I’ve been in search of truly unlimited online storage for quite some time. I don’t mind paying, as long as it’s really unlimited. In my quest, I’ve come across a wide variety of services that fall short of their claims because they require the use of a proprietary client to facilitate the backups, thereby effectively making an online RAID 1 mirror. The catch is that if you delete something on your local machine, it will be deleted (typically within thirty days). So, they’re obviously not too worried about you using too much space since it is unlikely that you’ll have 100TB of data on your machines.

Nevertheless, Livedrive also offers a “briefcase” feature that essentially functions exactly the same as Dropbox, except with unlimited online capacity which is a very good deal if you were in the market for that. Aside from that, I’m going to dive right in and see if Livedrive can offer me with the kind of online storage that I require. I’d like to be able to upload a 250GB Acronis True Image .TIB file, for example… we’ll see if Livedrive can fill my needs.

Installing the Livedrive client is simple, though requires a reboot.

After the reboot, Livedrive starts up automatically and prompts you to login with the account you already registered online. There is no e-mail verification, though signing up for the free trial does require your address and phone number.

Thereafter you enter in your computer name, and then choose which folders to backup via a simple checkbox UI. The defaults are Documents, Pictures, Music, Desktop, Firefox Settings and “Favourites.” There is a button to “Add Folder” as well. A little window shows how to set Livedrive to backup new folders via right-click.

So far it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to upload a massive 250GB .TIB file and leave it there “backed up.”

I right clicked on a folder to add it to “monitoring” and sure enough it lets me know that it will auto-backup whatever changes I make. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to make a one-way archive/backup or a single file without having it be a “monitored” or “mirrored” folder existing on both the local computer and the Livedrive servers.

Disappointed, I signed up for the Livedrive “briefcase” which enables an “L:” drive which is accessible via any PC you link up to it. During the initial pitch, it said that you could upload files directly from the web UI. I realized shortly thereafter that whatever you upload must also stay synced to whatever PC you have set to have an L: drive, so you cannot have the data reside only in the cloud. Moreover, there doesn’t even appear to be a way to upload files directly from the web UI in the Briefcase. I can make a new folder, but that’s about it.

What bothers me about this is that it isn’t a true “backup service” in the sense that I cannot take a full image of a massive PC and then keep it in the cloud. No, instead I have to use their provided client and keep the image in both places. I can appreciate the convenience, and I can see how this tool is useful for most people, but I wouldn’t recommend it for those who are technically inclined. We’ll need to look elsewhere. That’s too bad.

Sam
admin@variableghz.com

I have a lot of stuff on my hard drives. Not all of it is entirely necessary. I have dozens of old 3d studio max files and other projects that have long since been completed or abandoned over the years.

I like the idea of having an off-site backup of non-mission-critical data. When I heard that Microsoft increased their online storage capacity on SkyDrive to 25GB, I became very interested. They have a cap on the filesize, 50MB per file. To work around this, I elected to use my favorite archiver — WinRAR.

Why WinRAR? The incredible compression and ease of creating spanning archives. All I do is right click on the folder I want to archive and select “Add to Archive”; when WinRAR pops up, I check the following:

- Create solid archive
- Test archived files

Then we gotta set the “compression method” from Normal to Best (this makes an enormous difference depending on the type of files you’re archiving). Next, we set the “Split to volumes, bytes” to a custom size of 45,000k (45MB, comfortably below the 50MB limit; we obviously don’t need to do this if the entire folder is less than 50MB) so that each archive will upload to SkyDrive successfully.

Before, Microsoft had an ActiveX plugin that enabled you to click and drag files into the browser to upload using only IE; now, they’ve made it work using Silverlight so it can work on all browsers. Hopefully they’ll use some fancy HTML5 stuff in the future. Since you’re going to be uploading a lot of files, use their silverlight plugin. It makes the uploads much more reliable and lets you view the progress. Below, you can see my progress uploading a lot of photos complete with nifty progress bars.

