Tag: solid state drive

Adjust the Maximum Size of the Recycle Bin in Windows

Leading on from yesterday’s blog entry regarding the practice of emptying the Recycle Bin (or Trash in Mac OS X) I thought it was worth covering how to set the maximum size of the Recycle Bin in Windows to prevent it from growing too large. This is of particular importance on smaller drives in netbooks or more …

Continue reading

Reclaim Space by Emptying the Recycling Bin or Trash

Here’s a quick tip. While some of us may think this is a very obvious tip others may not have any idea about the concept of the Recycle Bin (or simply “Trash” in Mac OS X) and the fact that stuff that’s in there still chews up hard drive space. Sure, these days with drive …

Continue reading

Reclaim Space – Remove Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Backup Files

Removing backup files created during service pack installation

One of the hot topics today is the general release of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 to the public. Whilst it isn’t a ground breaking update in terms of adding new features to Windows 7 (a lot more of the action is related to Windows Server 2008 R2) it does contain a few important …

Continue reading

Visually Track Hard Drive Space with WinDirStat

WinDirStat - Folder Summary Screen (Completed)

Here’s a quick tip for this evening. If there is one thing that Windows has lacked all of these years it is a way to quickly assess from a macro level which folders are taking up the most space without having to take a “divide and conquer” approach by right clicking each folder, going to …

Continue reading

The 2TB Barrier – What Does it Mean for You?

Throughout last year I made a couple of mentions of the 2TB (two terabyte) barrier for physical storage in modern computers but didn’t take the opportunity to flesh out exactly what it means for the regular consumer out there. In this article I am going to explain why this is important and what you need …

Continue reading

Sleep and Hibernation Modes – What’s the Difference?

Over the years the humble shut down menu in Windows has been home to a number of options since it appeared back in Windows 95. If you can cast your mind back fifteen years, the usual suspects in the menu were: Shut down the computer Restart the computer Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode Close …

Continue reading

Free Up Space by Moving Your iPhone and iPad Backups

Yesterday, I was attempting to update the firmware on my iPhone and iPad but was running into an error, specifically: “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “Boyd’s iPhone” because the backup could not be saved on the computer.” This was due to the C: in my computer reaching its capacity. Using a 128GB solid …

Continue reading

Hard Drive Capacities – Know What You Are Getting!

Windows 7 - Disk Management

Over the years, you may have wondered whether or not you have been duped when you bought a new computer with a hard drive of a higher capacity that your current computer or maybe when you just buy a new drive to put into your existing computer. The shop of manufacturer may advertising one capacity …

Continue reading

Parted Magic – Disk Partitioning Made Easy

Once in a blue moon, you might find yourself in the situation where you need to slice up that huge hard drive (or maybe a smaller  solid state drive) into multiple partitions. Partitions can make your data easier to manage by keeping logical types of data separate. For example, my computer is setup as follows: …

Continue reading

iTunes for Windows – Good, Bad or Ugly?

Apple iTunes APIs

Not too long ago, Steve Jobs made a general comment regarding platforms in defence of the changes to the iPhone SDK agreement, specifically: We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform. Somehow, the extrapolation has been made that Steve …

Continue reading