Copy and Move Files Faster and Smarter in Windows

Have you ever been frustrated copying or moving files in Windows? It seems to take forever and seems to slow the system down to a crawl. Sometimes you want to pause the copying or moving of files but in Windows your only option is to cancel the copy and the result is only a partial copy of the files and without taking the time to look through the files or folder, there’s no simple way of determining how far the copy got. Or maybe you’re copying off a dying drive and the system consistently fails on multiple files while copying.  Well there’s a simple program that overcomes the limitations of the Windows default file copy/move. The program is called TeraCopy by Code Sector. The link to the program is below.

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Just download and install the program. There’s one option that you should be aware of during the installation. You will be prompted if you would like to “Use TeraCopy as the default copy handler”. If you would still like to keep the Windows copy / move feature, I would suggest against selecting this option. This is especially so to make sure that there is no incompatibilities with other programs you may have installed in your system.

So here’s a quick guide on how to copy/ move files. In this example, I will be moving a 1.79GB folder to a completely different hard drive. The process is the same for copying files

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Why Defrag Your Hard Drive?

Over time, your computer’s hard drive becomes fragmented from actions such as adding and deleting files and programs. As it becomes fragmented, the computer becomes slower accessing files and programs and it results in a slower computer.

Think of your computer’s hard drive as a bookcase full of books. At first, all the books are neatly placed in order either by category or alphabetically.  As you take books out to read them, add new books, and throw some out, inevitably some books get placed back in the wrong place and gaps appear where books have been thrown out. As this occurs finding a book becomes more difficult and takes more time to find. The same thing occurs to the hard drive on your PC. To make it easier and faster to find the books, it’s important to reorganize the books on your bookshelf once in a while. On a computer, this process is known as defragmenting or ‘defragging’ for short.

All recent versions of Windows have come with their own built in defragmenting utility but they can be very slow and sometimes not as intuitive. It’s still good to run the Windows version if you are willing to leave the system on for a while but it tends to feel like a chore to get it to run. As such, I’d like to introduce a freeware alternative to use on a more frequent basis. The program is called ‘Disk Defrag’ and is by a company called Auslogics. The program is very simple to use, works quite quickly, and best of all, free. So let me show you just how simple it is to use the program. You’ll need to first download the program from the link below:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download

If you need help installing the program, just click back on the link above and read on further down the page.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the program, click on the program icon to get it running. You should be presented with the screen below:

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Finding and Ridding Your System of Duplicate Files in Windows

With hard drives being as cheap as they are, some of you have become lazy and have duplicate files all over your PC wasting up space. Sometimes it’s good to do a little housekeeping on your PC but the thought of taking the time to look for these files can be time consuming. A freeware program called DupKiller can make looking for these duplicate files easy.

Click on the program logo to open up the website for DupKiller

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Why Does My New Hard Drive Show Between 127 GB to 137 GB When it’s Much Larger?

You add a brand new hard drive to your new system. You’re all happy of all the new space but the operating system tells you that there’s only somewhere between 127 GB to 137 GB available even though it’s much larger. You’re probably thinking that you got a defective drive or someone’s trying to rip you off. Take a few deep breaths and read on. This limitation affects both Windows and Mac based systems. An article provided by Seagate Technology, a leading manufacturer of disk based storage solutions, provides an explanation and details as to how this issue can be overcome. A link to the article is below:

Seagate Article

Make special note of where it says “IMPORTANT: Always Back Up First”

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The Operating System Reports a Hard Drive Size Much Smaller Than What the Manufacturer States

So you just purchased a new hard drive and when you go to format it, the size reported is smaller than what you expect. Or maybe you got bored and looked into the hardware information and were surprised to see the hard drive being reported in a smaller number. Before you pick up the phone to call your lawyer, you might want to read on.

Basically, the problem exists due to the fact that during the infancy of computers, people in the industry decided that they would call 1024 bytes a kilobyte although the prefix ‘kilo’ should refer to 1000 in the manner a kilometer refers to 1000 meters and kilogram refers to 1000 grams. At first the difference was negligible as drives were still only a few hundred megabytes in size but as they got into gigabytes the difference in size became much more apparent. To make it easier to understand, let’s use beer as an example. A standard can is 355ml. Using the calculations used for bytes (355/1024); it would mean that you’re getting only 347ml. That’s only a difference of 8ml…. not a big deal. Now let’s say you buy a 50 liter (50,000ml) keg. Once again, using the byte calculation, it would mean you’re getting 48.828 liters. That’s a difference of over a liter. This kind of difference would probably be a big issue if you just spent a pretty penny on a keg of your favorite beer. More details on the hard drive size calculating methods can be found from the link below:

Seagate Article

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So why can I not see my new hard drive in Windows Explorer?

A lot of people are able to determine how to install a hard drive in their Windows based PC through reading their motherboard manual, a hard drive installation manual, or have a ‘techie’ friend / neighbor do it for them. That’s all fine and dandy, but it’s not just a matter of putting cable A into connector B. It’s a bit more involved, but many people, not knowing any better, often blame it on the hard drive as it fails to show up in Windows Explorer on their PC. Well without sounding any further condescending, which often seems to happen when I try to write helpful tips, let’s see if I can help out. The fact that you’ve read this far suggests that’s what you’re here for.

The steps below show an example on a Windows XP system but the steps are virtually identical in Vista and will work for Vista users as well.

Step 1: Hopefully you’ll boot into Windows and you’ll see, or already have seen, a little notification bubble on your taskbar informing you that its ‘Found New Hardware’. It’ll generally first pop up a notification bubble with the model/part number followed by a second. If it doesn’t, that’s a subject I’ll consider tackling in another tech tip in the future.

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How to Share the Root of a Drive Under Vista

Hardware Canucks has a great article on How to Share the Root of a Drive Under Vista.

Quote:

Well one of the biggest challenges I’ve had with Vista has been file sharing related. I’m on a secure (read: wireless w/ lead paint in the walls) home network, so when I share a folder, I just want everyone to be able to access it from any PC in the house. It’s that simple, or so it seems.

Vista makes sharing folders a pain. When you click share on a normal folder (right click, then “share”), you have to add the “Everyone” permission to that folder in order for anyone to be able to access it. I wonder why Vista would assume that when you share a folder you don’t want anyone to be able to access it except yourself…. from the machine on which it’s shared….. I’ve actually tried created an account with identical sign-in credentials to the Vista machine and it will not allow it to access files that have my own name as the “Owner” with full permissions….

Anyway, after some struggling I figured out how to share folders. Here’s problem #2 though. I use a full drive as my “My Documents” folder. Basically it’s a RAID-1 with anything that I could possibly value stored on it. That way I don’t have to waste space on my RAID with my Vista install/programs etc by mirroring my main drive and storing everything in default directories. So that means in order to share all of my “My Documents” stuff over the network (music, movies, etc), I need to share the root of a drive.

Vista will allow the permissions to be set, even though you have to do it manually by right clicking, then hitting “share”, and manually setting the permissions to everyone, but then when you try to access it from a remote computer, it will say “access is denied”. So I struggled with this for a bit, and finally I decided to dig deeper. Here’s how to share the root of a drive under Vista:

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