Windows Surface Scanner can help you quickly identify drives with bad sectors. It can perform a quick surface scan and determine how many physical errors the selected drive(s) have.
The program is very small and does the job well. I tested it on a 600GB drive and it completes in about an hour and a half. Note that it only scans the drive for errors and does not “repair” the errors as many other programs do. Considering the speed of the check it is a nice program to have.
You may be getting BSOD, computer freezes, etc. because of bad sectors, or maybe something completely different. Since usually bad sectors on a drive are hard to diagnose this tool can help with the diagnostic.
Home Page: Windows Surface Scanner
Ever wanted to share the same mouse and keyboard on multiple machines?
I have recently needed to link up multiple computers, but didn’t have a KVM handy, so I remembered that a friend told me about Synergy. It is a program that allows you to do exactly that, but you still need a monitor for each machine.
The way it works is you install the program on all of the computers and designate a “server” (the machine the mouse and keyboard are connected to). Then set-up all other machines as clients to share the server’s. You can configure the program to define edges on each computer’s screen, so when you bump the mouse there the control gets transfered to a designated machine.
Here is a summary of the features:
- Share mouse and keyboard and transfer control by bumping at the edge of the screen;
- Multiplatform – you can have the server on windows and share the mouse/keyboard with a mac/linux/etc.;
- Shared clipboard – copy on one, paste on another computer;
- Synchronized screensavers – all start at the same time;
- SSH – you can configure it to use SSH for the connection (sadly on windows requires Cygwin);
Overall pretty cool.
Version Reviewed: 1.3.1
Home Page: Synergy
This little utility can be used to display whole bunch of information about your hard/cd/dvd/usb drives. Here are the main features at a glance:
- Display a list of all partitions and drives;
- Mapped drive letters;
- CD-ROM/DVD Drive info and capabilities;
- CD/DVD Media info;
- “Subst” i.e. assign a drive letter to a folder;
- Drive details like Vendor, Serial Number, etc.
- Portable – just one executable;
- Benchmarks;
Version Reviewed: 4.10
Home Page: Drive Manager
SpaceSniffer is a neat little portable application to help you understanding where all disk space goes to.
Here are the main features:
- Fast, simple and intuitive user interface;
- Data is presented as a clickable TreeMap;
- Powerful filtering by size, tag, name, etc.
- Adjust level of details displayed on the screen;
- Portable – no installation needed – just a single executable;
- Drill up and down in the data;
- Export to text file of the selected results;
SpaceSniffer is pretty fast (I have about 200GB out of 640GB taken on my hard drive and the scan took about 1.5 minutes).
Version Reviewed: 1.1.2.0
Works on Windows 2000+ including Windows 7
February 3rd, 2009
1:17 am
GTD
Recently I’ve been looking for ways to organize and prioritize better and have been looking at different todo lists for windows. Seems like there is plenty of software for Mac (or at least easier to find), but for Windows there hasn’t been that many. After looking at many desktop and online solutions here is what my search revealed (I have shortened the list to the desktop applications I liked the most):
- ToDoList – The fastest and smallest, but no less featured. I have been following it’s development for years now and every next release it gets better and better. This is the application I finally settled on and use the most, but am considering Chandler as a very close runner up.
- Chandler – Probably the most full featured of all programs mentioned here. Supports contexts, tags, multiple views, priorities, recurring tasks, etc. It is very convenient to use and with a pleasant user interface. The only disadvantage is it’s size and I have experienced slowness when the list starts getting bigger.
- FusionDesk Starter Edition – Supports tags, contexts, and priorities. It has a paid version, so I was reluctant to include it, but the starter edition is full featured and very convenient to use. It lack backup features, time tracking and recurring tasks, but it would be helpful for most.
