Review: DropittoMe offers simple Dropbox sharing without software

DROPitTOme DropittoMe is a free and easy way to allow others to upload content to your Dropbox—and you might find it pretty handy, too.

If you use the online file sharing service Dropbox, you know how easy it is for other users to send you files. But what about people who don't use Dropbox? DROPitTOme (and yes, that is how they capitalize it) is a free service that provides a simple way that people can upload files to your Dropbox account without having to install anything. It's similar to the handy dbinbox.

DropittoMe requires a password before content can be uploaded to your account, which is a nice security feature.

To use DropittoMe, you simply allow the service access to your Dropbox, and it creates a DropittoMe folder in your account. You then claim your username, which will be part of the link DropittoMe creates for you. I was able to claim “Liane” as a username, so my link will be relatively easy for anyone with whom I share it to remember it. With this link, anyone can send me files that then appear in the Dropittome folder in Dropbox.

I like that DropittoMe doesn’t simply assign you a random link. Instead, you get an easy-to-remember URL. What’s also nice is that you get to create a password, which folks who want to upload content to your Dropbox account will need to send files. It’s not the utmost in security—especially when you consider the security pitfalls of how you’re going to share that password with your friends and colleagues—but it is at least a protective barrier to your account.

DropittoMe’s interface is easy to understand, but also slick and attractive.

DropittoMe isn’t just for other folks to use. It’s also a convenient way to upload files to your own Dropbox account. You could use Dropbox’s own Web app when using a computer without Dropbox installed, but DropittoMe’s upload link can be even simpler. It allows you to upload files with fewer clicks. It allows you to place them only in the DropittoMe folder that it’s already created, though. And it limits you to files that are 75MB or smaller. But it’s a free, easy way to allow others to share content with you without them having to sign up for Dropbox.

Note: The Download button takes you to to the vendor's website, where you can sign up to use this Web service.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Lenovo ThinkPad T431s review: A high-priced Ultrabook without the high-end specs

LENOVO, INC. ThinkPad T431s $1,209.00 Lenovo's pricey new entry into the Ultrabook market caters deftly to business users, but it fails to deliver most of what's good about Ultrabooks: speed, portability, and convenience.

Lenovo’s long-standing tradition of producing black, boxy, boring laptops continues with the ThinkPad T431s, and it’s a testament to their underlying quality that businesses and business users continue to embrace them. But the company might want to rethink the “Ultrabook” suffix tacked onto this one's name, which conjures images of sleek, sexy, and speedy machines. The T431s is none of those things.

Rather, it has the heft and bulk of a more traditional laptop, weighing 3.6 pounds and measuring 0.8 inch thick. One suspects Lenovo could have squeezed in an optical drive, though at least the system leverages its large chassis to pack in plenty of expansion options: ethernet and VGA ports, a Mini DisplayPort, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, and a Smart Card reader for organizations that still rely on them. It also has a fingerprint reader, another nice security-minded perk. The system has only two USB 3.0 ports (three would be better), but one of them is powered so you can charge a mobile device even when the ThinkPad is off.

The T431s ranks among the slower Core i5–equipped Ultrabooks we’ve tested.

Like a growing number of laptops, the T431s lacks a drive-activity indicator. And although Lenovo included an LED for the Fn-key lock, the Caps Lock key didn’t get the same simple amenity. That’s inexcusable from a company known for great keyboards.

Indeed, this ThinkPad’s comfortable, backlit, perfectly spaced keys make typing a pleasure. It also has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, though they’re not grouped together. That’s a mild annoyance; a bigger one is the bottom-left corner placement of the Fn key. Most touch-typists’ fingers are accustomed to finding a Ctrl key there.

ROBERT CARDINLenovo's ThinkPad T431s is a relatively thick, heavy, and slow Ultrabook.

