disk

Find Junk Files does what it says

Find Junk Files may not be an imaginative software name, but it's an accurate one. This free tool finds junk files on your PC, mostly temporary files and folders. It scans for more than 100 file types, even obscure stuff like DOS and Windows 3.1 files, but you can choose what to scan and what to exclude. It's easy to use, maybe too easy; while it doesn't target anything dangerous like system files, it can find and remove logs, caches, settings, and other files and folders that, while not exactly "permanent," you'd prefer … Read more

Asus Ultrabook due Tuesday

Asus is due to release its Ultrabook lineup on Tuesday, as vendor momentum in this new Windows laptop category gains steam.

The Asus Zenbook line is expected to start at under $1,000 and be populated with 11- and 13-inch models ranging up to $1,499.

The UX21 model, for example, will come with an 11.6-inch display, a Core i5 Intel Sandy Bridge processor, and a 128GB solid-state drive. The high-end 13.3-inch UX31 will have a Core i7 chip and 256GB SSD.

Models are also slated to come with beefed-up sound and USB 3.0 ports. The latter … Read more

Tackling Time Machine slowdowns in OS X

Having a full-system backup is highly recommended for any computer, and for most people Apple's Time Machine backup utility is a great way to make hourly backups that each can be restored as a full and bootable image of your system. Unfortunately, despite its benefits Time Machine does have a number of glitches that a small number of people continually experience, with one of them being slow and hanging backups.

When slow backups occur in Time Machine, the system may sit constantly in its preparing mode, or it may crawl through a few kilobytes of data and seem to … Read more

LaCie ships first portable Thunderbolt drive

If you think the Promise Pegasus is just a bit too big (and you're right!), LaCie has something for you. The company announced today that its first Thunderbolt device, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt external drive, is now available for purchase.

This is the second Thunderbolt storage device on the market, besides the Pegasus, and the first that comes in a design that's small enough for you to carry on the go.

The new drive features a pair of 2.5-inch drives, set up in JBOD, RAID 1, or RAID 0 configurations. Measuring just 1.6 inches by … Read more

Addressing Apple Target Disk Mode security concerns

On Apple computers, Target Disk Mode is a special boot option that allows the system's hard drives to be accessed with a FireWire cable (also with a Thunderbolt connection for newer systems). This mode can be enabled by restarting the system with the T key held down, until you see the FireWire symbol displayed on the screen. At this point you can connect the system to another Mac (or even a PC) and have its hard drives mount locally on the second system for quick access. This mode is exceptionally useful for troubleshooting, migrating accounts and data to a … Read more

Windows 8 to directly support ISO and VHD files

Windows 8 will let you open and view ISO and VHD files all on its own, according to the latest "Building Windows 8" blog from Microsoft.

Posted yesterday by Microsoft engineer Rajeev Nagar, the new blog post, titled "Accessing data in ISO and VHD files," revealed that native support for ISO and VHD files was one feature often requested by users, prompting the company to add it to its upcoming OS.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) files are image files that hold the contents of a CD or DVD. Large programs available for download through the … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers. This week we had questions on how the iTunes Home Sharing feature works, different approaches for upgrading to OS X Lion, how to list open network ports in OS X, and how to identify whether you installed the Adobe Flash Trojan. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: Options for reinstalling OS X MacFixIt reader "Eric" asks:

I … Read more

The 404 889: Where we feel an urge to back you up (podcast)

Our guest on the show today is Jason Scott, computer historian and adjunct archivist at the Internet Archives, a nonprofit founded in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. He's also responsible for the Netscape GIF graveyard you see above. Also related: "under construction" GIFs!

We want to hear all about the 500,000 books scanned so far in the Archive warehouse, but we'll also talk to him about the Wayback Machine, a tool that lets you click through snapshots of Web sites along a timeline--check out CNET back in October 1996!

The Archive's book-scanning division is the company's foremost project with donated texts making up a big portion of the collection, but the Web site also preserves live music footage, original audio recordings, and various moving images clipped from history, like this compendium of news footage documenting various news organizations' coverage of the September 11 attacks over the course of seven days.

We have a lot of topics to discuss with Jason, including his personal project to rescue data saved on floppy discs (we'll explain what those are in the show, kids) and his personal vendetta against Wikipedia. But we only have 20 minutes for the interview, so expect to see him back on the show in the future.

The 404 Digest for Episode 889

Is this the end for books? Internet archivist seeks 1 of every book written. Rescuing floppy disks, by Jason Scott. The great failure of Wikipedia, by Jason Scott. Ticketmaster tells you where your Facebook Friends sit. CorporateTwits--Trolling goes corporate How a Tweet Led to a full steak dinner delivered to the airport. Netscape GIF Graveyard Under construction GIF Graveyard

Episode 889 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip review: Short and sweet

The MP3 player will never die. You can show me your smartphones and your tablets and all of the dozens of ways we have now to listen to music, but there will always be a place in the world for a cheap, reliable MP3 player.

SanDisk's latest Sansa Clip Zip is proof of this point. Starting at just $49 (4GB) and decked out with an enviable array of audio format support (including AAC and FLAC), an FM radio, a voice recorder, a stopwatch, and a 1.1-inch color screen, the Clip Zip is destined to become the same kind … Read more

SanDisk Ultra SSD review: Keep that hard drive, too

A little while ago I made a case that you should keep your hard drive when upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD). That case is even more clear with the SanDisk Ultra.

This is the first SATA 2 (3Gbps)-based SSD I've reviewed since the Samsung 470, and it's also the first that trailed behind hard drives in terms of data transfer speed. In our testing, the Ultra was actually the slowest among all internal storage devices we've seen when it comes to copying files.

This doesn't mean the drive is slow in other operations. According to SanDisk the Ultra is optimized for random access, which helps boost the performance of applications, especially during launch. And indeed the drive helped improve the overall performance of a computer a great deal in our trials. Games and large applications took much less time to fully load when compared with a traditional hard drive. The drive also cut down the boot and shutdown time significantly. … Read more