On the road of life, it’s best not to go it alone

If all you want is directions to the nearest diner or coffee joint, MapQuest and Google Maps have you covered. But if you really want to explore your world, Wayfaring’s social mapping is a better way to go. The service is based on Google Maps but enhances the basic direction-finding service with a social networking interface that lets you create custom maps and share them with friends.

Visiting a new town? Before you shell out for a guidebook, log on to Wayfaring and check out customized maps created by people who’ve actually been there. From dining options to museums to obscure attractions, you can pinpoint just about anything on Wayfaring.

www.wayfaring.com

The most infamous error message is the Blue Screen Of Death. It’s so well known that it has crept into the vernacular: “Aw, Fxxk! I was almost finished with my project when I got bluescreened!” The phenomenon is also known by its acronym, BSOD.

The conditions that cause a blue screen have changed since the days of Windows 95/98, as has what it means. In either case, chances are pretty good that, if you get bluescreened, any unsaved work will be lost, as either Windows (in NT/2000/XP) or your application (in 95/98) has been shut down.

The BSOD is perhaps the most despised error not only because it has wiped away countless hours of work over the years, but because of the obtuse way in which it does so. The messages delivered in the typical blue screen are meant for developers more than end users. For example, a blue screen delivered by Windows may deliver a message such as the following:
0×0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION _NOT_HANDLED.

And if you don’t find that sufficiently informative, you’ll see four variables in parentheses to help developers figure out what’s happening. Again, none of this will mean much to most of us, but a support rep or developer can often learn a great deal from such cryptic messages.

Fortunately, blue screens are rare in recent versions of Windows and may disappear after a reboot. But if the problem recurs, you could have a real problem. Here are some troubleshooting steps to follow if you encounter a BSOD:

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Though you’ll always hear people reminds you all to back up regularly, even the most religious backer-uppers sometimes need to retrieve data from unreadable hard drives, floppies, CDs, and various flashbased media. In these cases, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a virtually indispensable tool to retrieve the otherwise irretrievable, provided the underlying hardware is working properly.

The ideal recovery situation for SPWDR is when a file is lost due to software reasons, such as an accidental erasure or emptying of the trash, file deletions due to viruses or malware, or accidentally reformatting a drive or partition. In these cases, SPWDR manually scans the “empty” areas of a drive looking for fragments of files, which it then reconstructs on its own. If you know the file extension or part of the filename you want recovered, SPWDR can go digging with two scanning methods, it just scans the drive and lists everything it can recover. In the case of an older, often reformatted drive, it successfully recovered files we haven’t thought of in years.

SPWDR is also handy for recovering files from flash drives or memory cards that appear as unformatted volumes in Windows. It successfully recovered hundreds of photos from an unreadable SD card from a digital camera in our tests, for example, along with a QuickTime movie file.

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12 million hours of video, No stupid self submissions

Some people love whiling away the hours sifting through idiotic home-video footage on YouTube. If you don’t, try Blinkx. Built on a powerful search engine, Blinkx scours the web for videos, then analyzes and tags them for retrieval. So when you search for White Stripes, you’ll find the band’s videos, not a bunch of homemade vids of teenyboppers lipsynching to “Icky Thump.”

Blinkx grabs videos from across the entire web, so it’s got everything YouTube, iFilm, Veoh, and the rest have, only more organized and with full-motion thumbnails. It includes a Safe Search control to filter out the dirty stuff and clicking a video’s title will take you straight to its source, so you can see it in its original context.

www.blinkx.com

Most backup software can be categorized as either a drive imager, a file archiver,” or a snapshot taker. Very rarely does a single product fall into all three of these categories while still doing each job well, but FarStone Technology’s DriveClone 3 Pro is one of those products. It isn’t without a hiccup or two, but it has all the bases covered to ensure good backups of your whole system, your setup and configuration, and all your data files.

