Monthly Archives: October 2014

Download Deep Freeze

Deep Freeze from Faronics wipes clean all changes made to your hard disk when you reset the machine. What I liked the most about Deep Freeze was that the system was perfectly stable and there was no increase the bootup time, unlike other software I tested, such as CleanSlate and GoBack.

You can do anything you want – Surf the net, install doubtful software, change registry settings – And it will be wiped clean when you reset the system. In fact, you don’t even need an anti-virus or anti-spyware program, if you are using Deep Freeze. To put it in a nutshell – Once you install Deep Freeze, the only thing that can affect your hard disk is if you take a hammer and smash it to bits.

Reliable Online File Storage From JungleDisk

Jungle Disk – Amazon.com has an amazing new service that appears to be taking off. The service is named S3 – or Simple Storage Services. Essentially, it makes disk storage an “Internet Attached” service accessible to programmers via a set of web APIs. What makes S3 a big deal is the pricing model: $.20 per GB of data transferred and $.15 per GB/month of data stored. If you do the math, this is dirt cheap given that your file objects are stored redundantly at Amazon’s formidable data centers and securely available from anywhere on the net. Many new start-ups are using the S3 for their storage needs and bypassing the purchase of storage farms for their operation. Up until now, this was a ho-hum for the average user – but now – there are several open software solutions which extend the power of S3 to everyone.

One of these recently started using is Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com). Essentially you download the JungleDisk client for your Windows / MacOS of Linux platform ( I use all three) – and configure the software with your own Amazon S3 storage keys – then voila! You have a secure virtual drive that works from anywhere on the Internet, on any computer you have. Under the hood, Jungledisk works as a so-called WebDAV Proxy process – so you access your files through a WebDAV interface included in all modern OS’s. So far, I am impressed by JungleDisk’s usability and stability. Another beauty of S3 is becoming supported by a variety of vendors – so your data is not hostage to JungleDisk – you can always try other S3 client programs for your computers. No more tape or CD back-ups for me, JungleDisk/S3 is the way to go!

What’s The Big Deal About 64 Bits?

You may have heard about the shift from 32 to 64 bit processors and software being ’64 bit’ compatible, but what does this mean?

In computing, bits, short for binary digit, are used to measure many things. In the case of the current new technology however, it is used to refer to the size of the address bus of the processor. The address bus is what a computer processor uses to request information from it’s RAM. The larger the address bus, the more memory the computer can access at any one time. With an older 32 bit address bus processor the computer can ‘see’ around 4 Gigabytes of RAM, with a 64 bit bus however, this number goes up to a potential 16 exabytes! These days, 4 gigabytes is starting to seem like too little for many applications, so 64 bit processors are becoming more and more attractive. This comes at a price however, as although it may seem like quite a minor tweak to the way a processor works, it in many cases requires software to be extensively rewritten and can break compatibility with older programs.