TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPICS: TOURBUS IS DEAD / REFORMAT

Time for an important announcement... Tourbus is dead. Long live InternetTourbus! What do I mean? Sigh... it's all Google's fault. You can read all about that in today's issue. Also, a tutorial on (maybe) reformatting your hard drive, and the Top Twenty revisited.

The New InternetTourbus (dot com)

Last summer, for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, Google decided to drop TOURBUS.COM from their index. As a result, TOURBUS ceased to exist in the eyes of Google. After enjoying a pagerank of 7 or 8 for many years, with hundreds of indexed pages and thousands
of inbound links, TOURBUS.COM simply vanished from Google. If you do a search for "info:tourbus.com" Google will reply:

> Sorry, no information is available for the URL tourbus.com

No amount of entreaty would elicit a reason or remedy from Google, so we were stuck. Since Google is the only search engine that really matters (in terms of bringing searchers to a site), traffic to TOURBUS.COM had trailed off to a small fraction of what it once was. The best solution was to start from scratch with a new domain name. So from now on, the official website for TOURBUS is...

http://www.InternetTourbus.com

I've also taken the opportunity to freshen up the website with a new design and some new features. Pop in today and check out the Tourbus Screensaver, Very Strange Things, the Pop Quiz, and of course the complete Tourbus Archives from 1995 to 2006.

Got Links?

TOURBUS.COM will continue to work for now, but it may be discontinued at some point. So please... if you have links to TOURBUS.COM, update them to point to INTERNETTOURBUS.COM as soon as possible. If you DON'T yet have a link to Tourbus, visit the page below and pick up the link code and graphic to put on your site.

http://www.InternetTourbus.com/button.htm

Reformat hard drive under XP?

A reader asked me this question about reformatting his hard drive:

> "I have Windows XP and the system has gotten very slow and
> flaky. I would like to learn how to reformat the drive. Can
> you teach me in simple English how to completely format the
> drive and then re-install the operating system?"

It's certainly doable, but you should consider some alternatives first, because formatting a hard drive will erase *everything* on the disk. Re-installing Windows, all the patches from Microsoft, your software and personal files will take many hours to complete.

I'm guessing you're considering this move because your PC has been infested by spyware and/or viruses, and is now acting flaky. I suggest you first read my "Make Windows Run Faster!" article, and follow my recipe to clean gunk out of your computer's pipes.

http://askbobrankin.com/make_windows_xp_run_faster.html

...then if you REALLY still want to reformat your drive, see

http://askbobrankin.com/reformat_hard_drive_under_xp.html

The Top Twenty

Every few months I go through the AskBobRankin logs and see which articles were the most popular. Here are the current Top Twenty, ranked by readership volume...

1) House Values http://askbobrankin.com/house_values.html

2) Make Windows XP Run Faster! http://askbobrankin.com/make_windows_xp_run_faster.html

3) Red X Appears Instead of Image http://askbobrankin.com/red_x_appears.html

4) Convert Itunes to MP3 Format http://askbobrankin.com/convert_itunes_to_mp3_format.html

5) Removing Winfixer Popups http://askbobrankin.com/removing_winfixer_popups.html

6) Convert VHS to DVD http://askbobrankin.com/convert_vhs_to_dvd.html

Continue reading for the rest of the Top Twenty here:

http://askbobrankin.com/the_top_twenty.html

That's all for now, see you next time! -- Bob Rankin