So I have decided to resurrect an old laptop that I had sitting in my office for about 2 years.  Well after $40 to quadruple the memory and replacing the hard drive and then re-installing XP from scratch and then all the manufacturer drivers, we finally are in business.  I then plugged this into my network and our LCD TV and the stereo.  So it is our own little home entertainment system for our TV.  Well I decided that since this thing would be on 24/7 that I needed to do some automation to some tasks to keep it clean.  Because Playon and Hulu and other web based tools like to create awesomely large temp files that just hang around if you do not delete them.  Also because it is a WindowsXP machine I figured scheduling a daily reboot wasn’t a bad idea either.  Well turns out these are all very simple things to automate and then schedule.

For CCleaner you just need to run it in the silent mode by creating a schedule that kicks off ‘CCleaner /AUTO’

For JKDefrag you just need to schedule to run the JKDefragCMD file

For a scheduled reboot you just need to schedule a job that kicks off ‘Shutdown.exe -r -t 00′

Lifehacker has a great article on other processes you can automate but these were the first three I went after to keep my computer clean.  I scheduled CCleaner and JKDefrag on my work laptop and it really does keep things clean and moving along a whole lot better!

Why it took so long for these products to actually materialize I will never know.  I always have kept a USB drive on my key chain but I have had issues with it breaking or being a little too bulky or fragile.  These new ones from Lacie are all metal and the shape of your keys so they fall in line super easily.  Since they are a whopping $27 for 8 GB I think I will be picking one of these up when they come back in stock.  Check them out: Lacie Key Drives

Well I finally did what I always make fun of other people for doing.  I deleted a file that I needed (The last 3 years of my email!)  Luckily searching Google I ran into a Lifehacker article that listed a few applications and I tried this one and was very successful it just takes a while to get the files back but it is super easy to use.  I have attached it to this post in-case if it disappears as software likes to do these days:

Undelete Plus Download

LifeHacker Post of Free Software

Teracopy allows you to copy multiple files to another location very quickly and securely.  I just recently used it to transfer 50GB from my old 100GB external to my new 500GB external drive.  This did it very quickly and didn’t seem to lock up Windows at all and basically did it in the background without any interaction.

The interesting thing is that you just copy the files like you normally would in Windows and Teracopy takes over when the action happens.  There is also a portal app version of this application out there so you can run it from your pen drive.  If you are going to be copy mass amounts of files I would suggest using this application.

I have attached a copy of the most recent version but I would suggest going to their website to pull down the latest and greatest

Teracopy 2.0 Beta 4

Teracopy Website

Replacing your PS3 hard drive is really simple and works as expected with no loss of data!

Enclosure adds a pin number to 2.5 external drive so that your information is secure. But the product site rises some questions…questions like does anyone know Japanese??

Fire and Water proof hard drive for all your must have information.

SanDisk creating a PCIe Flash Drive to store your OS and greatly increase your boot times

This will be next on my list, of course after I win the lotto.  This bad boy will give you NAS and a home server all in one at an affordable price.  You are pretty limitless as far as what you want to do with this thing as here are the specs:

Processor: Intel ULV Celeron M 600MHz or 1GHz
RAM: One DDR SODIMM Socket, up to 1GB
SATA: Eight individual SATA II channels, 3 x eSATA ports + 5-bay SATA backplane
IDE: One 44 pin mini IDE connector, one CF socket
USB: Four USB 2.0 ports
Ethernet: Two 10/100 (Intel 82551ER) or two Gigabit Ethernet port (Intel 82541PI)
VGA: Intel chipset integrated, internal 15pin VGA adapter
Serial port: One RS232, internal IDC 10 pin connector
IRDA: One 5-pin connector
PS/2: One internal 2x 4-pin header for PS/2 keyboard and mouse
Capacity: 8TB + (using 1TB drives)
Power: ATX power, 180W, 110V to 240V AC, 50/60Hz
Dimensions: 6.75" x 9.5" x 11"

I would love to have this at my house as a home server, but there are many new things to add to the lineup before this but it is still a good idea.