Lenovo has redesigned its touchpad. This one is appreciably spacious and smooth to the touch, with buttons in all four corners. The top two are intended for use with Lenovo’s trademark pointing stick, which seems downright quaint today, but its presence will undoubtedly please longtime ThinkPad users. The entire touchpad is also a button, and that “give” can be awkward at times, especially if you land a little harder than you anticipated with your finger. To avoid accidental cursor clicks, you’ll need to develop a light touch.

ROBERT CARDINThinkPads are known for their sturdy construction, and the T431s is no exception.

With its Worldbench score of 121, the ThinkPad ranks among the slower Core i5-equipped Ultrabooks we’ve tested. The Sony VAIO Fit 15 posted a higher score, and the 128GB SSD in the Dell Latitude 6430u helped it earn a significantly higher result. The ThinkPad has a quick 7200-rpm, 500GB hard drive augmented by a 24GB SSD cache.

The ThinkPad T431s was only slightly faster than the Asus VivoBook S550CA we use as a notebook reference point. (Click to enlarge.)

Despite having only a three-cell battery, our review unit managed to last 4 hours, 45 minutes in our rundown test, which is about average for systems in this class. Like other Ultrabooks, the T431s has a nonremovable battery—a potential problem for business travelers who must swap in a spare power pack when the first one runs dry.

The ThinkPad’s 14-inch screen has native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels. That’s sufficient for enjoying HD movies and other video, but it’s shy of the 1920-by-1080 displays offered by other Ultrabooks (such as the Samsung Series 9). What’s more, we expected a laptop in this price class to include a touchscreen, but the T431s lacks one. On the plus side, the screen exhibits very little glare, and Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 4000 supplies enough horsepower for stutter-free full-screen video (at least based on what we streamed from Hulu and YouTube).

As Ultrabooks go, the ThinkPad T431s is far from the skinniest, lightest, fastest, or longest-lasting model you can buy. And without perks like a touchscreen and solid-state storage (the latter is available on other configurations), it’s hard to justify Lenovo’s higher-than-average price. Business users might continue to appreciate the ThinkPad’s sturdy design, security features, and comfy keyboard, but others will find more features and better performance for less money.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Work with Gmail without even opening it with Checker Plus

Email notifications are like coffee: Some people can't stand them, while others are addicted (and, yes, even use them to wake up in the morning). If you're of the latter camp, you may like Checker Plus for Gmail. Like every other mail checker, it lets you know when new emails arrive... but that’s where other email checkers stop and Checker Plus is only just getting started.

Checker Plus for Gmail can read email notifications aloud -- not a feature you'd want to use in a crowded office.

Checker Plus lives as a small button on the Chrome toolbar, showing a tiny unread message counter. But click the button, and a complete, working mini-Gmail interface pops up over the current window. You can see all of the messages in your inbox, archive them, directly open them in Gmail, and more. Checker Plus also shows a pop-up whenever a new email comes in, with the basic details of the email so you can decide whether to deal with it immediately or not. It can also chime an alert and read aloud some information about the email, so you know what it's about even if you aren’t looking at your web browser. The read-aloud option is enabled only by default if you are away from your computer.

Not everyone likes to be notified (or interrupted) in the same way, and Checker Plus's rich customization features reflect this. You can enable or disable chimes, text-to-speech, and pop-up notifications. You can tell Checker Plus which labels to monitor and alert you about, select a color scheme for the pop-up notifications, and even tweak the toolbar's icon appearance in minute detail.

Checker Plus lets you specify anything from the notification icon theme to the way summaries are formatted in the notifications.

figure class=" original">Checker Plus for Gmail is one of the most configurable Chrome extensions I've seen yet—but at the end of the day, it is still an email notifier, which can be as distracting as it is helpful.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: MotionArtist lets artists become animators without learning code

MotionArtist 1.0 generates interactive HTML 5 video presentation of comics and more.  This full release offers more customization of animation files, tighter recording controls, and better asset editing compared to the July 2012 beta. MotionArtist ($60, buy-only) makes animating images and text relatively easy for comic artists and web designers with imported files. Unlike with Flash, you can't draw in the program and then animate their creations. The focus is on animating existing image files from other sources.

