CastleCops® - Jackson Armor Card Review

Hoov writes "Jackson Armor card is a hardware solution that is intended to keep your harddrive from being altered in anyway, and helps recover it if it is.

When I first received the Armor Card I installed it into a 4 yr old HP. Following all the instructions, and the card failed to initialize. I contacted Jackson Armor Card, and they sent me an updated version. The same thing happened. So I backed up my primary system and pray that nothing went wrong. During the first boot, all went as described in the instructions. I installed the drivers (This needs to be better described in the installation instructions as it took less than a second to do, and the result was ambiguous at best). I then rebooted my computer as instructed. At this point windows crashed on startup. A subsequent reboot fixed the problem, and the Armor Card worked normally.

I left it installed for about 2 weeks, until I had figured out I had tested it enough.

What I think of it, is that it would be good for someone who is not a power user. The kind of person that just checks e-mail , and does some web surfing and other basic functions like that. As the drive that is being monitored is a real pain to make changes to the setup / programs that are installed. If you changed a monitored disk in any fashion, and forget to reboot thru the Armor card properly, you loose everything. For those people that do a lot of installing / uninstalling, beta testing this is definitely a drawback. The one particular program that many will forget about that could be affected by this device, is any kind of distributed computing program. I lost an entire days worth of work before realizing my error.

I think this would be a much more useful, and less painful device if the instructions were written a little better. Any kind of quick start guide should include more than a single sentence about moving working Data Files. Maybe a list of files / folders that should be moved. ANYTHING in which the data changes at all needs to be moved, this includes any kind of log files. The instructions are fine if you are on top of your system fully, and can remember everything, but if you are new to computing, or if you have a slip of the brain, you will loose data.

All in all this is a good tool for newer users to computing, and as such I think the instructions need to be expanded upon somewhat, to make sure those new users will be able to use this flawlessly. Also the quick start guide (instillation guide that comes with the board) needs to have a warning on it to read the full instruction sheet fully prior to installing the card, or data may be lost.

http://www.jacksonarmor.com "


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