Wednesday, March 23, 2011

My Preffered OS

1st STEP:
Booting Up and First Installation Steps
-Steps from here are pretty straight forward. Read the descriptions in each pages before clicking the Next button to avoid any disasters. IF there is options to choose in these steps you may find them with each images.









2nd STEP:

You may choose your Language options by selecting the dropdowns 'Language to install', 'Time and Currency format' and 'Keyboard or input method' here. I decided to leave everything to 'US' but it would be better for selecting the correct settings here for non-english users.


3rd STEP:

This screen is where the installation wizard begins. The install now options will leads to the advanced install options. For repairing a corrupt installation the 'Repair your computer' button located at the bottom-left can be used. For fresh installs just click the Install now button.




Tick the 'I accept the license terms' checkbox and click 'Next' to proceed.


Which type of installation do you want?

This screen provides two options, Upgrade and Custom (advanced). The upgrade option is for those who wish to upgrade an existing installation of older version of Windows to Windows 7. It is confirmed that Windows Vista can be upgraded to Windows 7 with out any issues.


4th STEP:
Where do you want to install Windows?

Clicking on the 'Custom' button brings the install location selection screen. In the test machine we have an un-partitioned empty disk. But in the case of a normal installation all your hard drive partitions (e.g. C:\ , D:\ etc.) will be listed here. Choose the drive as you like (a 15 GB size is recommended). Make sure the drive don't have any important data or the Windows 7 installation will wipe-out the contents of that partition. You can backup the data to another partition (e.g. for installing in D:\ drive move important files from there to say E:\ drive or to an external usb drive) for safe keeping.


Partitioning /Creating or Modifying Partitions 

Click the Drive options (advanced) for advanced partition management options like 'Delete', 'Format', 'New' and 'Extend'. To create a new partition click the New button. But if you have list of partitions in the previous screen, choose the one where you are planning to install windows 7 and click Format. Then click 'Next' to proceed.



The 'New' option provides a text box to enter the size of the partition you wish to create in MBs. A 15 GB (15*1024 = 15360 MB) is recommended. In this case I opted for the full size of my virtual drive, i.e. 9216 MB. Click the Apply button to continue. You may be greeted with a message To ensure that all Windows features work correctly, windows might create additional partitions for system files. . This is a new feature in Windows 7 to have a small boot partition for system files. Click Okto continue.



A new primary partition of 8.8 GB is created along with a System type partition of 200 MB. Select the partition you just created and click Next to continue.


5th STEP:

we are all set. The Windows 7 installation begins. time to grab a cup of coffee for and wait for 15 - 30 minutes for the all new OS!


6th & SO ON:


FROM HERE THE STEPS ARE EASY TO INSTALL AND READY TO USE.

Protection & Security

Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to remain accessible and productive to its intended users. The term computer system security means the collective processes and mechanisms by which sensitive and valuable information and services are protected from publication, tampering or collapse by unauthorized activities or untrustworthy individuals and unplanned events respectively. The strategies and methodologies of computer security often differ from most other computer technologies because of its somewhat elusive objective of preventing unwanted computer behavior instead of enabling wanted computer behavior.


The technologies of computer security are based on logic. As security is not necessarily the primary goal of most computer applications, designing a program with security in mind often imposes restrictions on that program's behavior.



There are 4 approaches to security in computing, sometimes a combination of approaches is valid:
  1. Trust all the software to abide by a security policy but the software is not trustworthy (this is computer insecurity).
  2. Trust all the software to abide by a security policy and the software is validated as trustworthy (by tedious branch and path analysis for example).
  3. Trust no software but enforce a security policy with mechanisms that are not trustworthy (again this is computer insecurity).
  4. Trust no software but enforce a security policy with trustworthy hardware mechanisms.

Monday, March 21, 2011

File System Management


file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method of storing and organizing computer files and their data. Essentially, it organizes these files into a database for the storage, organization, manipulation, and retrieval by the computer's operating system.
File systems are used on data storage devices such as hard disks or CD-ROMs to maintain the physical location of the files. Beyond this, they might provide access to data on a file server by acting as clients for a network protocol (e.g., NFSSMB, or 9P clients), or they may be virtual and exist only as an access method for virtual data (e.g., procfs). It is distinguished from a directory service andregistry.

Most file systems make use of an underlying data storage device that offers access to an array of fixed-size physical sectors, generally a power of 2 in size (512 bytes or 1, 2, or 4 KiB are most common). The file system is responsible for organizing these sectors into files and directories, and keeping track of which sectors belong to which file and which are not being used. Most file systemsaddress data in fixed-sized units called "clusters" or "blocks" which contain a certain number of disk sectors (usually 1-64). This is the smallest amount of disk space that can be allocated to hold a file. However, file systems need not make use of a storage device at all. A file system can be used to organize and represent access to any data, whether it is stored or dynamically generated (e.g.,procfs).


Input Output Management


Management Data Input/Output, or MDIO, is a serial bus defined for the Ethernet IEEE 802.3 specification for Media Independent Interface, or MII. The MII connects Media Access Control (MAC) devices with physical bus interface, or PHY, circuits. The MII comprises:
  • a data interface to the Ethernet link and
  • a management interface, referred as MDIO or as Media Independent Interface Management (MIIM).
The MDIO bus provides access to the configuration & status registers of each PHY. These registers are used to initially configure each PHY and also to monitor status during operation.

Memory management


Memory management is the act of managing Computer memory. In its simpler forms, this involves providing ways to allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and freeing it for reuse when no longer needed. The management of main memory is critical to the computer system.
Virtual memory systems separate the memory addresses used by a process from actual physical addresses, allowing separation of processes and increasing the effectively available amount of RAM using disk swapping. The quality of the virtual memory manager can have a big impact on overall system performance.
Garbage collection is the automated allocation and deallocation of computer memory resources for a program. This is generally implemented at the programming language level and is in opposition tomanual memory management, the explicit allocation and deallocation of computer memory resources. Region-based memory management is an efficient variant of explicit memory management that can deallocate large groups of objects simultaneously.