ON COMPUTERS | BY BOB AND JOY SCHWABACH
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January 2008, Week 1 |
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WHEN THE COMPUTER REALLY GOES DOWN
One night, Bob was working late next to a columnist who had just
finished his piece for the morning newspaper. Suddenly, with just 10
minutes to deadline, the columnist's computer crashed, wiping out
everything he had just done. His solution was immediate and straightforward: He threw the computer out the window, which was closed at the time. Unfortunately, the window was on the 13th floor of the newspaper building; fortunately, it was after midnight and no one was walking below.
Such stringent measures and possibly dire results might be avoided using
Acronis True Image 11 Home, a $50 backup program for Windows that
captures a true image of what you've just done. Now we know that Windows
XP
The
program comes with lots of extras that many people have asked us about
over the years, like File Shredder and Drive Cleanser. File Shredder
makes your discarded files unrecoverable; Drive Cleanser completely
wipes your hard drive clean, for that moment when you're going to give
your old computer away.
The one thing you can't do with the True Image home version -- or
Windows backup software, either, for that matter -- is clone one PC's
drive and transfer it to a new computer or an entire office network. But
you can do this with True Image Echo Workstation for $80, plus a $30
add-on called Universal Restore. You can then take the whole shebang --
everything on your hard drive -- and transfer it to a new computer, even
if that computer is just "bare metal," as they say. A free trial of Echo
is available at Acronis.com.
Roxio Easy Media Creator is now in its 10th incarnation (will there
someday be a Roxio 20?), and the price was recently dropped from $100 to
$80 after rebate.
The drop makes a lot of sense since so many people have earlier versions
of Roxio and those do most of what this one does. What's been added is a
three-
Easy Media Creator 10 is huge. More than 35 programs have been thrown
together in an "everything but the kitchen sink" collection that lets
you do just about anything in editing audio and video. Some of these
programs are available in similar forms as part of Windows and Mac
computers. But if you're willing to spend some time learning the ins and
outs, the Roxio grab bag can be a good deal. Tech support people tell us
you get more consistent results if you use Roxio.
The Mac version of Creator 10 is called Popcorn 3, which lets you easily
transfer video to portable devices, like the iPhone or iPod, Blackberry,
and even the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This includes a feature called
TiVo ToGo, which lets you pull anything saved on a TiVo box and transfer
that to any of the aforementioned devices.
Creator 10 was easy to use for recording Internet radio stations and
equally easy to use for converting video footage between formats.
Enhancing photos taken with a cell phone -- often low-quality -- was
simple and gave good results. We could make a 50-hour DVD of songs, and
their titles and other information scrolled by the computer screen as we
listened.
On the downside, a feature called Live Share did not work. This is
supposed to let approved viewers riffle through a picture collection and
download full-resolution copies. Our approved viewers got nothing but
"page not found" messages, and working with Roxio tech support did not
solve the problem. You can use a service from
SharpCast.com, instead, to share
full-resolution pictures free for 30 days.
Roxio.com
has a comparison chart that shows which features in Creator 10 are
available in earlier versions. If those are the features you want, you
can buy earlier versions on eBay for $10 to $15.
INTERNUTS
Travelpod.com/traveler-iq
is the site for a fast-paced geography game. It gives you a city
and you try and pinpoint it on a world map. If you miss, it shows you
how far away you were. When you're way off, a message says: "This is
Ask.com, an Internet search engine that
responds to plain language questions, has an "Eraser" button you can
click to automatically erase any information about search queries and
remove any cookies that were collected. It is available in the U.S. and
U.K. right now and will be expanded to other countries shortly.
FrontDoor.com
is a new U.S. real estate site from Home and Garden TV. It
combines sales lists from major Realtors and has 1.2 million listings.
It also has some good advice about how to back out of a deal: Make a
note of some flaw in the property and cite it later if you change your
mind about buying.
NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns here at oncomp.com or seven years worth of columns at oncomp2.com
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