The navigation “breadcrumb bar” for SkyDrive no longer makes sense as far as I can tell. When you first load up SkyDrive, it clear indicates that you are at the beginning by displaying Username > SkyDrive. However, once you navigate inside of a directory, it then displays Username > Office > Folder. If I try to go “back” to the root SkyDrive folder by clicking the new “Office” button, it takes me to this Office “recent documents” area and a “Messenger social” — I don’t understand the reason for this bizarre linking scheme, but it appears to be a way for Microsoft to expose users to more of their online offerings.

The only way I can see to get “back” to SkyDrive from here is to hover the mouse over “Windows Live” on the upper left, and then clicking SkyDrive to get back to the root. Extremely bizarre. If it wasn’t for the 25GB of free space, I wouldn’t be recommending it here as your first choice for archiving large files. There are dozens of other “free” online cloud drive offerings, however, anything with any serious size like SkyDrive come and go frequently. SkyDrive has been around for a relatively long time and since it is offered by Microsoft, they have the luxury of running it for years without ever turning a profit… kinda like MSN Search, I mean, Windows Live Search, errr, I mean… Bing!

Ouch.

Here is what a series of RARs looks like uploaded to SkyDrive successfully:

I’ve found SkyDrive to be the perfect solution for this, if you know of any other large, reliable cloud storage solutions please by all means let us know.

Sam
admin@variableghz.com

Well, there’s certainly quite a few Outlook sync competitors, but I chose Syncing.net due to price and the pitch. They have a nice little flash demo showing everything going perfectly. Now, Syncing.net doesn’t only sync Outlook PST’s between computers, they also have a Dropbox-like folder sharing capability which allows you to “invite” other people to your shared folder(s). I did not use this functionality.

Syncing.net, in theory, is pretty easy to set up. According to tech support, you simply install Syncing.net on the host/master computer, then “invite” your other computers as necessary.

Syncing.net manages its syncing capabilities by using a secure P2P (peer to peer) connection as well as a “store and forward” feature which allows Syncing.net to use its own servers to temporarily store up to 250MB of data temporarily if one of the computers is off — thereby preventing the possibility of a P2P connection from taking place.

I tested Syncing.net on a pretty zippy dual-core Athlon based system running Vista Ultimate x64. At all times I had plenty of available memory and since I built the system there was no additional bloat from any other trialware or anything else. I used Office 2007 with Syncing.net.

The Syncing.net software is curious in that whenever it is running and has an Internet connection, it has a circle and a green checkmark in the system tray. Fine, but it’s really not clear as to what it’s doing because of this; the only way to tell if it’s transferring data is to open the software and look at the lower right corner and see that it is in fact transferring data at a certain KB/s rate. Additionally, you can view transfer status via a menu option to see additional options. But it won’t give you any indication of when it’ll be finished. No percentage or anything. They say this is because sync is inherently never “done.” Fair enough, but some kind of progress bar would be appreciated.

Upon the initial sync with the second computer, Syncing.net managed to make a mess out of it. There were duplicate folders and e-mails, calendar entries, folders within folders that had no business being there, etc. I had to instruct my client to essentially delete whatever was necessary to restore it to normal. Tech support was dumbfounded and told me to send them an error report using their built in error reporting tool — which failed (on every system I tried it on, by the way; I had plenty of opportunity to test it out). I asked them why it failed, they told me the usual, anti-virus, firewall, etc. However, I disabled my local firewall and set the router to use a DMZ (Demiltarized Zone) to ensure that there were no conflicts and disabled any anti-virus/anti-spyware to ensure that they had no excuses — still no dice. So I had to send it to them manually via a convoluted process of digging around in my hidden application folder for a huge ZIP file. Fine for someone like me, but what if I didn’t know what Windows Explorer was, or what a zip file was? Or how to browse around hidden folders?

Anyway, tech support is in Germany so they take a pretty long time to get back to you. When they got back to me in this instance, they just told me to do the sync again. Okay.

So this second time around, I deleted everything on the second machine so that it would gracefully accept the data from the master system without any hitches. An unnecessary yet recommended step according to tech support. I performed the sync again which took many hours (due to the large amount of data, primarily). When it was done I was shocked to see, again, that somehow Syncing.net had messed it up. I had practically the same duplicate folders such as “Inbox_1″ which would contain partial e-mails from Inbox, and it wasn’t clear why some were in those folders but not others.

