Working in a Safe Enviroment Tech Testing

I wanted to post this before a lot of people started reading my articles and trying them on their own machines. I write many articles about different software that I have tested or used, this however does not make them safe or bug free. I can't recall anytime in the last 15 years that I installed software and felt positive that the software I installed had no bugs. Software is designed by humans. For the most part I do not believe the majority of us are out to get people but developers do make mistakes.

So here is a rule of thumb when testing software, always make sure you have a good back up of the machine you are working on before you start, or an easy recover method. Make a short simple plan to get you back to square one.

Best practices:
1. External Hard Drive - Buy a spare external hard drive this is great for back ups and vms.
2. VM Ware Product - Purchase a vm product.
3. Extra Email Account - Create a free gmail garbage email account.


External Hard Drive:
Roughly a 250gb slim line light weight drive with no power will cost you under $100.00. If you are willing to work with a large less mobile drive with a power supply, you can probably buy a 1 Terabyte drive for under $250.00. I prefer the small light weight drives with no power supply, I find that I am more likely to take a back up on another machine if I can quickly move my drive from one machine to another. By the time I am writing this I will bet that you will be finding 500GB slim line drives just over $100.00.

The hard drive is very important, take full back ups whenever you use software. Taking the full back up will save you lots of valuable time. These back ups will pay you back in full after just the first time you need to recover from a failure. Also use this drive to store base vmware installs. These vms are were all you product testing should occur. Avoid using your local machine to test. Create a virtual machine with a base install and make a copy to your local drive and run this each time you wish to test.

VM Ware Product:
This may be a little out of order because I talked about using a vmware above, I also intended to have a seperate vmware blog to help people quickly test new products at low cost to them, and guarntee that they can continue with there local machine afterwards.

Vmware is a product that allows you to create a virtual machine and run on top of your local machine. This virtual machine running a seperate file system keeps you underlying file system secure. Although the filesystems are seperated you still have the capability to communicate to the underlying os.

If you do not understand this concept don't worry I'll have another blog coming soon just on vmware. If you do understand this read on.

There are several different vmware products on the market today. Microsoft has a vmware product called "virtual pc" and company called VMWARE has a product called VMWARE workstatuon, and VMWARE player. I highly recommed the vmware product line. I also recommed purchasing a copy of vmware workstation, you can however get away without the product by using the VMWARE player. Because my preferences are so outweighted to vmware workstation, I will primarily blog in relation to this product. In the future I am sure I will do a couple blogs on both vmplayer and virtual pc by micorsoft. The concepts will apply to both these products as well but the method of performing the task may vary.

Extra Email Account -
If you haven't done so already create a catch garbage email account with google. Almost every product you test will require an email address the last thing you want to do is staturate you personal email box with tons of product information. Go to Gmail and create a new account use this account for all download products, remember the password because you will occasioanlly need to go here to get a registration code or verify your email address. If you later decide you really want emails for a product then change your email in the products email management area to your personal account.