I had originally intended to do a comparison of several high-speed USB flash drives. I contacted Apacer, SanDisk and Lexar, but I only heard back from SanDisk. This obviously makes it difficult to do a comparison. SanDisk sent me a Cruzer® Contour™ 4GB USB Flash Drive. As for a review, these sorts of things either work or they don’t. This one does. Here is a brief description of the drive, along with a few pictures and test results.
The first thing you notice is that this is a very sharp looking drive. Everyone I showed it too thought it was very cool and wanted to keep it. It has an ingenious slider that pushes the USB connector out, and then tucks it away. You pull back on the black side with your thumb. This exposes the USB connector. You then push up and the connector comes up with it. When you are done using the drive, you push up to cover the USB connector, and then when you pull it back down, the USB connector gets tucked away again.
The drive is a U3-enabled drive, which means that you can run programs on the drive that support this. The drive mounted without issue on several computers that I tried it on. I also connected it to a computer that only had a USB 1.1 port, and the drive still worked fine. The transfer were just slower.
I performed a benchmark test with HD Tune 2.54. The minimum transfer rate was 25.1 MB/sec; the maximum transfer rate was 27.9 MB/sec; the average transfer rate was 25.7 MB/sec. The burst rate was 19.4 MB/sec. These number are all in line with the speeds that SanDisk claims the drive achieves.
The drive is visually appealing. It doesn’t look or feel like a cheap piece of plastic. In fact the metal bottom of the drive gives it some weight that some may appreciate, or some may dislike. The drive comes with some simple instructions and a small cover/case for the drive. The drive is covered by a lifetime warranty.
As I said in the beginning, the drive works, and it is fast. I didn’t end up with other devices to compare it to, but I would definitely say you can’t go wrong with this drive. I also appreciate the fact that SanDisk did get back to me and was willing to send me the product to review. Others didn’t even respond, so the customer service at SanDisk should be worth something as well.
This isn’t very practical/important, but it is very cool. I was looking for an ASCII version (all text) of a heart that I could use on Valentine’s Day and I came across Photo2Text.com. It is a site that lets you upload a picture, and then it re-draws that picture with ASCII characters. As a test, I uploaded a small version of this sunflower that I use as my desktop wallpaper.
It then created this for me:
It looks great if you ask me. You have an option with the character set to use. The sunflower was made using the maximum character set. As you reduce the number of characters that can be used, the pictures don’t look as good.
If you’ve seen Vista in action, you know that it does have some pretty cool looking icons. For the hard drives, it also has a nice bar graph showing how much space is used/available. TechRepublic has a tip on their Microsoft Windows Blog about how to get these icons in Windows XP:
Vista Drive Icon is a free utility that will transform the drive icons in Windows XP’s My Computer into drive icons that resemble those in Vista’s Computer. Once installed, Vista Drive Icon will display a blue, glass-like bar underneath the drive icon. If the drive is close to getting full, the color changes to red.
Be sure to read the whole tip to find links to the software mentioned.
Quite a while ago Download Squad has some information about how to get Norton Ghost for free. In that same posting, they also mentioned DriveImage XML, a free drive backup utility.
DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.
The program allows you to:
- Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
- Browse these images, view and extract files
- Restore these images to the same or a different drive
- Copy directly from drive to drive
- Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler
There are all sorts of resources on the Internet to help you determine what program should open a particular file. Usually you do a search for the file extension, and you’ll find something telling you the program that made it or will open it. For instance, you can search for DOC and you find out that Microsoft Word is the most likely program that created and will open this file. If you search for AVI, you’ll find out it is a movie file, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of programs that will play this file type.
I was recently informed about File-Extensions.org which is a site that tries to make this easier for you:
File-Extensions.org is a large list of the computer file extensions with detailed explanation of each file extension and the way it is used today.
The Toolbox section of the February issue of TechNet Magazine highlights a product called Unlocker. I mentioned this over 2 years ago, but the software is still around and is being updated.
We’ve all had it happen to us before—some automated process hangs midway through its operation and a file gets stuck with a writelock, causing another operation to fail because it can’t copy, move, write to, or delete the file. And sometimes you just don’t know who was the culprit maintaining the file lock, but you know which file was locked. So what to do?
There are many ways to deal with this, but one tool that provides a quick-and-easy Windows® Explorer-integrated solution to file-locking issues is the free Unlocker tool, written by Cedrick Collomb. Thanks to its integration with Windows Explorer, you can find the offender by simply right-clicking on the locked file (or even a set of files) and then selecting Unlocker from the context menu. Then, if a lock is discovered, you can choose from a number of options, such as killing the offending process, unlocking the file (closing the handle), deleting the file, moving the file, or renaming the file. You can also copy the locked file in its current state to another location.
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