This has been an interesting week… Lots going on at the Spera house, lots going on with Apple, and lots going on here at Gear Diary.  One of the reviews I just posted, Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier, is generating a lot of e-mail traffic for me behind the scenes.  Please watch the site for a review on another defrag product, PerfectDisk…there’s a whole lot of defragging going on!

…and speaking of which, you may remember that I mentioned that I purchased a WD MyBook World II 1TB NAS on eBay last month, and installed it on my home network.  When the network is up (don’t ask…I’m not sure why my network is so fragile), it works like a charm, and the included Access Anywhere software from MioNet is truly awesome. However, I’ve run into an interesting problem…

While its not a huge issue just yet, with all of the defragging that I’ve been doing, I thought I’d check the fragmentation level of the NAS just to make certain that all of the backing up and file copying that I’ve been doing to it doesn’t skew all the data.  While this isn’t a huge problem in a 1TB drive now, (I’ve only used about 180GB so far), it might be an issue later. I’ve got over 800GB of contiguous space, so there shouldn’t be much fragmentation on it for a while.

Interestingly enough, the device shows up in My Computer as an NT Server UNC; but the Computer Management Console can’t see it. I’ve got a call out to Diskeeper Corporation to address this and will get back to everyone in Comments with the solution, if they have one…

I have a laptop that I use for most of my software testing and review writing.  It is about a year and half old, and lately I have been noticing an interesting phenomenon.  When I bought it, about 18 months ago, it was blazing fast.  Even after I loaded Vista, I was still impressed by how fast it ran.  Over time, however, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in speed.  In short, my hare has become a tortoise.  And I don’t care what they say about racing, in computers, slow and steady gets tossed out the window.  As you can imagine, this has become a source of increasing irritation for me, as my computer can take up to 10 minutes just to boot up and connect to the Internet.  Yikes!  So, when we received an offer from Large Software to review their PC Tune Up program, I jumped right it in with both feet.  I mean, come on, even if it doesn’t work at all, it can’t possibly make my computer any slower, right?  Hit the jump and we’ll find out.

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