If you were running out of things to do with old 3.5-inch floppies back in 2008 when we first shared a tutorial on how to turn them into a pen holder you’ve certainly run out by now. We’re back with new designs. More »
Instead of throwing out those old floppy disks, grab a couple of zip ties and turn them into a roomy, DIY pen holder that pays homage to the old school method of data storage. Do-it-yourselfer completegeek posts the straightforward step-by-step. In short, drill a couple of holes into the disks, fasten them together with zip ties, and trim off extra length with scissors. Easy-peasy, with nifty results! Photo by matthew.shelton. Floppy Disk Pen Holder [Instructables via matthew.shelton]
Windows only: Ariolic Disk Scanner scans your hard disks, flash drives, CDs and other removable media for errors—but it doesn’t fix them if it finds them. Completely portable and lightweight, Ariolic makes quick work of locating disk errors via read-only scanning, which is perfect for performing a quick disk check if IT lockdown or other circumstances render Windows built-in Scan Disk unavailable. Ariolic Disk Scanner is a free download for Windows only. Ariolic Disk Scanner [via gHacks]
Windows only: Freeware application Macrium Reflect Free creates disk image snapshots of any hard drive on your computer that you can restore on any other drive to bring your computer back to the same state. Disk imaging is a great solution for going from zero to a completely setup system if something goes wrong, and we’ve shown you how to hot image your hard drive with a similar software called DriveImage XML. Macrium Reflect Free does basically the same thing as DiX, like creating images while Windows is running, but—also like DiX—the free version of Reflect unfortunately does not do incremental backup. What Reflect does have is a very friendly interface that makes disk imaging seem simple. Just remember that you should still set up automated file backups.
