10/27 Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog A Better Disk Defragmenter Utility from Microsoft October 26, 2009 at 2:54 pm One of the reasons why your computer may become slow over time is because the files on the hard drive can become fragmented. Now what’s that? Disk Fragmentation for Non-Techies As you start filling your hard-drive with new programs, documents, and other files, the operating system tries to find vacant places on the hard-drive to place these files. Like an artist who breaks a tile into multiple pieces to form a mosaic, your computer will break these file into chunks (or fragments) and store them in different places across your hard drive. When you load a program or open a file, the computer will have to first assemble these “fragmented” pieces thus decreasing the performance. And fragmentation is not just an issue with your computer’s hard disk but even removable devices like the USB Flash Drive or your external drives can also become fragmented with time. Alternate Windows Disk Defragmenter from Microsoft A Disk Defragmenter program helps because it will pre-arrange all the “fragmented” pieces of a file close together thus reducing the time it takes to open files or load programs on your computer. Now almost every version of Windows includes a disk defragmenter utility but the problem with these built-in tools is that that will defragment the entire hard-drive at once and they’ll ignore files that are smaller than 64 MB. Luckily, Microsoft offers another free but lesser-known utility called Contig (short for contiguous) that lets you have more control over the defragmentation process. What’s unique about Contig is that it lets you defragment individual files, folders, or the entire hard drive. You can run Contig from the command prompt but if that sounds a bit technical, you can also look at Power Defragmenter – an easy and more visual interface for Contig. Using Power Defragmenter, you can visually select files, folders, or the drive you wish to defragment, and Power Defragmenter will internally use Contig to perform the defragmentation process. You may use Contig on machines running Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. For instance, if I were to defragment all the documents on my disk and none of the other files, the command* will be: Contig.exe -v -s c:\Users\labnol\Documents\*.* [*] You’ll need to run the utility as an administrator as it will throw an “Access denied” error. And here’s a detailed output of a standard Contig command that tells you exactly what happens behind the scenes per file. Unlike other third-party defragmentation tools, Contig uses Windows' internal defragmentation APIs so it won’t cause disk corruption, even if you terminate the program while its running. Please note, however, that defragmentation is only recommended for traditional hard drives; computers using newer flash memory based solid-state drives should not use traditional defragmenters.  Even though file fragmentation may occur on these drives, it should not impact performance due to the nature of flash memory.  Additionally, defragmentation may actually decrease the life or a solid-state drive; however, they cannot cause this on a traditional platter-based hard drive. Related: How to Reinstall Windows Without Losing Data A Better Disk Defragmenter Utility from Microsoft Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.       The Google Timeline in Video – Brilliant. October 26, 2009 at 1:50 pm This brilliant video animation from Google UK captures some of the important milestones in Google’s 14 year old history right from the summer of ‘95 when the co-founders first met at Stanford until 2009 when Google announced important non-search related products including Google Wave and Chrome OS. Don’t miss this one. The Google Timeline in Video -- Brilliant. Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.       Use Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter October 26, 2009 at 10:37 am If you have a huge bundle of Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint Presentations on your hard drive that you would like to convert into PDF at once without investing in commercial software like Adobe Acrobat, try Google Docs. While it has always been possible to convert Office documents into PDF using Google Docs, the new export feature makes it even easier for you to batch convert Microsoft Office and OpenOffice file formats into PDF (or HTML) in three easy steps. Batch Conversion to PDF with Google Docs Step #1 – Create a new “input” folder in Google Docs where you’ll upload all your documents and presentations that are to converted into PDF. Step #2 – Now select the Upload Document option in Google Docs, set the destination folder to the one that you created in Step #1 and upload* all your documents. Google Docs officially supports the following file formats though you may also upload images: Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps). Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw). Microsoft Excel (csv, .xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods). [*] You may also use the email option to upload documents onto Google Docs but that would put everything on the main folder and managing documents can therefore become a issue especially when you have too many files. Step #3 -  Once all files are uploaded onto Google Docs, open the dashboard again and select the “input” folder from the right sidebar. Select all the files in this folder and choose “Export” under “More Options”. Here’s select “PDF” (or HTML) as the output format and all your Word Documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. will be instantly converted into PDF. And if you are converting a large batch of documents into PDF, you don’t have to wait in the browser for the conversion to finish as Google Docs will automatically send you an email once the processing is over. The email will have a link from where you can directly download all the PDF files in one large ZIP. Useful stuff. For more tricks, check out the Adobe PDF Guide and Google Docs Guide. Use Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.       Today, 7.5m Web Pages and 8m Images Will Be Deleted from the Internet Permanently October 26, 2009 at 3:52 am Yahoo! acquired Geocities in January 1999 and, after operating the service for more than 10 years, they are finally shutting it down today. Geocities hosts around 7+ million public web pages and 8+ million images according to Google. This number can be much higher because some of the Geocities sites could be private and therefore Google won’t know have details about such pages. Starting today, Yahoo! will remove each and every Geocities hosted page from the Internet and that means introducing a few hundred million broken links, if not more, on the Internet. Let’s see how how quickly search engines manage to remove this “404″ clutter from their results. Related: How to Recover Deleted Web Pages Today, 7.5m Web Pages and 8m Images Will Be Deleted from the Internet Permanently Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.       Download All Your Documents from Google Docs as a Zip October 26, 2009 at 2:34 am While Google Docs is brilliant, the only issue is that you need an active Internet connection to create new Office documents in Google Docs as well as for editing /reading old files that already exist in your Google account. That’s a problem because, unless you use something like Google Gears, you won’t have access to your Google documents while you are in an airplane or are using an old computer that has Microsoft Office but no Internet connection. Download Google Documents for Offline Use Therefore the best option is that you download a copy of all your documents, PDFs, etc. from Google Docs and put them on a local hard-drive or USB stick so that you can at least read them which you are in offline mode. While there are third-party tools that let you easily download Google Documents to the local drive in one go, the good news is that the batch export feature is now available in Google Docs by default so you don’t have to hunt for external tools to help you do so. Select Google Documents for Exporting Just open your Google Docs account and select the documents that you want download locally. Then use the Export option from “More Actions” and within minutes, all your Google documents will be available on the desktop as one large zip file. You may even convert Office files to PDF or HTML format before exporting them out of Google Docs. Choose the Export Format – PDF, Word, etc. Download All Your Documents from Google Docs as a Zip Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.         This email was sent to blogpersonalcomputer@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.