DriveClone works in three modes and adds some useful utilities. The first mode is System Backup, which basically takes a whole image of a drive or boot partition and copies it elsewhere. Almost magically, it manages to successfully copy Windows from within Windows while Windows is running, but other programs need to be shut down. The File Archiver copies sets of files and folders, either manually or on a schedule. The Snapshot Taker works in place of Windows’ own System Restore, recording snapshots to a hidden partition on your main hard drive. All three modes also allow for incremental updates, so backups only record changes.

DriveClone can write system backups and file backups to second internal drives, external USB devices, burnable CDs/DVDs, and even over a LAN to a network drive, and it does it all very quickly with compression set to Medium. A Linux-based boot disc allows for restoring from all modes and from all sources, even if Windows won’t boot.

Foibles? Just minor ones. The installer doesn’t install all of the DriveClone’s features by default, which is odd; choose the Advanced installation and follow the prompts to activate everything. Secondly, DriveClone just didn’t like one of my PCs, constantly stating “System partition space or continuous space is not enough,” even though using a 20GB drive with 4GB of data on it. So try the program before buying it. Finally, some PCs just don’t like Linux bootable CDs, so test the Restore CD before relying on it.

That said, DriveClone 3 Pro works marvelously and can handle all your backup needs in one slick package.

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The first service pack for Microsoft Windows Vista operating system won’t arrive until early next year, but judging from many experience with a beta of SP1, the update will be more about stability and security fixes than noticeable performance gains.

What is Improved
Many alterations in this service pack, the tested version of 0.275 won’t be obvious to a casual user. You probably won’t notice any interface changes, for example.

Instead, Microsoft says, the service pack beta improves stability, performance, and reliability when reactivating a machine from Hibernate or Suspend mode; enhances device-driver support; increases security; and adds support for new standards such as Extended File Allocation Table (intended to enhance flash storage on notebooks, not desktops).

According to Microsoft, typical load times for the final version should range from 30 to 60 minutes. The installation requires 7GB of free hard-drive space (some of which will be reclaimed after the installation is complete), though the finalized install file itself is expected to be a 50MB download via Windows Update.

In early tests with the beta, some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds.

Microsoft is also touting improvements in the speed of copying and extracting files, so that also tested a few of those scenarios. Noted that a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totalling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the a fore mentioned HP Compaq notebook.

In another test, Nero 7 Ultra on an Acer Aspire 5630 Core 2 Duo laptop were tested to add files to a disk image. After SP1 installed, the notebook built the disk image about 7 percent faster.

There aren’t many grab-bag utilities that do a lot of different, handy things these days, but Transfz is just such a utility, and you will wonder how you lived without it. Consuming hardly any RAM or CPU cycles (the executable is just 320KB), Transfz just sits in the Taskbar tray awaiting its hotkey, and then it leaps into action to make your computing life a little easier.

Before describing what it does, here is how to use it. Just highlight a word or set of words within a document or program, including text fields in Web browsers, and press CTRL-D. A pop-up menu appears that offers all sorts of handy features and commands that work with the selected text.

Arguably, the most useful is an Internet Lookup command, which instantly opens your browser (or a new tab) and Googles for the selected text. If you don’t care for Google, then Transfz can use Wikipedia, IMDb, Slashdot, the BBC, or any of about 10 online searching tools.

The next is a permanent clipboard of which stores and displays the 10 most recent Clipboard items. This allows you to copy several things to the clipboard at once and then paste them all again at once, with no tedious back and forth between windows or applications. There are also text formatting options that can change all the selected text to ALL CAPS, Upper Case, lower case, and so forth. It can also insert the current time and/or date at the cursor, count the number of selected words, or search and replace within your selection.

A small but growing list of plug-ins are adding more features to Transfz almost weekly, and there is no arguing with the price free. But it seems to make keypress sticky within Office 2007. Hopefully this bug will get chased out as the product goes from beta to final.

URL: www.transfz.com