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Prevent data loss: Monitor your hardrive’s health status with CrystalDiskInfo

July 25th, 2012 2 comments

Data recovery is always costly. It’s always better to have backups, but what about the reliability of our backup drives? There is a way to find it out. Each hard drive, both internal and external, stores details about its health without any user intervention. It’s called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which monitors several parameters which helps to anticipate failures. S.M.A.R.T can detect only predictable failures which comes from normal wear and tear of mechanical components, and degradation of disk surface. CrystalDiskInfo is a free system utility to read your hard disk’s SMART data easily.

 

CrystalDiskInfo

 

  • IDE, SATA hard drives even on USB interface is supported.
  • can detect disks on RAID array.
  • less hungry on system resources.

CrystalDiskInfo can detect very interesting figures like

Power-On Hours (POH) : Count of hours in power-on state. The raw value of this attribute shows total count of hours (or minutes, or seconds, depending on manufacturer) in power-on state

Power Cycle Count : This attribute indicates the count of full hard disk power on/off cycles.

Temperature : Current internal temperature and many more.

source: wikipedia.com

Download CrystalDiskInfo

OS : Windows 7/2008/Vista/2003/XP/2000, x86/WoW64

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Hamsphere: Virtual Ham Radio transceiver on your PC

October 6th, 2011 1 comment

Hamsphere simulates a full blown virtual Ham radio transceiver on you system. It can be operated by licensed and unlicensed DX’ers for free. If you are not having Amateur radio license, they will issue you a "call sign" while registering.

What is so great about this Ham Radio Software Transceiver?

No extra hardware needed, just your PC, a microphone, speakers and you are ready to call CQ on the virtual Ham Radio bands.

You can feel audio on Hamsphere with simulations of occasional band noise and fading, as in a real radio transceiver. The user interface looks like a real HF transceiver

hamsphere2

If you are interested in becoming an Amateur radio operator, here is the opportunity to practice it without buying costly amateur radio gear.
Forget about building complex antennas, raising it on high mast, antenna tuners etc. All you need is an Internet connection and Java support.
Voice (SSB) and CW (Morse code) are allowed on most bands. On the lower bands we can turn on/off(noise-free) the simulation.

Digital modes were prohibited on HamSphere earlier, but are now supported on the 30m band. RRTY, PSK31, SSTV etc can be used.

Pre-requisites: Download JAVA

Download Hamsphere (Windows, Mac and Linux )

For more updates @Hampshere

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Get System Management BIOS table in Human readable format, DMI Decode

September 21st, 2010 No comments

Dmidecode is a tool which queries DMI/SMBIOS information and presents it in human readable form. DMIDecode runs on BSD systems and a variety of other *nix distributions. Let’s see it in action. Fire up a terminal and type:

dmidecode –t x

where x can be any of these valid type keywords:

  • bios
  • system
  • baseboard
  • chassis
  • processor
  • memory
  • cache
  • connector
  • slot
  • dmidecodet

    dmidecode –s x

    where x can be any of these valid type keywords:

    • bios-vendor
    • bios-version
    • bios-release-date
    • system-manufacturer
    • system-product-name
    • system-version
    • system-serial-number
    • system-uuid
    • baseboard-manufacturer
    • baseboard-product-name
    • baseboard-version
    • baseboard-serial-number
    • baseboard-asset-tag
    • chassis-manufacturer
    • chassis-type
    • chassis-version
    • chassis-serial-number
    • chassis-asset-tag
    • processor-family
    • processor-manufacturer
    • processor-version
    • processor-frequency

     

      dmidecodes

      Read more…

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