In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally. What would an internal drive be doing outside your desktop or laptop? Funny you should ask.About a week ago, my media-center PC starting displaying this message during boot-up: "Hard drive failure imminent." And you know what? It was. In short order, the machine wouldn't boot at all.Long story short, I had to replace the drive, reinstall Windows, etc. But I wondered if I could salvage any/all of my recorded TV shows. To find out, I connected the old,...
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Let's say you're moving a bunch of stuff to an external hard drive. As usual, the process goes: drag, drop, and wait. The initial good news is that you'll be waiting less: Windows 8 is generally faster at copying files.But take a closer look at the file-copy dialog box that appears. For starters, if you click theMore details arrow, you're treated to a real-time progress meter that graphs the current and total speed of the copy process. Neat!You may also notice there's now a pause button. It's true: Windows 8 lets you pause file copies. It's...
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Before you can successfully boot from a disc or flash drive, you may need to go to your computer's Setup screen and change the boot order. How you do this varies with different computers. Look for an onscreen message, soon after you boot your PC, that says something like "Press key for setup."The following terms and definitions will help you understand booting from media that doesn't stay inside your PC.Boot disc: Any bootable CD or DVD. Although not technically accurate, the term is also used for bootable flash drives..iso file: A...
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
If you're a Firefox user, you may have noticed a few changes in the latest version of Mozilla's browser, which "turned 20" last week.Among them: a new Download Manager. It's a small tweak, and I'd say one for the better, but as I noted in Monday's post about Google Chrome's bookmark spacing, not everybody appreciates sudden and unrequested changes.First, let's talk about what's new. At the right edge of the search bar, alongside the Home button...
Sunday, April 21, 2013
I recommend Digital Volcano's Duplicate Cleaner Free. The attractive, three-tab interface allows the program to provide plenty of options without overwhelming you. When preparing Duplicate Cleaner for scanning your drive, you can have it examine or ignore file content. You can tell it to consider files with the same name, with similar names, or to ignore names completely. It can also match files by the Created and Modified Dates. A special...
Friday, April 19, 2013
If you rely heavily on Google services, as so many small-business users do these days, you're probably familiar with the black toolbar that spans the top of various Google services. It provides quick and convenient access to apps like Search, Gmail, Calendar, and so on.Ah, but what happens when you're viewing a non-Google site? No toolbar, that's what.Black Menu for Chrome puts all Google services just a click away. Once installed, this extension adds a button to your browser that reveals an attractive drop-down menu for all Google's best...
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
A Twitter chat is an awesome way to engage an audience, increase your brand's social visibility, and connect with an audience in a new way.I’ve hosted and participated in several Twitter chats over the last few years. My number of Twitter followers has increased each time, as have the Twitter follows of the other participants. Plus, I’m able to connect with others in a way that’s different from a traditional webinar or video chat.A Twitter chat happens...
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
The Internet? Kind of a cesspool. And as the parent of kids who are now old enough to operate a Web browser, you can bet I'm keen on checking their activities and filtering out the inappropriate content.Thankfully, Windows 8 offers some solid tools for doing just that. (Windows 7 does, too, but Microsoft made them easier and more robust in the new version of the OS.)For example, you can limit your child's Web browsing to age-appropriate sites and block or allow specific sites as needed. You can impose time limits, perhaps locking out the PC during...
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Now that I'm running Windows 8 for at least part of my workday (much to my chagrin), I'm doing my best to make it hospitable. And for me, the first step is installing Google Chrome, my preferred Web browser.So I dropped into Desktop, fired up Internet Explorer, downloaded and installed Chrome, and set it as my default browser.Then I ran it, signed into my Google account, and smiled as my synced bookmarks appeared like magic. This is how the world should work.But, wait, what's this? Something's missing. Three somethings, in fact. When I went to...
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
assuming you're saving and sharing those photos as .jpg files. And that gives you an advantage, because jpegs have captions build in as part of the format's metadata.Metadata is a particular kind of data that explains a file's content, and most file types contain their own metadata fields. For instance, a jpeg's metadata includes the camera model, resolution, the date the photo was taken, and other bits of information. To view and potentially...
Monday, April 8, 2013
I know loads of Facebook users who never bother to check their notifications. You know, that area in the top-left corner of the screen, the one with the little red number badges?From left to right, those little icons consist of the following: Friend Requests, Inbox, and Notifications.To me, all three are like inboxes, in that they should be checked and cleared out on a regular basis.But let's talk about Inbox itself for a moment. When you click that...
Sunday, April 7, 2013
If you're new to Windows 8, I suspect you're finding certain things confusing. (Never mind the lack of a Start button; that's been covered to death.)For example, if you're using the Metro UI (i.e. the new Start screen with all the tiles), you've undoubtedly installed some apps. That's half the fun, right?Okay, but what happens when you want to remove an app? It's not immediately obvious. If you pull up the Charms Bar and tap Settings, no help there. If you tap the Change PC settings link, you'll find no uninstaller there either.Well,...
Friday, April 5, 2013
Here are four ways to do this, although--technically speaking--only two of them actually keep the files on both PCs. The others merely make the folder available on both.I'm assuming here that both PCs are attached to the same router (either wired or wirelessly), and through that router can access the Internet.Share a folder over the networkClick for full sizeSince your computers are on the same router, they're also on the same local area network...
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
The Steve Jobs era may not quite be over at Apple.The late co-founder may have been involved in the development of the next two versions of iPhone, according to a report in the San Francisco Examiner. That information was supposedly imparted to San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón by Apple's government liaison, Michael Foulkes, during discussions with Apple regarding the growing problem of mobile phone theft.Gascón described his hour-long discussion with Foulkes as "very underwhelming," saying that Foulkes did most of the talking."It...
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