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

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

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

• 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.

An online version exists at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/, but I find it more convenient to have a desktop edition installed, so it is available without an internet connection.

• Kaspersky - about 100MB and my personal favorite used on the computers at my home: Download Kaspersky Rescue CD. The disk is Linux Kaspersky 2008 engine based and features virus definitions update function, which is very important, so you don’t have to build the rescue cd every time the virus definitions change.
  Note: If you own 2009 KAV or KIS you can build such a disk yourself directly from the Kaspersky interface.
  
• BitDefender – about 228MB. Download BitDefender Rescue CD 2.0 . It is also a linux based solution. Similarly to Kaspersky it offers automatic virus definitions update. Also a very good antivirus. Another nice feature is that the CD includes a memory test (Memtest86+), which is a nice addition.
  
• VBA32 – abot 75MB. Download VBA32 Rescue Live CD. I recently stumbled across this rescue CD. Linux based and has a text mode interface. The small download size makes it useful and also can update virus signatures from internet.
  
• Avira AntiVir – about 45MB. Download Avira AntiVir Rescue CD. An excellent antivirus, also linux based rescue CD. Its small size allows very fast boot and download, although it doesn’t support online signatures update. Another nice feature is that it comes as an executable, that burns itself to a CD or writes an .iso image. Avira also offer a free antivirus system to install on your computer.
  
• F-Secure – about 222MB. Again a Linux based Rescue CD. Donwload F-Secure Rescue CD 3.01. Good antivirus system, but a very large download file. It also features virus signatures update over internet, so you’d only need to download it once.
  

Hopefully this information will help you the next time your computer gets infected. I would rather try more than one antivirus in such case, instead of relying on just one. All things considered all of the above are very good products, so take your pick.

Overall a very useful program to have on your USB Drive.

1. Import an image file to digitize.
2. Pick three points on the axises to define the X and Y axis (those can be for cartesian, polar, linear and logarithmic graphs).
3. You can clean-up your image by features like automatic grid removal, and discretize. The discretize is very helpful in cleaning up the image, where you can specify various thresholds with real time preview of the image.
4. You then face two choices – manual and automatic digitizing process.
5. Finally when happy with the results – you can export the data to a .csv file to be processed with other software.

Overall I find it a very useful freeware program especially for engineers, scientists and students, where very often it is helpful to digitize data from a plot, scanned from a book. It is a powerful software with a very good set of automatic detection tools.