Wondering if your hard drive has issues or not or what temperature it’s running at?

Check out HDTUNE. Its a free (yes, free) Windows utility that will go over your hard drive(s) and check for errors and give you an idea of the performance of it as well. It is a very handy program that probably should of been included within the Windows OS (or at least Windows should of shipped with such a utility).

Netstumbler is a great program for detecting Wireless Access Points, and more importantly, the signal strength. It’s a must-have program that every tech/nerd should have.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in Microsoft Vista - but there is an alternative. It’s called Vistumbler. personally I haven’t tried it, but friends of mine say it looks and feels very simialr to the ‘original’.

Gmail’s g-archiver seems a great utility for backing up Gmail messages to your computer.

But there appears to be a security flaw.

From this website I read:

The backstory:

Yeah, but it wasn’t a ‘coding mistake’. He coded it in there, so when someone used this tool, it uploaded YOUR username and password to HIS email account. (Nice huh?)

OUCH!!!!

Anyway, looks like the good people of Google have removed g-archiver, and are recommending you remove it from your computer. Their official explanantion:

What happened was that a member of our development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version.

Running P2P applications in Vista and ever see this message coming up? In your event viewer, the exact wording is ‘TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts’.

Microsoft has implemented a change in the TCP/IP stack since XP SP2 to limit the number of ‘half-open’ (incomplete/syn packets) connection attempts per second to keep your computer from being used by dangerous programs such as worms that scan the internet to infect more systems.

I stumbled on this feature(?) only today as I don’t use Vista. Fortunately, if your P2P applications are suffering, there is a patch. You can download it from here.

I hate having to pull a hard drive out of a case to check what the jumper settings are for Master, Slave etc.

Not knowing the exact model of this Maxtor one I came across today, I though I’d ask my friend Google. I found a page with most (if not all) of the Maxtor and Qantum drives listed that I would ever need. Handy site to bookmark.

Check it out here.