Dozens of free programs have been collected in one place at NiNite.com. You can install them all in one swoop if you want. Check off the boxes for the freebies you want and click “download installer.” The rest takes place automatically.
Filed under: apps, free stuff, photos, storage | No Comments »
ThisLife.com offers free photo storage for 1000 photos or 100 gigabytes of files for $3 a month. It can import photos from any other site or folder, and use keyword searches to find particular shots — if you have previously labeled those shots with an identifying word (It’s not magic, you know).
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Dropbox is a free program from dropbox.com, and probably the most popular way to store and/or share large files; they let you store up to two gigabytes for free. But Gmail now lets you insert an attachment up to 10 gigabytes. That’s 400 times larger than Gmail’s previous limit for attachments. It will prompt you to store it in Google Drive. To see all you’ve stored, from the Gmail window, click “Drive.”
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Instead of fighting over the family iPad on long car trips and plane rides, three people can watch their own movie or TV show on their own tablet, computer or phone, all streamed from a little Seagate box that can hold 300 high definition movies.
(CLICK UNDERLINE BELOW HEADING FOR MORE.)
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Previewing the new Microsoft Office 2013 is a blast. It’s totally unlike our experience trying to preview Windows 8, which crashed our test computer every few minutes. Office 2013 Preview is a free download from Microsoft.com/Office/Preview. The preview leaves your existing copy of Office in place, so there’s no risk of overwriting it. Unfortunately, 55 percent of Windows users won’t be able to try it, since it doesn’t run on the still widely used XP or Vista operating systems. But here’s our take for the Windows 7 users: While the Office 2013 preview is installing on your machine or tablet, you can experiment with a PowerPoint presentation that comes up automatically to tell you about the new features. You can [...]
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Seagate can now put a trillion bits of data on one square inch of a disk drive. They will soon come out with a six terabyte 3.5-inch drive for desktops and a two terabyte 2.5-inch drive for laptops. A 60 terabyte drive is feasible, say the engineers. To put that in perspective, a 60 terabyte drive could hold 216 million pages of text or 18,000 hours of good-quality video.
Filed under: backup, electronics, storage | 2 Comments »
Just after we wrote about Microsoft’s Skydrive’s free 25 gigabytes of online storage, they started charging for it. They’re still king of the freebie hill with seven free gigabytes, but the competing new Google Drive is worth a spin. Google Drive (Drive.Google.com) gives you five gigabytes free, and unlike other storage sites, lets you edit the documents you store. That’s because it connects seamlessly to Google Docs, which has it’s own word processor. And — as they might say on late night TV — any documents you create with the Google Docs word processor don’t count toward using up the five gigabytes of storage. If you need 25 gigabytes, it costs $2.49 a month.
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Google Drive is expected to launch next week with five gigabytes of free online storage. And there are scores of others. There are so many free services for storing your documents and files online that it’s easy to overlook what appears to be the best, which is Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The software giant offers five times as much free storage as any of the others. Oddly enough, it seldom gets any mention in the tech blogs. Is there any reason for this? We’re open to conspiracy theories. The Wall Street Journal recently compared Apple’s iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft SkyDrive. SkyDrive offered 25 gigabytes of free storage, the others only 5 gigabytes. All of them provide extra storage [...]
Filed under: Internet, storage | 1 Comment »
“One more thing,” as Steve Jobs used to say while driving the engineers crazy. Well, one more way your computer slows down is when the drive gets too full. Joy’s laptop drive was three-quarters full when she decided to run WinDirStat, another free program from WinDirStat.info. It tells you what’s hogging your drive.
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Storing information on the Internet makes some people nervous. It makes us nervous too. So how about having a private cloud? A “cloud” in computer talk is a storage place for information. Commercial ones for corporations and government tend to be huge. The “my-Ditto” is a book-sized box that can act as your own private cloud. It can handle up to four terabytes of storage if you pay $370 for the maximum capacity. Less capacity costs appropriately less. It has its own Internet address, which means you can access it from any device that can connect to the Internet.
Filed under: apps, backup, cloud computing, storage | No Comments »
