ScrnShots - Free Screen Shot Hosting

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

This ain't no Flickr! Every blogger needs a place to host screen shots. Flickr is the best place for photos (IMHO) but they ask that all the images you post be photos (not that they're rabid about that). But now there's SCRNSHOTS.com. Unlimited screen shot uploads. You can tag them for easy searching. The photo below is a screen shot of scrnshots.com and it is hosted on scrnshots.com. How recursive is that!

It works pretty much like flickr. Take a screen shot and save it on your computer. Upload it, add a description and tags. Embed it using the provided html. They do ask that you link back to them which is the same thing flickr asks.

On the social side, I've found that people frequently comment on shots. It's fun to browse around and look at the shots other people are taking. I'm going to try to post at least one interesting shot per day and I'll try to comment on any interesting ones that I find.

I am very happy to have this available. I'm not sure what the financial model is for this. I'm hoping they don't disappear anytime soon. Flickr seems to be going strong, especially now that they got bought. Maybe google will buy this one.

LewisC

Free Floor Panning Software

I've started playing with a new online tool, Floorplanner.com. This is a really neat little tool. From the site:

Buying a new home, rearranging your room, or moving into a new office? You can save time and have more fun if you lay out your ideas ahead of time.

Floorplanner is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floorplans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your floor plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website.

It's easy to use and works in almost any modern browser, no extra downloads required.

I haven't used it heavily but so far it works fine. The free version will only let you create a single floor plan. Since I ownly own a single house, that's not a problem for me. ;-)

You can upgrade to the Plus version. That gives you 5 floor plans. It costs $30.50 per year. That's about what you would pay for a comparable desktop version but a desktop version would give you unlimited floorplans.

You can also upgrade to Pro for $24.50 per month. That seems really steep to me even for a professional.

The free version is definitely worth a look though.

Clonezilla: Free Disk to Disk Transfer for Laptops

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

I wrote some time ago that I had bought a new laptop. My old one had died. I didn't need to transfer any files (couldn't actually, the hard drive was toast) but I had my backups so I didn't lose any data.

The one downside to the new laptop (which otherwise had awesome specs) was a 200GB 4800 RPM hard drive. After giving it a few months, I decided I had enough of it. Vista is not exactly a speed demon anyway but on that disk I was getting old waiting for it. I decided to swap hard drives and if Vista was still slow I would upgrade to XP.

So, I ordered a new 200GB 7200 RPM hard drive. It's a SATA drive from Hitachi (replacing a SATA drive from Toshiba). I got an excellent deal from TigerDirect.com.

My existing drive was partitioned into a 188GB C drive and a 12GB D drive. The D drive is a recovery drive that I don't need.

The new drive came yesterday and I installed it last night. Before doing so, I did a partition image of my C drive using Clonezilla.

Clonezilla is a replacement for Norton Ghost. It takes a bit by bit image of the hard drive and can write that image on a new drive. You download Clonezilla as an ISO and burn it to a disk. It's fairly small at about 80MB. It's a Debian Linux install with just enough Linux to work and a bunch of utilities.

From the Clonezilla website:

What is Clonezilla ?

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!




Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

I popped the Clonezilla disk in (I used the Clonezilla Live disk) and rebooted. Linux booted up without any issues. It asked some questions about my hardware and we were on the way. No networking was installed as far as I can tell. I didn't need any though.

I cloned my C partition to an external Maxtor 500GB USB drive that I normally have hanging off my network for extra storage. It's definitely not the fastest disk on my network but it works great and is easy to use. Clonezilla recognized both my C and D drives and the USB drive with no special prompting from me. Clonezilla creates a repository on the target disk to store the images.

Clonezilla took about 3 1/2 hours to write the 148GB that I had on my existing C drive. I blame the USB drive, not Clonezila, for the amount of time it took.

Anyway, once complete, I popped out the old drive and installed the new one. I booted up but this time I did not have the USB drive plugged in. It told me when to plug it in but I may not have been fast enough or something. It seemed to recognize the drive but then hung at that point. I rebooted with the USB drive already plugged in. It recognized the drive and proceeded to the restore.

The Clonezilla restore failed on the first attempt. Because I only did one partition and not the entire disk, I had to choose to have Clonezilla recreate the MBR. It worked when I changed that option. The restore went faster than the save. I forgot to write the time down but I think it was 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

I booted back into Vista and it did a disk check. It said the $shutdown$ (or something like that) file was invalid. After the check disk it finished booting up. Once I logged in, I got a message that Vista had installed new hardware (a Hitachi disk drive) and had to reboot. I did and when it came back up, I was back in business. Sweet!

I checked and had a D drive but it wasn't formatted.. I went into the Vista disk manager and removed the D partition. I then extended my C partition and I am now using the entire disk. I have had no issues at all.

I was afraid that moving from a 4800RM to a 7200RPM drive might cause me some heat issues. I left it on over night running some mindless tasks for me that do disk access. I woke up this morning and checked the temperature. It's actually running cooler than the 4800RPM drive. I have no explanation for that.

My second fear was that Vista would require me to revalidate my install. Not a fear really as it's just calling a 1-800 number and getting a key to enter. Didn't happen though. I'm apparently still genuine.

I plan to buy a USB enclosure for the old drive. It works perfectly fine, just kind of slow. I can use it for backups and such. Any suggestions for a good enclosure?

I have noticed a significant increase in speed in Vista. The copy is a bit by bit copy so the file fragmentation level should be the same. My disk performance score went from 4.5 to 5.4. My overall score stayed at 3.5 due to my video card (NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS).

All in all, I am very pleased with my purchase and the results. This is the first time I have used Clonezilla but I will definitely use it again if I need it and I would recommend it to just about anyone (that has somewhat of a technical background).

LewisC

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