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External Drives and You Today I got a new toy, in the guise of a Maxtor One-Touch external USB hard drive. 250GB in a vertical footprint roughly the size of a Dummies book is nothing to sneeze at, and I was desperately in need of near-online storage for my laptop. Setting it up couldn't be easier. I always gauge such things by how intuitive the device's interface is, and I have to admit this one can't be beat. Open box, open power and USB cord bags, connect drive, plug into power strip. 30 seconds later, the drive was online and available. In general USB may not be fast enough for daily work since the transfer rate isn't as high as an SATA or other built-in interface, but an external drive has lots of other uses. For instance, I have an ongoing need to download and retain gigabytes of data from all types of sources. Multiple VMware images, ISO images for Linux, software for testing, and software from my MSDN account all takes up a lot of space. I'd been shuffling things between my laptop's 80GB internal drive and 500GB SATA unit on my main desktop machine, but now I can just push it all to the Maxtor and forget about it. It took about a half hour to clear off 20GB on the laptop's nearly-full disk. The second major use is, of course, backups. I can easily copy all critical files from the laptop to the Maxtor on a daily or weekly basis. ... The People Dislike Vista As the deadline for purchasing copies of Windows XP looms on the horizon, the vote count at the "Save XP" web site continues to rise. At last count it was around 194,000, which is really only a few fish in the sea in comparison with the number of overall Windows users. Naturally, it's doubtful Microsoft will deign to extend its lifetime past the current 6/30 execution date. This said, the sheer hatred some users seem to have developed for Vista is astonishing in its depth. One commentator even went so far as to suggest that Redmond should deep-six Vista instead, retaining the more reliable and popular XP for the foreseeable future. Yeah, like that's ever going to happen. But it shows how badly Vista is faring in the eyes of some user segments, and Microsoft should at least take note. Even PC vendors have taken notice. Dell, HP, and Lenovo are all apparently "offering consumers a way to purchase a PC or a notebook computer with the last version of XP via a so-called downgrade. This basically means you are paying for Vista and getting the discs, along with the option of upgrading to Vista anytime in the future. " This is having their cake and eating it too -- with all the complaints about ... A PC for Mom? With Mothers' Day fast approaching, some of you may be thinking hard about last minute gift selections. What would Mom want? How about a new PC so she can store all her photos and recipes? Maybe a digital camera is on her list, or even a video recorder. These days, Moms don't just want flowers and candy, so the above suggestions may not be as outrageous as you'd think. Maybe Mom likes photography or music, enjoys communicating with friends over the Internet, or (geek heaven) loves cranking out Perl code. Hey, Moms like Dilbert's really do exist, you know. The good news is that a huge selection of good deals are available in the current slow market. Most big retailers are having massive sales in an effort to attract buyers, and the discounts can be pretty deep. It might be just the time to surprise her with a new desktop system, laptop, or multimedia combination (say, a laptop and snazzy new camera). The above combination might be especially useful if she's considering a dream vacation to an exotic location, or even a short trip to the beach. Not only can she download all her digital photos to the laptop for safekeeping, but she can mail them to her kids while relaxing at the hotel (be sure not to sit the Mai-Tai on top of the keyboard). Digital vacations can be fun. I have several friends who have chronicled their own trips in near real-time by making daily Web page updates (complete with n... |
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