Artwork by Karen LukThe blue line with dots represents an animation path. Under Project Settings, MotionArtist offers common video dimension sizes.

MotionArtist opens to a default project designed by Smith Micro, showcasing various animation techniques. However, comic artists unfamiliar with using an animation program or film terms might find all the controls tricky to animate their comic pages. Imported PSD files maintain their layers for animation or the user can composite the layers into a single layer. JPG, PNG and MotionArtist vendor Smith Micro's Anime Studio are other supported file types.

MotionArtist has three different views: Director, Camera and Panel. Animators will recognize the toolbar and scene list, and the timeline setup with its default of 30 frames per second. Thanks to GPU acceleration, users can play working files back in real time, which assists in editing the video. In addition to using your own video, you can animate panels, text and speech balloons with various effects in MotionArtist.

Comic artists can use difference scenes to cut between comic panels or pages. For example in film, opening credits can be the first scene, followed by the next one of the characters walking into camera view. In comics, it can be moving from one panel to the next or page to page. MotionArtist is set up for multiple scenes, so comic artists can animate individual pages or panels and then cut them together for a single presentation.

Artwork by Karen LukAfter exporting the HTML 5 video to its own index page, web designers can modify the CSS or JavaScript.

The rub is getting familiar with MotionArtist to maximize the effects of a motion comic. A comic artist may have many layers of their comic art and have to merge them into different layers for animation output. Separate layers for each character, sound effects, backgrounds and so on in order to animate them individually. For more painterly comic pages, MotionArtist offers camera tilt, zoom and a parallax effect to create interest in moving from panel to panel.

Typical film scene transitions like Fade to Black and Iris Wipes are listed in the scene list tool bar. Artists can make buttons to either “turn the page” or use the animation scene transitions to continue the story. You can add sound to any to scene, too. MotionArtist has pre-loaded background templates for the exported video. Once the animation is exported as HTML 5 file, web designers can view source code in their browser to edit the CSS or JavaScript. Users can also upload an AVI file directly to YouTube and Facebook. MotionArtist allows the comic artist to control the motion comic’s presentation, right down to the second and specify the size of the presentation for HDTV 1080p or an iPad.

MotionArtist 1.0 offers more animation control and options than its beta release. Web designers can use the program to generate quick loading, interactive graphics without Flash and ready to go for HTML 5. Comic artists willing to learn basic animation techniques and spend some time using MotionArtist will be rewarded with creating their own motion comics without learning lots of code.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Karen Luk is a freelance illustrator and art instructor who creates comics. Her work has been featured at the Cartoon Art Museum and Google. Recently, she successfully funded her upcoming Steampunk ABC children's book on Kickstarter.
More by Karen Luk

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: MotionArtist lets artists become animators without learning code

Motion Artist 1.0 generates interactive HTML 5 video presentation of comics and more.  This full release offers more customization of animation files, tighter recording controls, and better asset editing compared to the July 2012 beta. Motion Artist ($60, buy-only) makes animating images and text relatively easy for comic artists and web designers with imported files. Unlike with Flash, you can't draw in the program and then animate their creations. The focus is on animating existing image files from other sources.

Artwork by Karen LukThe blue line with dots represents an animation path. Under Project Settings, Motion Artist offers common video dimension sizes.

Motion Artist opens to a default project designed by Smith Micro, showcasing various animation techniques. However, comic artists unfamiliar with using an animation program or film terms might find all the controls tricky to animate their comic pages. Imported PSD files maintain their layers for animation or the user can composite the layers into a single layer. JPG, PNG and Motion Artist vendor Smith Micro's Anime Studio are other supported file types.

