DiskCheckup: get warnings before a hard disk drive fails

By Melanie Gross on August 17, 2012 - Tags:hard-drive, monitoring software, Windows software

A failing hard disk drive can have severe consequences for the data that is stored on the drive. In the worst case, you end up with an unusable hard drive and data loss that even the best recovery programs can’t restore.  While backup software can prevent data loss from happening in the first place, you may also appreciate warnings before a hard disk drive connected to your computer fails.

One of the programs that you can use for the job is DiskCheckup, a free for personal use disk monitoring software for the Windows operating system.

The program displays all hard disk drives in its interface on startup. The lower half of the screen gets populated with information once you select one of the drives at the top. Information are sorted into the following four tabs:

• Device Info lists the capacity, interface, model number, firmware and other device related information including the drive’s standards compliance.
• SMART Info displays information about the health of a drive. Here you find information about the current and worst temperature, or error rates, and status information for each value that informs you if the drive is still running within limits.
• SMART History is deactivated by default. You first need to activate the feature in the program settings. Please note that the data file can grow significantly in size. It is therefor suggested to only activate this feature temporarily.
• Disk Self Test offers to run a short or extended test and displays the status of that test afterwards.

You need to enable the warning system with a click on the configuration button. Here you can define a temperature warning level, and configure whether you’d like to see a message window or receive an email when values exceed the threshold.

You need at least one hard drive with SMART functionality to use the program, and need to know that drives connected via SCSI or hardware RAID are not supported.

Improve your text reading speed with Speed Reader Enhanced

By Martin Brinkmann on August 20, 2012 - Tags:Portable software, Windows software

Remember those movies where a genius is reading each page of a book in a few seconds? While average readers probably never get that far when they start to improve the speed in which they read text, it is certainly possible to learn how to read faster without sacrificing the meaning of the text. So called speed reading programs aid you in improving your text reading speed by gradually increasing the words per minute count in practice sessions.

Speed Reader Enhanced is a free program for the Windows operating system that is available as a portable version or installer. When you first start the program you see a settings page where you configure the program’s features. It is here that you select the words per minute and word interval as well as the text that you want to read or use for practice. The author of the application recommends that you start with a words per minute count that you feel comfortable with before you increase the count gradually over time. Depending on your reading experience, the word count of 300 per minute may be too fast to start with.

I’d suggest you try it out and reduce the words per minute count if it is too fast for your. The settings page lets you change the background color and text color as well as the font the text is displayed in as well. You can furthermore change the minimum number of characters displayed to you per interval, whether you’d like the program to combine small words, and if you want the program to make small pauses after periods and commas.

You can use the default text for the configuration phase, or load a pdf document or text file from the local computer system instead. A click on Show Reader opens the interface in full screen, and a tap on any key but the ESC key starts the speed reading exercise. You can hit ESC at any time to switch to windowed mode, pause with any key, and go back to the settings page with another tap on the escape key. The program saves the position whenever you pause, so that you can continue at the same position when you start again.

You find a speed reading course pdf document in the program folder that explains some of the concepts and ideas behind speed reading. If you have never come into contact with the concept before, it is probably a good way to start.

All in all a great program for Windows users who want to improve their text reading speed.

Put.io: downloads torrents for you, lets you stream or download afterwards

By Martin Brinkmann on August 19, 2012 - Tags:File Sharing

If you can’t run a Bittorrent application on your local computer system, either because you are not allowed to install any software on it, or maybe because your Internet Service Provider is limiting bandwidth for P2P file transfers which would make the downloading less enjoyable and slow, you may be interested in an online service that does the downloading for you.

Put.io offers to download torrent files using their servers. All you need to do is supply the service with the torrents you are interested in, wait until the files have been downloaded, to either download the files to your computer or stream media files directly.

A free account is good for 1 Gigabyte of storage space and unlimited bandwidth. If you need more, you can upgrade to pro or premium accounts that increase your storage to 50 or 100 Gigabytes for $9.90 or $19.90 per month respectively. You can refer other users to the service to get an additional 350 Megabytes of storage space up to 3 Gigabytes in total. The system works similar to Dropbox, and you can invite by email, social media or with direct links.

The whole process of adding and download or streaming files is surprisingly easy. To start, you click on add new files on your user home page, and either paste torrent file links directly into a form on the page, or upload torrents from your computer instead.

The service checks the torrent file and its storage requirements on the next page and gives you either the green light to start the transfer, or the red light if downloading the files would exceed your storage space. What’s missing is an option to select individual files that you want to download from a torrent. This is especially true for archive.org torrents which often come with multiple versions of the same file.

Put.io checks if the torrent has already been downloaded by another user of its service, and if that is the case, makes the file available to you directly after a few seconds. If the file has not been downloaded yet, you are redirected to the transfers page where you will see connection and progress information.

Once the service has downloaded files for you, you can access them from the your files menu. Options available here include zipping and downloading files to the local computer, extracting zipped files, sharing files with friends, or deleting files. When you click on a media file, you are automatically taken to a streaming video page so that you can watch the video online without downloading.

Options to stream using a local player and to download the file are present here as well. The subtitle search feature is a nice addition as well.

The operators of the site and dedicated users have created tools that improve the service’s accessibility. You find plugins and apps for XBMC, Plex and Boxee here, as well as Chrome extensions, options to map the storage to a local drive letter or instructions on how to use the mobile version of the platform for use with smartphones and other mobile devices.

Another interesting feature is that the service supports RSS subscriptions. All new torrents that get released will be automatically updated once you have added a subscription to your account, provided you have enough free storage space available for that.

Put.io works pretty well and has a lot to offer. Especially the easy to use interface, the third party tools and the option to stream media right from your account need to be mentioned in this regard.