Best computer news

2.5″ hard drive already reaches 1TB, only two years after 3.5″ hits the same mark. The credit goes to the Western Digital for bringing this spacious drive to the market in the form of internal and external USB storage. Others like Seagate and Hitachi however won’t be far behind. As good as this may sound, the WD Scorpio Blue 2.5″ 1TB is 3mm too thick for notebooks, most of which only accept 9.5mm drives.

Even though the Scorpio Blue maybe a tad too big for the majority of laptops, it’s perfect for portable USB drives like WD’s My Passport Essential SE. While offering twice the size competitors offer, one caveat is that the 1TB as well as its 750GB sibling spins a 5200-rpm, a bit slower than what is usually expected. It’s uncertain how this may affect performance, but you can’t beat the convenience of carrying around a tetrabyte data in a single USB-powerd enclosure. The drive is also bundled with sync+encryption software. The My Passport Essential SE 750GB and 1TB will join the rest of the family with a MSRP of $199.99 and $299.99.
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Portableapps.com almost single-handedly is bringing the digital nomad lifestyle into the main stream. This week brings the second coming of the launcher that helps weave it all together. John T. Haller, the head honcho over at Portableapps.com has done a lot of work on the menu launching system that has limited adoption by hardcore portable users. The dozens of great apps that he has culled into his site’s offering have free, open-source, full featured versions of just about every type of software you can imagine. MS Office, digital post-its, Photoshop, Internet browsers, all can run from a flash drive and keep all your settings the same on ANY computer that you use. One of the main groups of people that can benefit from giving this a try is office workers. If you have a computer at home and a computer at the office why do you need a laptop? Keep your data synchronized and ready to travel at a moment’s notice on a flash drive. These applications will also run the same amongst different versions of Windows. XP, Vista, 2003, 2008, Windows 7 all seem to have very little problems running these programs.

Where Portableapps.com seems to have redoubled its efforts recently is in the menu launcher system. This is effectively the program that helps you sort, organize and run all of the programs you get in this suite or otherwise collect including music or documents. It very strongly resembles the Start button menu of Windows Vista and with almost more features than the whole operating system. Prior versions of the Portableapps menu left those who adopted the lifestyle wanting more. This version promises to bring many of those who went looking for alternatives back to the collective. While the menu may not have been its strong point before take a look at the awards won by the project as a whole. (Note: Page has an error that keeps it from displaying in FF.)
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