Motion Artist has three different views: Director, Camera and Panel. Animators will recognize the toolbar and scene list, and the timeline setup with its default of 30 frames per second. Thanks to GPU acceleration, users can play working files back in real time, which assists in editing the video. In addition to using your own video, you can animate panels, text and speech balloons with various effects in Motion Artist.

Comic artists can use difference scenes to cut between comic panels or pages. For example in film, opening credits can be the first scene, followed by the next one of the characters walking into camera view. In comics, it can be moving from one panel to the next or page to page. Motion Artist is set up for multiple scenes, so comic artists can animate individual pages or panels and then cut them together for a single presentation.

Artwork by Karen LukAfter exporting the HTML 5 video to its own index page, web designers can modify the CSS or JavaScript.

The rub is getting familiar with Motion Artist to maximize the effects of a motion comic. A comic artist may have many layers of their comic art and have to merge them into different layers for animation output. Separate layers for each character, sound effects, backgrounds and so on in order to animate them individually. For more painterly comic pages, Motion Artist offers camera tilt, zoom and a parallax effect to create interest in moving from panel to panel.

Typical film scene transitions like Fade to Black and Iris Wipes are listed in the scene list tool bar. Artists can make buttons to either “turn the page” or use the animation scene transitions to continue the story. You can add sound to any to scene, too. Motion Artist has pre-loaded background templates for the exported video. Once the animation is exported as HTML 5 file, web designers can view source code in their browser to edit the CSS or JavaScript. Users can also upload an AVI file directly to YouTube and Facebook. Motion Artist allows the comic artist to control the motion comic’s presentation, right down to the second and specify the size of the presentation for HDTV 1080p or an iPad.

Motion Artist 1.0 offers more animation control and options than its beta release. Web designers can use the program to generate quick loading, interactive graphics without Flash and ready to go for HTML 5. Comic artists willing to learn basic animation techniques and spend some time using Motion Artist will be rewarded with creating their own motion comics without learning lots of code.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Karen Luk is a freelance illustrator and art instructor who creates comics. Her work has been featured at the Cartoon Art Museum and Google. Recently, she successfully funded her upcoming Steampunk ABC children's book on Kickstarter.
More by Karen Luk

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Page Four provides the tools writers need, without distractions

I got a t-shirt for my birthday:"Writing is 5% talent and 95% not being distracted by the internet." It could just as easily say "distracted by your word processor." PageFour ($40, 45-day free trial) helps remove that distraction, while adding in tools and features specifically useful to writers—though it also makes a decent tree-style outliner, in a pinch.

Some tools for writers offer plain text only...PageFour tries to find the sweet spot between that style and a full-function word processor.

PageFour v1.86 organizes work into notebooks, which can contain folders, nested as desired, and within each folder, pages , which are the actual text. A page can be of any length—not just a page in the old dead-tree sense, but more like a page in the web sense, an arbitrarily long document.

You can have multiple notebooks active at once, and multiple pages open in the tabbed central panel. This is handy, especially for working on multiple projects, but there is a minor annoyance: the sidebar with the notebook and pages doesn't sync with the active tab. If you change tabs to a different page, or a different notebook, this isn't reflected. This isn't a critical flaw, but given the power PageFour gives you in terms of how many documents and projects can be actively worked on, it would be a nice feature to have. Fortunately, the title bar of the window displays the full path to the currently active tab.

The actual editing window is basic WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), with a handful of formatting features: font size and style, paragraph alignment, and so on. PageFour focuses on the style functionality most needed for books and non-technical non-fiction. There's no tables, indexes, cross references, or page-layout tools. Headers and footers can be added in print templates, but are not visible on the screen. Some tools for writers offer plain text only, in a single font, replicating the ancient typewriter. PageFour tries to find the sweet spot between that style and a full-function word processor.

