Tag: SMART

Erez might have been less than thrilled with Acronis Drive Monitor the other day, but I have a feeling he'll like Passmark's DiskCheckup a lot more. They're the same people who produce the awesome app BurnInTest -- one of my all-time favorite technician tools. It's a simple little tool which keeps an eye on the SMART status of your hard drives. In addition to displaying an exhaustive amount of ...

S.M.A.R.T is an acronym that stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It's a nice bit of intelligence that hard drive makers have been including into drive firmware for several years now. In simple terms, it's supposed to let you know that a drive is about to crash before the crash happens. You can then take measures to protect your data or, perhaps, return the drive to the ...

At first, the idea of "podcast documentaries" seemed a bit odd to me. It's a documentary to which you listen; there are no images. BBC Documentaries offers quite a few documentaries in this format, for free. Once I started listening to one, I realized why it can actually be a viable medium. I listened to some of the documentary shown above, about Wedge Island, in which they refer to the ...

You're walking (or driving) along, and your iPhone (or iPod touch) has dimmed the screen. Suddenly a song comes on, and you can't quite place it. You tap the home button to see what it is and who it's by. Unfortunately, the tiny type is hard to read at a glance. If only there was a way to fix that... Developer Vitaly Belman has a solution: automatically create album cover artwork with big, bold ...

One thing I often forget to do before installing a program I want to test or fiddling with my drivers is creating a System Restore point. System Restore has been part of Windows for ages now, but I still have trouble remembering 1) it's there and 2) sometimes it's pretty handy. To make it easier on myself, I set up a dead-simple restore point creator. Those of you who don't want to bother ...