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Closer Look
So with a good idea of what to expect I waited patiently until this dropped through my door.
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Package |
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Contents |
Included, as you can see, are the installation CD, an introduction sheet, an installation guide, and the standard warranty sheet, and of course the Armor Card itself, which is deceptively small and simple looking.
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The Hardware |
The CD contains the necessary drivers as well as the ‘actual’ manual.
Installation
I installed the card on my older system as I wasn’t overly assured of its amazing abilities quite yet, the specs are:
- AMD Athlon 1GHz
- ABit KT7-A
- 256MB PC100 Ram
- Hercules Kyro II 64MB graphics card
- 30GB Western Digital Hard Drive
Installing the card is a breeze, you pop the card in, boot the system, press enter twice when it tells you to, when windows finishes loading you pop in the CD and follow the steps to install and then reboot. And that’s it.
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Installed |
With the card installed, every time you boot the computer the following screen appears
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Boot Options |
If you press nothing the system will continue booting with the default option, which is ‘Protected Mode’. In this mode, any changes you make to the hard drives contents will be removed when the system reboots.
If you make any changes which you want to keep (e.g. you install a program) you select ‘Save Data’, which re-buffers the hard drives contents.
If you know full well that you want to boot up the computer and make permanent changes, you can select ‘Open Mode’, in this mode you can make as many changes as you want and they won’t be removed upon reboot.
‘Recovery Mode’ is used when you don’t have the Armor Card automatically reverting to the saved state of the hard drive every reboot, and perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘Recovery Mode’ manually recovers the saved state.
Finally there’s the ‘Set Parameter’ option. This is essentially the options menu, where you can change the password (which is required for every option apart from protected mode), select which partitions to protect, save the CMOS data, and select the Auto Recovery options, where you can tell it not to auto recover, recover every x days, or recover every reboot.
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