One of the more unique features of PageFour is a phrase scanner, known as the "Smart Editor," which counts the number of times a phrase appears in a document. It's very useful for discovering repetitive terms and descriptions. Oddly, the Smart Editor will bring you to the first occurrence of a repeated phrase, but won't easily lead you to the next, or highlight all occurrences of it—just the first. You can use the basic text find feature to locate them all and decide which must be excised.

This screenshot shows off PageFour's features, but they can be easily hidden for a more distraction-free environment.

Printing is a little different in PageFour. The default is straightforward: It prints what's there. However, users can create print templates, which can change fonts to a standard, add basic headers and footers, adjust margins, and so on. This can be useful for meeting submission guidelines, if any publisher still takes manuscripts on paper anymore. It also lets you use the styling you find comfortable on the screen, when a different layout might be better in print.

Overall, I found PageFour a very comfortable environment to work in. It encourages breaking down your work into manageable chunks, and lets you have pages with notes about characters, plot points, or random text without this being intermixed with the actual writing. A single command key hides or shows the various interface elements. The automatic archiving helps preserve entire notebooks from accidental deletion, while the "snapshot" features saves the current page so that you can easily go back to an older version. There's a number of small annoyances, such as the Export feature not allowing you to create a folder to export to, but nothing that's really game-breaking. At $39, this is a low-priced tool that offers a lot of functionality to its target audience of serious writers.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Create A Mobile App Without Any Code Using AppMachine

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Beat the FBI: How to Send Anonymous Email Without Getting Caught

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

Samsung Series 7 Chronos Review: Pretty Without Breaking the Bank

If you're looking to satisfy your craving for brushed-metal exteriors, look no further than the mesmerizing 14-inch Samsung Series 7 Chronos. The machine's subtle minimalism and smooth curves may suggest a MacBook Pro wannabe, but it bears the comparison quite well.

The Series 7 Chronos is a very pretty machine. The cover, bezel, and wrist rest are adorned in gunmetal-gray brushed aluminum, and the keyboard deck and trackpad are free of unnecessary lines or buttons. Even the power button is stylish, with just the chrome-covered symbol raised up.

The system does have a couple of minor design flaws. First, the curved bottom of the computer is made of plastic, so there's a thin line around the edge of the keyboard deck where the plastic meets the aluminum. And second, the backlit keyboard features two-tone keys with black tops and white edges, which allow for a lot of light to seep through. Another consideration: For a slim 14-inch machine, it's surprisingly heavy (5.3 pounds with accessories), but on a positive note the entire machine feels rock-solid.

Our review model, priced at $1100, sports an Intel Core i5-2430M processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 750GB hard drive. It also comes with Bluetooth, a built-in webcam and microphone, and Wi-Fi, as well as switchable graphics (with a discrete AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphics card). Our test model ran the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

The Chronos's performance was somewhat disappointing. In our WorldBench 6 benchmark test suite, the Chronos finished with a mark of 118, which is a few points lower than the average score posted by other all-purpose laptops we've tested recently--and several points lower than the 125 turned in by the much thinner Asus Zenbook UX31E. Chalk that up to the Chronos's lack of a solid-state drive. The laptop's battery life was a little better than average for its class, clocking in at around 6 hours.

Samsung arranged the Chronos's ports in an array typical of a slim machine such as the MacBook Air or an Ultrabook, but of course the Chronos isn't that slim. You get two USB ports (one 2.0 and one 3.0), an HDMI out, a mini DisplayPort, an ethernet port, a combination microphone/headphone jack, and a lock slot. Because the laptop curves underneath, the ethernet port is hinged to accommodate a full-size connector. Samsung also provides a four-in-one memory card reader, a slot-loading DVD-RW drive, and an included VGA adapter that plugs into the mini DisplayPort slot. For additional networking, the Chronos offers built-in Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n.

