Computer Crafting, Projects, Tips, and Reviews
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As a lover of shiny, new gadgets, I now have an external hard drive. Not your everyday, takes-up-a-lot-of-room-on-the-desk hard drive either.
Since I have this almost ancient desktop that I bought at a great price because mine was on it’s deathbed, I lacked hard drive space. This one has about 10 gig (I think that’s the techie term). But I had a much loved laptop that died the week before (there’s something in the electricity here) and it had an 80 gig hard drive, full of my most valuable digital possessions.
So, clever old gal that I am, I bought an external hard drive case (about $25) and put my laptop hard drive into it. The case is a sleek silver beauty about the size of a cigarette case and has cables that plug into my desktop computer’s USB port.
Voila, I now have an extra hard drive on this old machine and since I am saving my work onto the external, when ye old computer dies, my stuff will not go with it. Perfect!
I have become the proud owner of a cute and cuddly, 9 inch tall, huggable speaker bear. He looks like your regular teddy, except that the soles of his feet are speakers. He has a connection wire on his back to plug an mp3 player into.
He’s light enough to carry from room to room, the sound is pretty good (better than I thought it would be) and if I record my voice and have it play, I can entertain my two-year old granddaughter for at least ten minutes - okay, maybe five.
Here is a picture of my cute little iBear:
My old desktop finally crossed into the computer graveyard and was replaced by another old, but not so sick, desktop computer.
I hated to say goodbye to my email and my address book, so I thought I’d be smart and buy a software program called E-mail Back-up and Relocater, by Fogware. It was easy to install, but I didn’t have much success at all. I guess my computer is too old, because the program took too much room and I wasn’t able to use it.
Next, I tried to save the info on a cd - not enough room for the data. Then I tried saving it onto my flash drive, still not enough storage space. (Yes, I know I had too much stuff).
Finally, I ended up picking and choosing only the information I couldn’t do without and copying it in pieces unto my flash drive.
Not a good solution, I know. And since this other desktop has a short lifetime left, I need to save for a newer machine and find a better way to transfer my email.
Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
I purchased a SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB Flash Drive with a 1.0 gb storage capacity. It was a great price and I was looking forward to all the storage room I would have.
I was a bit disappointed when I used it the first time though. My smaller USB flash was a simple matter of plugging into my computer and dragging the files I wanted to store unto it.
But this new Cruzer comes with programs on it - skype, an email synch program, a password manager, an antivirus program, and some games.
All good programs, but I need the storage space more than I need them. Plus, there is an extra learning curve before I can save my files.
I still appreciate the flash drive, but simpler is better for me.