster, just like an engine that climbs steep hills every day. If you hear vague rattling noises when your hard drive is accessing data, you should run a disk clean-up and defragmentation right away. The less the read/write head must move to find, read, and write data, the longer it will last.
If you feel your hard drive is failing or if you would like to have it checked, Frankie On Call will help you. We can image your existing drive to a new drive. This will offer more space and a new healthy drive. Call ore email Frankie On Call with any questions.
If noises or errors become frequent, don't hope the problem will go away -- because it won't.
You wouldn't count on an old car with a blown engine seal in emergencies or even for backup use, would you?