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Wallpaper switcher works

Looking at the same desktop background every day gets boring. Sure, you can wade through your digital photos, or hunt down the perfect image online, but that image will just suffer the same fate. Perhaps you've been building a collection of great backgrounds for years, but you're still manually selecting a picture every other day. This is where Auto-wallpapers comes in. Its straight-forward--if slightly cluttered--interface will allow you to easily gather up all your special pictures and automatically switch between them at just about any interval between every 72 hours to every second.

Mostly, the features are all … Read more

Transcend makes portable solid-state drive

If you like your thumb drive for the durability, you'll like what Transcend introduced on Monday. It's a new breed of compact external storage device that's based on 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSDs), the SSD18M.

Unlike traditional external storage devices that are based on hard-disk drives, the SSD18M is made of reliable NAND flash memory that contains no moving parts. This eliminates the possibility of mechanical failure due to shock or vibration and also provides substantial weight savings and reduced power consumption.

The new drive features both both eSATA and USB2.0 interface options. This means … Read more

Monitor and protect your system

For the paranoid or detail obsessed, Grouped Access Tools (GAT) would be a welcome Task Manager replacement. It also would appear to be a valuable software debugging tool. The interface is aesthetically spare, but not inappropriately so, as it provides well structured information on first launch. The menus seem logically arranged, and context menus are provided.

Installation is straightforward, but there's no option to exclude or specify the location of the Start Menu folder. GAT appears to deliver on all its promises, though the Memory Editor option never became an active option and couldn't be tested. With no … Read more

A picture is worth a thousand words

Adding, deleting, or upgrading files on your computer, especially when they're executables, can cause changes that aren't easily identified. This program makes it easier to see what's going on with snapshots you can compare side-by-side.

SysTracer has a well-designed user interface, but it still took a visit to the Help menu for us to get started. But after that, we found it easy to navigate. The nice thing about the interface is that only the buttons you need are activated. Basically, you take a snapshot of your PC's Registry, files, and applications that serves as your … Read more

Toshiba announces faster 1.8-inch hard drive

Two weeks after releasing the largest capacity 1.8-inch hard drive, Toshiba announced on Thursday its MKxx29GSG series of this small form factor storage device that's finally catching up with the regular 2.5-inch laptop hard drives in terms of speed and storage space.

For a long time, 1.8-inch hard drives' performance was limited to 4,200rpm and the old-school ATA interface, making them significantly slower than the currently popular 2.5-inch hard drives that spin at 5,400rpm (or even faster at 7,200rpm) and use the SATA standard. That discrimination has ended now with Toshiba's … Read more

Toshiba 1.8-inch hard drive hits the 240GB mark

Toshiba announced on Tuesday two new 1.8-inch hard drives, including the single-platter 120GB (MKxx31GAL series) and the world's first dual-platter 240GB (MK2431GAH) internal hard drives. The single-platter version also includes an 80GB offering.

Generally speaking, 1.8-inch hard drives are small form factor portable hard drives, where the regular size is 2.5-inch--and used mostly in portable media players, camcorders and compact ultramobile PCs.

These two new hard drives use the Parallel ATA interface and feature the industry's highest area density at 344 gigabits per square inch. They incorporate the fourth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which Toshiba … Read more