Backup and Restore

Media Library – Digitizing your DVDs & Blu-rays (Part 2)

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Looks like this series will be in 3-parts initially, i.e., it may restart if I decide later to go with a Media server. Here is Part 1. Am a novice at this digitizing a Media Library, so my method is for those with low budgets and no experience either. 😉

Total costs at this point are $189.63 including tax and free shipping. The external Blu-ray burner drive was 42.69, and EaseFab LosslessCopy software was $39.95 on sale for 1-PC. After research, I purchased a Seagate FireCuda ST4000DX005 4TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal HDD Bare Drive for $106.99 last night – settled on this HDD after considering reliability, 7200 RPM speed, 3/5 warranty, and costs (there were cheaper & more expensive ones).

I already had some devices/components—which saved on my costs, but you may have to buy more items than listed above:

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Media Library – Digitizing your DVDs & Blu-rays (Part 1)

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Media Library Digitizing Test – Total novice here, so there is probably an easier and quicker way than how I am doing it at this point. Still not sure if I will go to digital movies & series since it seems to require lots of time. Movies have been easy so far, but next test will involve digitizing a series like Game of Thrones or Justified or maybe Dark Winds since it is short. Series requires its name plus season plus multiple disks (1, 2, etc.) – so that test may be too much trouble…I just dunno. Total costs at this point are about $80 for Blu-ray drive and EaseFab software.

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ASUS Prime Z790M-PLUS D4 mATX MoBo: Restore an Image and/or do a Clean Install

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The Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) driver holds the controllers (?) and storage drivers I needed to do a Backup and Restore (Windows 7) of a Win11 Pro saved image, and/or to do a clean installation of Win11 Pro – on an ASUS Prime Z790M-PLUS D4 MoBo.

I am no expert at motherboards, but I sometimes do more ‘Tinkering’ with my main computer (‘Apevia’) than I should—hence the reason for using the Backup and Restore (Windows 7) utility that comes with Windows 11 before actual ‘Tinkering’ starts.

Long story, but I don’t really want to go thru the ‘Nightmare’, in great detail, again. Doubtful that I could remember all the details anyway, since a lot of the experience involved luck, searching, banging away, more searching, more banging away mixed in with deep thought & pondering, experimenting & testing, and a stroke of good luck in the home stretch. 👍😳👌🙂

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Builds & Upgrades — Part 2 (‘Rose’ has Plastic Surgery)

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A lot has happened since Part 1 on 5/29/23 — mainly, the Intel® Core™ i9-13900K CPU started dropping in price ‘n then dropped again. After I saw the first big drop in price, I purchased it at $509.99, and a day later it dropped again to $499.99.

I don’t ever recall Intel dropping their price for their top Intel® Core™ i9 Processors this much–this early, e.g., best price for an i9-12900K right now is $402.27. It must be a good time to Build and/or Upgrade a desktop computer — the ASUS Dual NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition I had just purchased for $364.00 (which was a bargain) is now at $319.99 from B&H.

‘To Make a Long Story Short‘ — after buying the CPU, I decided to go ahead ‘n purchase all the needed components to build a new computer inside the Apevia case (no longer available & mine doesn’t have all those LIGHTS!). I’ll get into the new components in Part 3 of this series.

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Reset this PC – “Factory Reset a Windows 11 PC”

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Windows 10 Home & Pro reach end of support on 10/14/2025 so I won’t go into how to reset those PCs. Most Windows 10 PCs can be upgraded for free to Windows 11—those that can’t be upgraded still have almost 30-months left. Reset this PC is a little different for Windows 10, but basically the same ‘Steps‘ wid slight differences in some terminology.

This is the third part of ‘Sorta a series‘ on ways that Microsoft offers Windows users different options to refresh their PCs and/or recover from various PC issues that can happen—issues usually caused by the users and/or an OEM software/hardware issue.

I’ve built most of my own computers (‘BYOC‘) ‘n haven’t had any issues wid them; however, the SupportAssist on my Dell XPS 13 9310 recently started acting up after some updates—that also included BIOS & Firmware upgrades.

‘XPS13‘ is about 19-months old, but I still don’t want to do a lot of ‘Experimenting‘ on it just yet – hey, it’s my first purchased Dell lappie!!! 😊 After pondering the issue for a while, during which time I decided to write this ‘Sorta a series‘, a Reset this PC seemed the better solution:

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