We can build it better, faster, stronger for under 6 million dollars

What we are building here is the drive layout for a PC containing 2 equal speed equal size hard drives.

We want speed for applications that need it such as gaming and video encoding as well as web cache. We want to secure our data on a partition other than the partition holding the main OS. This space will also be used to load applications that may contain user data and settings that we might want to preserve in the event we have to blow away the OS partition. Finally we need raw storage for video mostly that is not on a raid in the event we need to recover it. We could create a raid array for recovery purposes but it has always been my opinion that home or novice users need to maintain good backups as opposed to trying to recover data from a failed hard drive in a Raid 5 array.

The partitions needed will be from each drive in Gigabytes:

100
100
5
(final partition containing the remaining space)

You will have 100 on one drive for the OS. You do it this way because we are creating the Raid arrays using Microsoft Disk Management.

Then 2 100gig partitions will be used to create a Gaming or High speed stripped partition. If you want a bigger gaming array you can allocate more space or simply add another array later with the left over space being used for mass storage.

The 10gig array will be used for internet cache and for a very fast page file for both speed and privacy. It is very easy to wipe a small partition that might contain personal data that could be used to steal your identity or create profiles on your surfing habits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID














Click on the image below for more details:

Send and receive text SMS messages from the PC for free.

Google has a option in gmail where you can put a phone number into your chat box and send a text message to any phone in the US.

This is how you get it set up:

In GMAIL click:
Settings,
then Labs,
then scroll down to SMS chat which is fairly far down the list.
Select enable
Then back to the top to save settings.

Now you can simply type a phone number in the chat contact box. It will offer to save the number with a name associated.

Then simply type a message and wait for a reply.

These messages are not free to the person receiving the message.

Suck a golfball through a hose?

Well emailing a large file or movie to friends and family can be hard if not impassible, no I didn't mean impossible because I have a solution.

http://files2you.com/

This is a free service from the people who created the commercial product file catalyst.

Registered Max Filesize 200.00 MB - this is a little weak but not bad.

File types - All type allowed
Multiple uploads - 5 (not sure what this means)

Support for resuming downloads
Support for download-accelerators
100kb/s
Unlimited

You can use a service like file front and upload just about any size file as well as maintain a neat little web space if you do alot of this kind of thing. There are other faster and simpler solutions if you want to share passwords with friends or family you can just simply share free online storage space.

I recommend encrypting personal files that you might share using true crypt but your family will need to have true crypt and the password to decrypt the resulting file. This method you can encrypt a whole folder and move it as a file. You can do this with zipped archives as well. 7-Zip is a great free solution for this.