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: 
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:
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.
This is a great convergence of two common technologies. This adds an extra security line to your portable hard drive. The only issue is the site is in Japanese and I cannot read it so I have no idea what kind of encryption if any it adds to the data. Because if it doesn’t add encryption to the drive what is keeping you from opening the drive and plugging into another external enclosure. Considering the lack of any translation site I am not thinking that it is not as cool of a product as it sounds, but it does make for an interesting idea.
So SanDisk as usual is making some great strides on some great new products. This one I especially like because as much as I love waiting about 15 minutes for my Dell laptop to boot up and be usable this would greatly speed that up. It is a flash drive that plugs into your internal PCIe ports so it has really really fast connectivity. The idea is that you load just your OS on this drive and let the platter drive handle the big stuff. I cannot wait until technology like this is more affordable and found on every laptop making them quieter, faster, and longer battery life. Of course this is assuming that SanDisk allows anyone to make flash drives as they just filed a big lawsuit against just about anyone who had made a flash drive in the past.
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: 
