HDD wipe

Wipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy Way

Giving a computer to somebody else? Maybe you’re putting it out on Craigslist to sell to a stranger—either way, you’ll want to make sure that your drive is completely wiped, scrubbed, and clean of any personal data. Here’s the easy way to do it.

If you only have access to an Ubuntu Live CD or thumb drive, you can actually use that instead if you prefer, and we’ve got you covered with a full guide to securely wiping your PC’s hard drive. Otherwise, keep reading.

Wipe the Drive with DBAN

Darik’s Boot and Nuke CD is the easiest way to permanently and totally destroy every bit of personal information on that drive—nobody is going to recover a thing once this is done.

The first thing you’ll need to do is download a copy of the ISO image, and then burn it to a blank CD with something really useful like Imgburn. Just choose Burn image to Disc at the start screen, select the little file icon, grab the downloaded ISO, and then go. If you need a little more help, we’ve got you covered with a beginner’s guide to burning an ISO image.

Once you’re done, stick the disc into the drive, start the PC up, and then once you boot to the DBAN prompt you’ll see a menu. You can pretty much ignore everything on here, and just type…

autonuke

And there you are, your disk is now being securely wiped.

Once it’s all done, you can remove the CD, and then either pack the PC up to sell, or re-install Windows on there if you feel like it.

More Advanced Method

If you’re really paranoid, want to run a different type of wipe, or just like fiddling with the options, you can choose F3 or hit Enter at the prompt to head to the advanced selection screen. Here you can choose exactly which drive to wipe, or hit the M key to change the method.

You’ll be able to choose between a bunch of different wipe options. The Quick Erase is all you really need though.

 

So there you are, easy PC wiping in one package. What about you? Do you make sure to wipe your old PCs before giving them away? Personally I’ve always just yanked out the hard drives before I got rid of an old PC, but that’s just me.

Download DBAN from dban.org

Windows 8 and VirtualBox

How To Install Windows 8 Consumer Preview In VirtualBox Virtual Machine On Mac & Windows 7 [Tutorial]

On Wednesday, Microsoft officially released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview (which is essentially a fancy term for ‘public beta’). If you’re eager to dabble around with the build in a virtual machine – perhaps due to the lack of a non-production machine, a spare partition, the fear of using it in a production environment, or, well, if you just want to install it in a virtual machine – then you’re in luck.

Here’s a quick tutorial that will show you how to install Windows 8 in a VirtualBox virtual machine, so you can enjoy the Consumer Preview from the comfort of a safe and sound OS. So, what do you need? A copy of VirtualBox (free), and a copy of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which you can grab from here. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Launch VirtualBox and click on the "New" button to create a new virtual machine. In the wizard that pops up, select the Microsoft Windows Operating System and the Windows 8 version (remember to select the 64-bit version if your ISO is an x64 copy).

Step 2: Select the amount of memory that you wish to allocate to the virtual machine. VirtualBox recommends the staggeringly specific amount of 1536, so I just went with that. Raise or lower the memory amount as you please, but bear in mind that decreasing it too far beyond the minimum recommended amount will lead to diminished performance.

Step 3: Now, you’re going to have to create a new virtual hard disk. VirtualBox recommends that its size be 20GB; this is the minimum amount that Windows 8 needs for its x64 version (x86 is 16GB). If you do wish adjust this amount, the only way you can go is up.

Step 4: Select the virtual disk file type that you wish to use. I went with a VirtualBox disk image as I won’t be using this virtual machine with other VM software, but you do have the option to select a more generic file type if needed.

Step 5: You will be able to choose between a fixed virtual hard drive size and a dynamically allocated size. Basically, the latter will allow your virtual machine hard disk size to increase in size as it fills up. If you choose to create a fixed virtual hard drive size, set your HDD size here.

Step 6: We’re getting there. Verify that the settings are the ones that you desire, and create the virtual machine.

Step 7: Now, start the virtual machine that you just created; a wizard will appear.

Step 8: Browse to and select the Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO that you downloaded.

Step 9: Install Windows 8. Assuming that the previous steps were performed correctly, you should now be viewing Windows Setup.

Step 10: Wrap up the Windows 8 installation process, and voilà.

Now, while all of the screenshots above were taken on OS X, this configuration process is the same on Windows.

Enjoy Windows 8!

