Posts Tagged ‘laptops’

Must Have Application for Thumb Drives

It’s a sign of the time, you can buy a thumb drive almost anywhere.  I have even seen them in Gas Sta­tions in the Omaha area.

There are many rea­sons to use these dri­ves: size, por­ta­bi­lity con­ve­nience, and sto­rage space, all come to mind quickly.  A lot of my exter­nal users do not even take their lap­tops to mee­tings any­more because they can keep all their pre­sen­ta­tions and such on a thumb drive and just plug into any machines.

On the other side of the coin, there are some inhe­rent risks to the trans­por­ta­tion of these devi­ces.  You may for­get them on site, lose them while get­ting something from your poc­ket, so on and so forth.  No mat­ter the rea­son, if you lose your drive, all of that data is now avai­la­ble to the per­son that finds it.

Here are some exam­ples of the type of data that can be lost by anyone:

Firm ‘broke rules’ over data loss

Home Sec­re­tary Jac­qui Smith has bla­med a pri­vate con­trac­tor for losing the details of thou­sands of cri­mi­nals, held on a com­pu­ter memory stick.

Tax web­site shut down as memory stick with sec­ret per­so­nal data of 12million is found in a pub car park

Minis­ters have been for­ced to order an emer­gency shut­down of a key Govern­ment com­pu­ter sys­tem to pro­tect millions of people’s pri­vate details.

The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park con­tai­ning con­fi­den­tial pass­co­des to the online Govern­ment Gate­way sys­tem, which covers everything from tax returns to par­king tickets.

Two exam­ples may not seem like a large amount, but if you look at the amount of data that was lost in these two exam­ples you will rea­lize how much data is at stake.

With that being said, I have found a free appli­ca­tion that will help with this.  Rohos Mini Drive Encryp­tion.  This app has a very small foot­print and once your drive is setup, you don’t have to ins­tall soft­ware on any other com­pu­ter to access that encryp­ted file.

Accor­ding to the deve­lo­pers web­site they list the fea­tu­res as:

• Crea­tes a vir­tual encryp­ted par­ti­tion volume (disk) within a USB flash drive free space
• Auto­ma­ti­cally detects your USB stick con­fig and crea­tes encryp­ted partition
• Pro­gram does not require ins­ta­lla­tion to work with encryp­ted par­ti­ton on a guest com­pu­ter. You can start it right from USB drive
• Encryp­ted par­ti­tion is pro­tec­ted by password
• Encryp­tion is auto­ma­tic and on-the-fly
• Encryp­tion algo­rithm: AES 256 bit key length. NIST approved.
• Rohos Disk Brow­ser to open encryp­ted par­ti­tion without having Admin rights
• Vir­tual Key­board — to pro­tect your encryp­ted disk pass­word from a key logger
• Auto­run Fol­der. Saved program’s/file’s short­cut will auto­ma­ti­cally start/open up upon disk connection
• The limit of encryp­ted par­ti­tion size is 2 GB

I find the soft­ware very easy to use and intui­tive.  In no time, I had car­ved 500 megs on one of my dri­ves and was moving files over to the encryp­ted por­tion.  To try out the func­tio­na­lity I han­ded the disk to my co-worker and watched as they put it in and sure enough none of the data sho­wed.  Just an exe­cu­ta­ble.  When run, the pass­word cha­llenge screen comes up.  I really do like the idea of a vir­tual key­board, par­ti­cu­larly if you are on a com­pu­ter that you do not know.  Bet­ter safe then sorry in this world.  Once the correct pass­word is ente­red and accep­ted an explo­rer win­dow is ope­ned and all your files are acces­si­ble.  It did take a few moments for me to see how to add new files to the encryp­ted volume.  Just so you know, in the explo­rer win­dow you can right click and import file.

As I said before, in this world, encrypt everything.  I highly recom­mend this pro­gram to anyone with a thumb drive.

How hot is your Laptop?

How many rea­ders have a lap­top? I would say alot, they are much chea­per and much more func­tio­nal then the lap­tops of the old days.  Some are almost as cheap as a desk­top.  That cou­pled with how easy a wire­less net­work is to set up and how many public area offer free WiFi for on the road, makes a lap­top a good invest­ment now a days.

But have you tried to ever sit with one on your lap some­ti­mes?  Well ima­gine the tem­pe­ra­ture inside the case and ima­ging what it is doing to your CPU(s).

For those that may not be aware of what high tem­pe­ra­tu­res can do, it cause cause hard­ware pro­blems or even cause soft­ware to freeze up and crash.

To see the CPU tem­pe­ra­ture, there is a few free pro­grams out there.  The first is Real Temp.  It is a small down­load that you ins­tall and bam you see the temp of your Intel processor(s).  It does show a lot of infor­ma­tion, but for most users you will need only the mini­mum and maxi­mum temp, the current CPU load, and the ther­mal indi­ca­tors.  Another I have used in the past is Speed­Fan.  I per­so­nally like Speed­Fan bet­ter, I find it gives bet­ter infor­ma­tion as well as infor­ma­tion con­cer­ning S.M.A.R.T. hard drives.

For Macs, though I can test it, there is a uti­lity for Mac OSX — smcFanControl2.  If you are a Mac user and try this, please let me know how it works.

For the heat to your legs, I recom­mend get­ting a lap­top cushion you can find almost anywhere, or I have a bel­kin base that actually has a fan that runs cold air up at the bot­tom of your lap­top to cool it down. My base usually drops the CPU temp about 5–6 degrees Cel­sius.  I highly recom­mend loo­king for one.