To make matters worse, once I had my client “clean” everything up, Syncing.net would always seem to be one step behind and throwing up little prompts saying that I had made a change on a different system, asking which change I wished to keep. That’s odd because there’s only one person using any given Outlook at any particular time, so, how can these magic “simultaneous syncs” be happening? Tech support certainly had no idea.

My final qualm with the software is that it consumes an enormous amount of resources, mostly in disk activity, which is the worst kind of resource to be hoarding. It causes the computer to slow down enormously with intense I/O sometimes for nearly 20 minutes at a time, even when no changes to Outlook have been made. It really locks the system up — all 3 I tested it on, Vista and XP.

So, my issues with the software and service are as follows:

- No progress bar or any indicator of completeness (or even that it is doing anything, without manually clicking and checking or seeing the intense disk I/O);
- Poor resource management (hogs the entire hard drive without waiting for idle time);
- Incessant prompts which are difficult to permanently solve (“conflicts” resulting from supposed simultaneous changes);
- Difficult and generally unhelpful tech support;
- Extremely time consuming;
- Inconsistent (sometimes it syncs files perfectly, other times it skips several e-mails, even with the “store and forward” feature enabled).

If the software fixed the resource and inconsistency issues, it would be a passable solution. However, because of the compounding issues I cannot recommend this software, just as I cannot recommend Outlook as an e-mail solution. Sorry.

Look elsewhere for your e-mail needs and try to detach yourself from Outlook as soon as you can!

admin@variableghz.com

I’ve been running Microsoft’s free anti-virus solution for quite some time now. I’ve been a fan of Microsoft’s security attempts beginning with their buyout of Giant Anti-Spyware way back in 2004 (then imaginatively named Microsoft Anti-Spyware). Since then, service-started protection was necessary and thus Windows Defender was created to serve that purpose as well as provide the necessary x64 compatability as well. They essentially rewrote the entire program.

Since then, Microsoft has made the largest leap of all by providing free anti-virus to anyone running a “genuine” version of Windows (i.e., not pirated). For most users, nothing will change since most hardware vendors will not equip their machines with MSE since it will not subsidize the cost of the machines as do Symantec products.

This is unfortunate because MSE is a near-perfect solution for combating viruses. It is self updating and generally not annoying. It’s green when everything is OK, yellow or red when action is required. The thing is so silent that you’d never even know you had it installed if no viruses are ever detected.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I used to use a hex editor in a masochistic endeavor to determine viruses out of .exe files back in the mid-90′s. Since then, my first experiences with anti-virus programs were AVG Anti-Virus which I used and recommended for many years.¬† Right around version 8, however, AVG started to become a little too Norton-like for my tastes — bloated, slow to start, nag screens, etc. I then switched to Avast! anti-virus, which I then recommended highly because of its light memory footprint and unobtrusive nature. Unfortunately, Avast! requires an annual registration, even for the free version. This tends to confuse people who are not familiar with the product, “my avast is expiring? what do i do?!” Mandatory registration for a free product is relatively perplexing. MSE deals with all of these issues and is the perfect anti-virus solution. It even uses less memory than any other anti-virus program I have ever tested.

There is so little that needs to be managed or customized for the end user that there is not much left to say. This is a rare and positive feature to appear amidst a category of otherwise insipid yet necessary software. Download it now!

admin@variableghz.com

I’ll keep this short. These past couple days I’ve been experimenting with Google Wave, Google’s solution to e-mail “chat”, the back-and-forth asymmetrical use of e-mail as a means of realtime communication and collaboration between multiple recipients.

It’s a good idea, and it essentially mirrors the functionality of a forum, albeit a high tech forum with lots more capabilities.

Although Google Wave maintains the typical Google simplicity of its application here, I feel as though the people this might benefit most will be the least likely to use it.

For example, I am currently working on a federal case where a single attorney is constantly e-mailing everybody about issues pertaining to the case, often with many drafts and revisions between several people — sounds like a clear cut case for Google Wave, right? I have no doubt in my mind that Google Wave would dramatically improve collaboration and organization for this exact kind of situation. That is Google’s mission statement, isn’t it? Here’s where it falls short: the kind of person who uses e-mail as a substitute for a forum or instant messaging is probably not likely to seek out options such as Google Wave, let alone take the time to learn its most useful core features which would benefit them most.