Windows 7 to Windows 8 upgrade

It's not exactly a shock to learn that Microsoft is preparing a way for people who will buy a new Windows 7 desktop or laptop in the near future to upgrade to the upcoming Windows 8. Microsoft has made similar upgrade paths available to consumers whenever a new version of Windows was close to launching.

News.com reports that, according to their sources, consumers who buy a Windows 7 PC running Home Basic or higher will be able to get an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro when it is launched later this year. The story claims that the program will begin either on or around June 2nd.

The update to Windows 8 Pro won't be free; Microsoft will charge users some kind of fee for the upgrade from Windows 7, according to the story. So far, there's no word on what that upgrade fee might be. The Windows 8 Pro update program is reportedly to last until sometime in January 2013.

The story adds that Microsoft wants to launch the program during the summer so that PC makers can benefit from sales for the back-to-school time period, even though Windows 8 itself is not expected to launch until after the fall school sessions begin. Microsoft has not officially commented on its Windows 8 upgrade plans.

A Look Into: Popular (Public) Site Ranking Services

By Darren Stevens. Filed in Web 2.0

Ads by Google

Google Analytics Survey4Qsurvey.com Learn how to make happier visitors: Add a 4Q survey to Google Analytics

There’s no denying that anyone who owns a blog in some way tracks the statistics and rankings of their site. After all, one has to measure growth somehow, one has to know if they’re on the right track of growth and prosperity.

One way of doing this is simply to check the statistics on your site, either through an integrated tracking system, or an external one like Google Analytics. While this gives you an overview of your traffic and visitors, it doesn’t give you a picture of how your site compares to others. This is where traffic analysis services like Compete.com and Alexa come in.
This article will cover the major players in the market of traffic analysis and ranking, and investigate how they operate, how and what kind of data they use to rank sites, and most importantly, their validity of their rankings. Full list at the click.

Recommended Reading: Real Time Web Analytics Services – Best of

Ways of collecting traffic data

There are 3 major ways of collecting and estimating traffic for a website:

• Track users with custom installed software (e.g. toolbars) and record the websites they visit, then use the data collectively to estimate how popular a given website is. The main problem with this method is that toolbars aren’t popular among users, especially tech savvy users, and the data is somewhat skewed towards the kind of people who would use the toolbars (the not-so-savvy Internet users). To make matters worse, some of the toolbars only work for certain browsers, while others are even classified as spyware/malware.
• ISP data tracking. A more direct way is to collect vast amounts of data from ISPs and inspect what sites broadband users visit. This option is by far the most accurate, but it’s also the most limited due to privacy laws.
• An internal ranking score based on different metrics, e.g. Google PageRank, which uses links and link quality to determine a site’s ranking.

Most web tracking services use a combination of the first two methods, while some are entirely based around one. Here’s a rundown of the most popular services, and how they operate.

Compete.com

Compete is a popular way of measuring traffic, and has been in operation since 2000. Compete uses traffic from users with its Compete Search bar installed to rank sites and estimate traffic, in addition to data from ISPs and other metrics. Compete also offers several paid services, including search analytics that compares site keywords.

Like any traffic service, Compete.com’s rankings are as trustworthy as the data they have, which in their case is compiled from several sources, including a toolbar, data from ISPs, and online surveys. Because data is compiled and estimated from several sources, it’s prone to be less biased than if it was compiled from only one source, e.g. a toolbar.

Alexa

Alexa, founded back in 1996, and now owned by Amazon, gathers data from only one source: its toolbar for Internet Explorer and plugins for Firefox and Google Chrome, and the ranks of website are calculated on a 3-month basis. Throughout these years it has become so popular that many advertisers and webmasters use it to estimate traffic.

As Alexa ranks websites based on only one data source, it is often cited as vastly inaccurate compared to other tracking services, and rightfully so. Alexa only uses one source of data, and that data is entirely based on whether the user has a toolbar installed, but some anti-virus applications even classify the Alexa toolbar as malware.
Finally, Alexa ranks are calculated on a 3-month basis, which is a relatively long time, especially in a fast growing online world. Despite all this, Alexa is used by many bloggers to rank sites, and is popular among advertisers to estimate traffic of websites.

comScore

comScore gathers data from a selected group of users who have comScore monitoring software installed on their systems, which tracks their website visits and activity. So far, over 2 million people send data to comScore, which uses it to create traffic rankings and estimates for marketing purposes (e.g. selling the data to large advertisers and researchers). Though its rankings and data are commercially available only, it’s popular among advertising agencies and online market researchers.

comScore handpicks its users based on age, location, income, etc., which gives it a broad representation of web traffic and demographics, something other traffic ranking services don’t. Because of the expensive way in which the data is gathered, comScore’s traffic and rankings aren’t publicly available besides a top 100 list. Users, and marketers alike, have to pay for the data. What you get though, is of high quality.

Quantcast

Quantcast is one of the newer players in the market, and has been active since 2006. It gathers data from website owners who insert a code snippet into their HTML code, sending visitor data to Quantcast. The service only tracks US visitors for the time being.
Quantcast tracks data directly from sites, and what makes it different than others is it can only compare sites that are both participating in the system, but it’s still somewhat of a “niche” service.

Quantcast’s traffic data is as accurate as it can get, since it has direct access to websites and can track every single visitor (with the use of Cookies as well). Because it gathers data only from websites that participate, it doesn’t have a broad ranking system – you can rarely compare sites that aren’t on Quantcast. But those that are, the data could be valid. Quantcast does estimate traffic on some sites that don’t participate via tracking cookies, but those aren’t nearly as accurate.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a service offered by search giant Google, which displays and ranks a particular search term compared to the overall volume of search. It’s also possible to compare several search terms against each other, and display the data from a period of a number of years. Additionally, the data can be narrowed down to country, city, language etc.

As you might know, Google Trends’ data is based on Google searches. It’s used to view the volume of searches for a particular item, or compare several items, which makes it a great tool for research purpose.
Google Trends can be used in a number of ways, for example, to compare how often a phrase is searched. It can also be used to compare different sites, e.g. Engadget vs. Gizmodo over time, or in different regions (e.g. the US).

Google PageRank

PageRank, developed by Larry Page for Google in the late 1990s, is an algorithm for ranking websites in Google’s search engine. It uses data based on how websites link each other to create a ranking from 0-10.

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

It’s widely known that PageRank is used internally by Google, and it’s a popular standard of measuring a site’s importance on the web. Overall it’s updated 1-2 times a year, and the ranking algorithm is changed within certain time. The whole search engine optimization (SEO) industry has been built around to optimize the site’s PageRank.
Google uses PageRank as of its key measures to determine search engine results, and sites with a high page rank (6+) are considered “influential”. PageRank isn’t generally used to estimate site traffic, since it doesn’t rank websites based on traffic, but rather, based on the site’s importance. But that doesn’t mean PageRank isn’t useful – it’s still one of the most popular ways of determining a site’s genuine popularity.

Conclusion

Should I be worried about my rankings? Should I even care? Well, the use of web traffic estimators and ranking services isn’t necessary to any site owner – most have some form of stats tracking like Analytics installed, and for the most part, that’s all that matters.
But there are situations where your ranking on one of these services matters. For instance, potential advertisers will glance at your rankings in order to estimate what kind of traffic your site gets and estimate your site’s importance. Alexa rankings, for instance, regardless of their usefulness, are still used to gauge website popularity by advertising services such as BuySellAds.
Technically speaking, these services don’t matter to the individual site owner, but they matter to those (e.g. advertisers) who compare properties and decide where to put their money, especially those media companies looking to acquire sites. Even if the data isn’t nearly as accurate as it should be, most times, these services are all that’s available to measure one site against another.

9 Interesting Facts About Any Website

By Kay Tan. Filed in Web 2.0

Ads by Google

Linkdex - SEO Platformwww.linkdex.com/free-account Seize Every Opportunity. Claim Your Free Account Today.

Image credit: stock.xchng
As bloggers, designers and consistent Internet surfers, we constantly visit a lot of websites and blogs on daily basis. Aside from reading the content, we get all curious too. These ponders are often figures and data the website/blog generates, for example – the pageviews, feedreader counts, rankings, web host, how much money a site makes, etc.
If you are constantly checking out these figures of any websites you go to, don’t worry because that’s a good sign. These information allows you to understand websites you visits better, it also keeps you closer to your competitions. If you often checkout Google PageRank, Alexa of your website and others, we want to show you more. Here are 9 Interesting Facts About Any Website. Full list after jump.
Disclaimer: We believe the following statistics, figures are not absolutely accurate (perhaps, nothing are) and they might varies from one web service to another.

