Good Job Nikon!

Took about two weeks, but the UPS man showed up this morning with my new and improved "rugged" Nikon AW100 camera.  I must say they do good work, although I am peeved that my "rugged" (their terminology, definitely not mine) needed a repair after a simple 3 foot drop.  Lesson learned?  Always keep your receipt and paperwork, I would have been screwed without both.

Safely remove your Flash Drives by simply unplugging it

Most Windows users have become conditioned over time to never unplug a USB flash drive or hard drive without first clicking Safely Remove Hardware in the System Tray.

Why is that necessary? In theory, it's to ensure that Windows isn't busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted data or even a damaged drive.

As it turns out, however, you can safely sidestep Safely Remove Hardware with little to no loss of performance. In fact, this option may already be enabled on your system, and you just didn't know it. Yep, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.

Do this:

1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager. (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look different in previous versions of Windows.)

2. Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it's called "USB2.0 Flash Disk USB Device."

3. Right-click that entry, then click Properties.

4. Click the Policies tab; you should see something like this:

5. If the first option, Quick removal, is already selected, you're good to go. As noted in its description, "you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon." If Better performance is selected, switch to Quick removal and click OK.

So, what are giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results posted at 7tutorials, almost nothing. The performance impact was negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it's worth a few milliseconds to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.

SSD Hard Drive prices are coming down, get one if you can

For years most of us have been skeptical of Solid State Hard Drives (SSD's) because of the long term viability of Solid State Hardware.  In short, would it last as long as standard hard drives?  Well they are almost as good in that respect, but they blow away standard hard drives in performance.  Some models with up to 21 times the speed difference of regular hard drives make them very tempting.  Too tempting actually.  Tonight, or actually, this morning, I installed the Crucial brand M4, 120Gb SSD ($117 from Newegg)and the performance is great.  There are many brands to choose from but I like the Crucial because you can get a special laptop conversion kit with the drive.  What it does is that you can connect your SSD to your current laptop and clone the drive to the SSD.  Once cloned, install and turn on.  Everything from your old drive is intact, except now it's on a SSD drive.  It will clone it even though the SSD drive is smaller (providing that the programs and data on the old drive is less than the new drive).  Not that I would recommend anything from B*st B*y, but they just had a price drop of $40 on the Intel Cherryville 120GB drive from $189 to $149.  Finally a deal that is comparable with the Internet..so far I should say. 

First Impression of Windows 8....Fantastic

If you have a Technet Subscription from Microsoft, then you can download and install the actual version of Windows 8 that will ship in October.  It became available this week.  I must say after dual-booting it with Windows 7, Microsoft has actually done it right.  I was more than skeptical of the idea of integrating tiles (ala, your smartphone) with the desktop, but after an hour of playing with it, it's actually very cool and useful.  You can revert back to the familiar desktop if you choose, but I think you may actually like the tiles.  Of course it's early and Microsoft does have a history of hiccups, so beware of that, but initial reaction to the OS is bravo!  Now if the rumors are correct and the Windows Surface comes out at $199, Microsoft may have just changed the game and put Apple on alert.  Windows 8, so far, is outstanding.  More later as new developements come about.

An alternative to Ninite...with a little more work

For frequent followers of this site, you are aware of my love for Ninite, a website that automatically updates your software while at the same time, eliminating bloatware commonly associated with those updates.  For some odd reason, the most popular subject on this site is the removal of CCleaner from Ninite (Trust me, I don't understand the obsession, but I appreciate the hits).  If you are looking for an alternative to Ninite, try Soft2Base.  It is a free program you download (no bloatware).  Once installed, it will review every program installed on your computer, inform you of what version it is and link you to the most recent version available to download.  Simply click on the program you want updated and click next and it will automatically update your programs, Ninite style.  One word of caution though, if the software that you are updating has bloatware, it WILL install that as well.  You can avoid this by unchecking "Silent Install (automatic)".  Silent install is the default setting.   It will continue the install process, but you will have to click through each of the installation prompts (thus giving you the ability to uncheck bloatware you do not want).  A little more work than Ninite, but it does check all of the programs on your computer, as opposed to offering a select number of programs like Ninite does.

How to delete your hard drive BEFORE you give the computer away

Deleting files, folders and applications -- and clearing the data from the Recycle Bin -- won't do the trick if you're going to recycle your computer. Anyone can easily recreate that data using commonly available tools. Even if you reformat your hard disk, if someone really puts their mind to it they can recreate the deleted data.

This can be a serious problem. Back in 2003, two graduate students at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science bought 158 used hard disks from eBay and other sources.

Only 12 of the drives had their data properly cleaned. Even though approximately 60% of the hard drives had been reformatted and about 45% had no files on them (the drives couldn't even be mounted on a computer), the students were still able to recover data from them, using a variety of special tools. They found over 5,000 credit card numbers, personal and corporate financial records, medical records and personal e-mails.

What can you do to keep your data safe? Get a disk-wiping program, preferably one that meets the U.S. Department of Defense's Media Sanitation Guidelines. These programs will overwrite your entire hard disk with data multiple times, ensuring that the original data can't be retrieved. If you use them, be patient, because it can take several hours to wipe the hard disk.

One well-known free application that meets the DoD's standards, according to Auburn University, is Darik's Boot and Nuke. The software creates a boot disk that wipes everything on the hard drive. It can also be used with floppy disks (remember those?), USB flash drives, CDs and DVDs.

Another free Windows utility that also meets the DoD's standards is Eraser.

If you've got a Mac, you can use Apple's built-in Disk Utility (it can be found in the Applications/Utility folder). You can also download a third-party application like Mireth Technology's ShredIt X ($25, free trial available), which lets you shred files (in other words, overwrite the contents of a file multiple times) as well as wipe your local hard drive, network hard drives and CD-RWs. (There's a Windows version as well.)

If you're truly nervous, there are hardware devices available that let you sanitize your drives such as Drive eRazer Ultra. Or you can pull the disk from your PC and send it to a hard drive shredding service that will physically destroy the drive.

(For a more tongue-in-cheek view of how to cleanse a hard drive, check out this old-but-still-good story: Removing hard drive data -- the YouTube way.)

Once you've wiped your device clean, it's safe to sell, donate or recycle your equipment. Find out how to do it in our article How to recycle your phone, PC and other tech gear.