The Chronos comes with a 14-inch matte LCD screen, with a native resolution of 1600 by 900. Matte screens do a nice job of reducing glare, but they often cause images to look less crisp and to have softer edges. Nevertheless, images on the Chronos's screen looked sharp enough, and color representation was good, though a little oversaturated at times. The screen was sufficiently bright for comfortable use in direct sunlight. Unfortunately, Samsung turns the auto-brightness setting on by default, which I found annoying because the sensor is extremely sensitive. Unless you're working in extremely consistent lighting the screen will flicker often as it alters its brightness level.

Video looked and sounded merely okay on the Chronos. In my multimedia tests, the laptop streamed HD video seamlessly but with occasional artifacts (blockiness) in the clips, especially during dark scenes. In PCWorld's Far Cry 2 graphics tests, the Chronos managed an acceptable frame rate of 37.8 frames per second (at low quality and 1024-by-768-pixel resolution), and a less-than-ideal frame rate of 22.1 fps (at high quality and 1024-by-768-pixel resolution).

The Chronos's speakers are adequate for basic multimedia consumption, but I wouldn't recommend them for audiophiles or DJs (even dorm-room DJs). The audio was acceptable, but the speakers had little bass, a tinge of tinniness, and a slightly muffled quality. The speakers' maximum volume is fairly low.

Overall, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is a very attractive machine. Unfortunately, looks can take you only so far, in laptops and in life. The Chronos is larger, heavier, and a worse performer than some Ultrabooks, but it's a great budget-friendly choice for Windows users who lust after MacBook Pros.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Apple: Apps Can’t View Your Contacts Without Explicit Permission

Last week, it was reported that several iOS applications are collecting users’ personal contact information without asking for permission. Among the culprits mentioned was the Path app, a platform for sharing status updates across social networks.

Today, Apple has finally addressed those claims, telling All Things D, “Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines.” The company also said that, going forward, apps will need to explicitly ask for permission before they can collect information about a users’ contacts.

U.S. lawmakers, including House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman, issued an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook just hours before the company responded today. An iOS update that requires all apps to ask for permission before viewing your contacts should be on the way soon.

via All Things D

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

How to Move a Data Center Without Having a Heart Attack

As the dust settles in the aftermath of a successful physical data center move, I'm nursing my bruised and cut hands, kicking back with a Scotch, and reflecting on what went right. I said "successful," but actually there's no such thing as a failed data center move: If something's going wrong, there's nothing you can do except keep working until everything's up and running.

But a successful data center move is no accident. Whether it's a data center relocation or new data center build-outs, detailed plans must be made months or even years in advance.

[ Also on InfoWOrld: See Paul Venezia's guide to "Killer open source monitoring tools." | Stay current with "What IT should know about AC power." | And when you're ready to kick back, try "InfoWorld's Linux IQ test." ]

There are a number of ways to move a data center. If budgets and skill sets allow, the easiest method is to build a brand-new data center in the new location, drop high-bandwidth links between the two, and use virtualization tools to migrate all the virtual machines from one site to the other -- live.

This assumes a fully virtualized infrastructure and a massive budget since you're duplicating the whole thing at the new site. And although very expensive, this method offers low-to-zero downtime and a brand-new computing environment with new servers, storage, and core networking at the new site. Plus, time and scheduling considerations are far less stringent. However, it's also out of the budgetary ballpark for most organizations.

Then there's the hybrid method, where some portion of the new data center is built out before the relocation, such as racks and core networking. When the time comes to relocate, the old data center is shut down and the servers and storage are physically moved to the new location, reracked, recabled, and then brought back online.

This offers a far lower cost than the duplication method, but involves at least a day of downtime and the threat of data and service loss. It's also performed under the gun, as critical services and applications are down for the duration, and when a storage array stubbornly refuses to come up properly, that downtime grows as the new problem is dealt with.

Next there's the "kitchen sink" approach, where the new data center is provided with power and cooling only and everything is moved from one site to the other: racks, servers, network, storage, the whole shebang. This is the cheapest method, but is also necessarily the hardest and longest process of all.