1. Traffics: Visits, Pageview, Rankings

Most of us know Alexa is flawed and the rankings might not be too accurate. The fact is, nothing is really accurate. Any figures generated by these public web services are as good as cross-referencing and perhaps nothing more. The most accurate traffic figures and demographics information will only make known to the webmaster inside their Google Analytics, Sitemeter, etc account.

Alexa

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources.

Compete

Compete is a new breed of web analytic company. Powered by the largest pool of online consumer behavior data in the industry, Compete.com is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics in one site to help you quickly master online marketing.

Statbrain

With Statbrain.com you can find out how many visits any site has. Statbrain uses different resources on the web combined with mathematical and statistical methods to estimate how many visits a website has. Statbrain estimates the number of visits that a website has based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc.

Quantcast

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence. The free service empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

Google Trends For Websites

With Google Trends for Websites, you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of your favorite websites. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

2. Loading Time

Find out what slows your site or a site you visit down. Good tools for site optimization.

Pingdom Tools

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file.Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

Webslug

Webslug was conceived as an all encompassing way of testing site performance. It measures load time as the user sees it. The time it takes for a page to load fully from when the request was made.

WebWait

WebWait is a website timer that benchmarks your website or test the speed of your web connection. Timing is accurate because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

Internet Supervision

Internet Supervision monitors the availability, performance, and content of a website, web server and internet services from our UL approved offices with 24/7 personnel in Washington DC, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Santiago, Chile.

Link Vendor

Link Vendor shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website take to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP.

3. Web Hosting

Some websites took traffic spikes smoothly. Wonder who’s hosting for them? Check them out.

Who.Is

Who.is is a website for performing whois lookups on domain names for many popular gTLDs and ccTLDs.

Who Is Hosting This

Who Is Hosting This is a tool that lets you discover who is hosting any web site instantly. Enter the domain, and we’ll tell you which web hosting company the site uses. It’s that simple!

4. Feed Subscribers

FeedCompare

Feedcompare is another web service that does the same; but instead of comparing web traffics, it compares Feedburner feed subscriber counts. Feedcompares supports comparison up to 4 websites/blogs and you can generate a chart as far as 24 months view. Feedcompare reveals feed subscriber counts as long as you type in the FeedBurner feed name.

How to Find Out Feedburner Subscribers Figures

We did show you how to find out feedburner subscribers figures when they don’t tell. Click the above link to check the tricks out.

5. Website In- History

WayBackMachine

Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available.

6. Interface Design

Browsershots

Browsershots makes screen shots of a web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service.

Cross Browser Testing

CrossBrowserTesting.com allows website designers see what their website looks like in different browsers and in different operating systems.

7. SEO | PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages and more

Xinu Returns

Find out how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics

Websitegrader

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors.

SEO Meter

SEOmeter.com offers a convenient online SEO tool that allows webmasters to monitor their website’ crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.

Popuri.US

A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!

8. Website Value

dnScoop

dnScoop.com attempts to estimate a value for an established website or a domain name by using factors such as links pointing to the domain, popularity of the domain, age of the domain, pagerank of the domain and traffic to the domain.

Cutestat

Cubestat is a free and perfect tool for website value calculation, estimations and information. Cubestat has an unique algorithm will calculate and estimate the website worth, daily pageviews and daily ads revenue of the present domain. Among the estimation it will show precise information available for the domain.

WebsiteOutlook

Websiteoutlook is the perfect place to evaluate any website. When choosing to buy or sell a website having the proper information about your investment can be crucial to your success. Websiteoutlook is dedicated to finding all pertinent information that may pertain to your personal interest. And it’s FREE!

YourWebsiteValue

Your Website Value is basically a calculator that evaluate the yearly potential value of a website based on many factors such as: Number of pages indexed in search engines; Number of sites linking to the website; Quality of website; Popularity of the website.

Site Value Calculator

Site Value Calculator is the easy way to check the value of your website. It finds the value of your website with seeing your site’s traffic trends, backlinks, alexa ranking and DMOZ links.

9. Everything About A Website (All in One)

Quarkbase

Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. It is a mash-up of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc.

Domain Tools

Domain name search tool; allows wildcard search of current and deleted/expired whois domains.