And that’s too bad, because Google has a winner here; a platform which takes the most useful aspects of a forum, the realtime capabilities of instant messaging and the convenience of e-mail all into one single page which can be interacted by virtually limitless participants. It’s a real evolutionary step for communication and collaboration.

All that said, I think Google Wave is going to rely heavily on IT departments to increase awareness. For all we know, the final version of Google Wave could look quite a bit different than what i’ve shown here.

admin@variableghz.com

Physically, the TX2500 varies very little from the TX1000, where the major improvements lie are in the touchscreen and performance. My feeling about the TX1000 was that it was drastically underpowered and not up for the challenge of running Vista. The TX2500, however, feels powerful, balanced, and runs cool to boot.

The screen is very reflective, but no more so than the TX1000 which I got used to very quickly. It’s not a big deal after a little while. The touchscreen works quite well both with the wacom pen or direct touch. Here is a poorly made video demonstrating the TX2500 touchscreen:

(YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, MSN Video, Blip.TV, DailyMotion)

Specs:
- Windows Vista Home Premium (Service Pack 1 (32-bit))
- AMD Turion(TM) X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-84 (2.3GHz)
- 12.1″ diagonal WXGA High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen (1280 x 800) w/Integrated Touch-screen display
- 3GB DDR2 System Memory
- ATI Radeon(TM) HD 3200 Graphics
- 250GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
- Webcam + Fingerprint Reader with HP Imprint Finish (Echo)
- Wireless-N Card w/ Bluetooth
- DVD/CD drive, LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW DL
- 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery

This neat little Flash intro plays after booting the computer up for the first time.

However, in typical low-end PC fashion, HP tries to force Norton on you and the fun stops there.

Bummer. I clicked Yes. If there was any company I’d like to see fail, even more than GM, it would be Symantec.

I timed the initial set up of the notebook just for fun, results were 26 minutes, 13 seconds until I had a working desktop and the hdd stopped thrashing.

Few more photos of the unit:

After the computer was up and running, I uninstalled the following:

Yahoo! Toolbar

Yeah. I’m sure.

Viewpoint Media Player
SlingPlayer
Slingbox Flash Tour
QuickPlay SlingPlayer 0.4.6
Cyberlink PowerDirector
Cyberlink Power2Go
Norton Internet Security
My HP Games (WildTangent, must uncheck every one individually)
muvee autoProducer 6.1
Microsoft Works
Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2007
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
LiveUpdate
HP Update
HP Smart Web Printing
HP PhotoSmart Essential 2.5
HP Help and Support
HP Customer Experience Enhancements
CyberLink DVD Suite
Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system
Adobe Reader 8.1.0
Activation Assistant for the 2007 Microsoft Office suites

Then…

Installed 37 Windows Updates
Restart. Received the following error message:

Oh no!

Error automagically solved itself.

Install 6 more Windows Updates.
Received this error message:

Then…

Set IE7 homepage from hp-laptop.aol.com to google.com
Set IE7 search default from Yahoo to Google. Remove ask.com and yahoo permanently.
Restart.
Install 3 more Windows Updates.
Restart.
Install 2 more Windows Updates.
Restart.
Disabled UAC, set DPI to 120, disable automatic Windows Defender scans.

I was a little troubled by the number of processes running by default:

83 seems a bit high.

Using Windows Defender’s Software Explorer feature, I disable the following from starting automatically:

bttray.exe
sm56hlpr.exe
qpservice.exe
MUIStartMenu.exe
HPHC_Scheduler.exe
HPWAMain.exe

Installed the following programs:

Avast! Anti-Virus
Firefox
CCleaner
Google Chrome

Microsoft Office Professional Plus

… and that’s about it. The system is stable, good to go. I won’t go into details about heat and speed because other reviewers have documented that already. What I hadn’t seen was many photos of the unit until now.

Technical details/more reviews are over here, and here.

As always, e-mail with questions: