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
I was browsing around on the web today and thought it would be useful to share some of my experience with freeware and open source software I have used or tried.