Most companies involved in an office or data center relocation will opt for some blend of the last two methods. The hugely expensive first method is essentially guaranteed to succeed and offers plenty of time to get everything just right. But the way to ensure that the other approaches go smoothly is with copious amounts of planning, such as anticipating the worst possible scenarios prior to the actual move.

As an example, let's look at the data circuits. The existing data center may have a few fiber connections from a T1 carrier that connect it to the Internet and a WAN. Without those circuits, the data center is functionally useless, so they get priority. However, you can count on the fact that the carrier will take forever to build out the circuits to the new space, SLA be damned.

It's best to assume that, even given four or five months' notice, those circuits won't be in place when the relocation date arrives. Hedge your bets with one or two business-class cable circuits. These are generally installed much faster than dedicated fiber links or T1/T3 circuits, and can get you by with them in a pinch. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing when the carrier finally realizes it needs to run new fiber from the street to the new location, requiring city permits, traffic detours, and lengthy delays.

It's also a good idea to have plenty of hands available. While a few core admins will be responsible for actually bringing the site back online, a dozen or more people who can be trusted to securely transport and rack servers, storage, and network gear are invaluable. When the senior network admin is neck-deep in switching and routing reconfigurations, you don't want him distracted by quandaries like how the hell that blade chassis rail kit goes back together.

Also, draw up explicit plans specifying which servers and other gear will go where in the new site. Take this down to the rack-unit level, so there's no mistaking what system should reside in which rack. This will speed up the rebuild and make cabling much easier. Speaking of cabling, this might be time to take a good look at alternative solutions for rack access. If you've traditionally run copper to all racks from core switches, you might look for room in the budget for top-of-rack switching and bundled or 10G uplinks to the core.

Label everything: the servers, the switches, the KVM dongles, and all the rail kits as they come out of the racks. Few things are more frustrating than spending an hour searching for the other rail for a mission-critical database server while the project comes to a standstill. Also, take tons of pictures of the old data center in situ and the new data center before, during, and especially after the relocation.

Though it may not need to be said, make sure the folks transporting your gear are good drivers. Smaller relocations may find servers and other gear riding in SUVs and small trucks, while larger moves may leverage entire racks rolling from loading dock to box truck to the new loading dock. The hardware and data contained within those vehicles is more important than anything else in the company, and when it's rolling down the highway at 70 mph, the risks of losing some or all of it are extremely high. Putting an eager intern behind the wheel of a rented truck might be a bad idea.

Finally, once all that gear arrives and is racked up and before powering anything on, take time to inspect the data and power cabling, cable pathing, power loads on new PDUs -- and go even further by reseating blades in chassis, modules in modular switches, and hot-swap power supplies. With all the jostling and bouncing these systems have just experienced, you don't know what might be floating around.

Be very aware of temperature differences between the data center and outside. Rolling a recently shutdown core switch that came from a 75-degree data center with an internal temp still in the 90s to a 20-degree outside loading dock can result in catastrophic problems, because circuit boards can rapidly contract in the cold and crack.

Also, if the relocation involves a full office with hundreds or thousands of switchports, make sure you have an elegant method to assign those ports to the right VLANs. Some infrastructures use dynamic VLAN assignments according to login credentials, but others use fixed assignments. In the past, I've written custom code leveraging wildcard DNS and locked-down VLANs to facilitate self-service VLAN assignment. When users arrive at the new site, they plug in their PC to a data jack, open a Web browser, and are presented with a Web application that allows them to choose the appropriate VLAN for their system.

The back-end code of this Web app makes an SNMP call to the appropriate switch and reassigns the VLAN for that port. A few seconds later, the user is ready to go. This is also handy when dealing with printers and other network devices, because admins can log into the tool and assign ports to VLANs that normal users should never see. Tools like this can save massive amounts of time and aggravation.

