Dan’s Web Spot

Introduction

WD MyPassport Essential 500GB USB Hard Drive

If you've ever used disk cloning software such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, you know that you can usually boot your computer from the product CD for backup (except Ghost) and restore operations. With an external hard drive attached (USB), you can typically back up a complete disk image to this destination as long as the product you are using has drivers that support external USB drives.

My favorite backup software is Acronis True Image, which I use to create periodic drive images so that in the event of a catastrophic drive failure, I can partition a new drive, restore the latest image, and be up and running in a couple of hours with little user interaction. This sure beats reloading Windows and all the applications and settings I have already invested the time into setting-up (at least one day, maybe two initially, and then countless moments spent tweaking from there).

The Acronis media disk lets you create a bootable USB flash drive or a CD image that you can use to burn a CD for booting your computer. My preferred method for backups is running automatically as a background process to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. While this does work, network backups over wireless-G can be painfully slow... » More...

I found a link recently to an article about using your cell phone with your laptop (or desktop PC in a pinch) to get on the Internet. Maybe you're traveling and you can't find a Wi-Fi hotspot nearby, or you don't want to pay extra for Wi-Fi access somewhere, or maybe you can't afford to drop the money on a new wireless broadband card and services fees for your laptop.

If this sounds like you, then check out this article: How-To Roundup: Modem Tethering. Scroll to the bottom to select your phone type and download the appropriate software for free. (Note that you need to have a data plan with your cell service provider.)

The instructions worked out great for me and my Motorola V3m phone...

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