Once everything's in place, fire everything up and watch your monitoring systems to make sure that everything comes up normally. This is only one reason why an exhaustive network and service monitoring implementation is absolutely necessary, being that it takes almost all the guesswork out of the situation. But when the new site is up and running and everything goes according to plan, the Scotch tastes even better and the scratches and scrapes don't matter so much. Trust me. I'm feeling pretty good right now.

This story, "How to move a data center without having a heart attack," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia's The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

From PC World. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Turn a PC Into a DVR, Install Software Without a DVD Drive

Recently I've heard from a number of users who are looking for a way to cut that pricey cable-TV cord, but don't want to give up on watching and recording their favorite network shows. Turns out there's an easy and very affordable solution, one that eliminates cable (cable-TV, anyway) service entirely and frees you from monthly fees. It's called Windows 7.

This may come as a surprise, but Windows packs a very powerful TiVo-like DVR system called Windows Media Center. When paired with an inexpensive TV tuner and a decent antenna, it lets you watch and record broadcast television--in high-def!

The PC part is up to you. It can be a laptop or desktop, as long as it runs Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate. (Windows 7 Starter doesn't come with Windows Media Center, nor does Windows 7 Enterprise.)

You'll also need a reasonably large hard drive with a decent chunk of free space. A one-hour recorded TV show can easily consume 7-8GB, so if you're envisioning recording multiple episodes of multiple shows, make sure you have ample storage to spare.

Before we talk tuners, make sure you live in an area that gets decent over-the-air (OTA) reception of local channels. A site called AntennaWeb.org can answer that question for you and tell you what kind of antenna you might need to get. (If you're already watching OTA shows on your TV, just without a PC in the mix, you're all set.)

Your antenna will screw into the tuner, which in turn will plug into one of your PC's USB ports. Then you'll run Windows Media Center and walk through the TV setup process.

So, what kind of tuner should you get? I recommend sticking with a well-known brand like Hauppauge, just to ensure proper compatibility with Windows Media Center. I've had good luck with the WinTV-HVR-950Q, which has a list price of $99 but routinely sells online for around $75. The tuner enables the PC to display and record broadcast TV shows.

Recently I became the mostly happy owner of an HP Pavilion dm1z. I say "mostly happy" because I wasn’t thrilled with its performance. To give the system a boost, I decided to swap the pokey 5,200-rpm hard drive with a speedy solid state drive.

The Samsung SSD upgrade kit I bought came with Norton Ghost 15--a utility that would copy the entire contents of my existing hard drive to the new drive--on CD. But the Pavilion, like so many ultrabooks, ultraportables, and other ultra-compact laptops, has no CD drive. How was I supposed to install Ghost?

A friend of mine had a similar problem with some new drive-less systems he’d purchased. He wanted to install his licensed, disc-based copies of Microsoft Office, but couldn’t.

This begs the question: If your PC lacks an optical drive, how can you install software that’s stored on a CD or DVD?

You have two options. First, you can buy or borrow an external drive. A quick check of Ebay reveals tons of USB DVD burners selling for $20-40. Might be a handy item to have on hand.

Second, try downloading your software instead. When I checked Samsung’s support page for my SSD kit, I found not only manuals and drivers, but also Norton Ghost 15.

I downloaded it, installed it, then activated it using the license key that came with the actual disc.

You can do likewise with Microsoft Office: just download the trial version that matches the version you already own, then activate it using your product key. (This gets a little trickier with older versions of Office, as Microsoft currently offers only the 2010 edition for download. You might need to hit up some torrent sites to find older trials.)

This method should work for the vast majority of other software as well. Usually you can download a trial or demo version and then unlock it with your license key. And the added bonus is you’ll have the latest updates right from the get-go.

If you've got a hassle that needs solving, send it my way. I can't promise a response, but I'll definitely read every e-mail I get--and do my best to address at least some of them in the PCWorld Hassle-Free PC blog. My 411: hasslefree@pcworld.com. You can also sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

From PC World. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here