What You Need

You basically need money to buy a brand new mobile SATA hard disk either second-hand or brand new. Remember if you buy to tell the computer store’s salesperson that you need a mobile SATA hard disk and not just SATA hard disk. A mobile SATA hard disk is meant for a laptop/notebook and is a lot smaller (2.5 inches) making it mobile than the normal hard disk equipped on personal computers which is 3.5 inches. Mobile SATA hard disks are costlier than regular HDDs but its price is worth the mobility. I’ll leave up to you to do online research or do in-store canvassing regarding the price of mobile SATA HDDs.

So, you got the mobile SATA HDD? Another thing you need to buy is a 2.5′ external hard disk enclosure. You will manually setup this and put the mobile SATA hard disk you bought inside. A good mobile SATA hard disk enclosure is made from aluminum or any material that is a good heat conductor. This will let the tiny hard disk’s heat to dissipate more quickly when it is in operating mode. Hard disks are known to produce a lot of heat when used frequently. Once you’re done with the enclosure setup, you’re good to go. You can bring and hook your hard disk at virtually any computer using a fast USB 2.0 connection. Plus, unlike enclosures meant for 3.5′ HDDs, you don’t need to have an external power for your external drive to work. It’s truly mobile. I just bought one in the past weeks as described on a blog post about my disk shortage with my current hard disk and so, the external mobile SATA drive is a great addition. So far I’m loving it.

This month I felt that my Windows Vista Home Premium still getting slower and slower each day, although my laptop’s specs are a lot better now than what it once was, . And I highly suspect that my outdated laptop BIOS and near-full hard disk drive are causing this. This utterly means that I will need to buy a new external hard drive pretty soon so that I can free some space from my hard disk and recover some speed. See my hard disk’s gauge above. It’s pathetic.   I’ve already have removed large video files, emptied my recycle bin and deleted all temporary files and uninstalled unnecessary programs, but it didn’t truly helped at all.

Online Computer Stores Give Ideas

I checked this online computer store Super Warehouse to get some idea how much it would cost me to get a new mobile hard drive. I am planning to get a mobile SATA, then I’ll put it on a mobile hard disk enclosure so I can use it like a large capacity USB drive. On the site I also browsed the notebooks section, to see what’s the latest gaming laptop specs I wish one day I could reward myself one. I am particularly in loved with Acer, HP Laptops and Sony laptops having high-end processors, high definition speakers, and discrete graphics card. I like Apple laptops too, especially the Macbook Air, but it’s rather too much for me (the price, that is). I currently own a Neo Empriva 540NVP2i  laptop and I am pretty sure only Filipinos knew this brand.

Finally, I browsed through Super Warehouse’s digital camera section. I saw that new digital cameras are now reaching beyond 10 megapixel level, which is awesome. If I had the money, I would probably get a Sony or Samsung digital camera and then pair it with some photo printers — but I don’t have, so I left the site and just wrote this post.

How about you, what you buy these days if you have the money for a computer store?

To tell you: WinDirStat is not new, but probably this could be the first time you heard about this program. WinDirStat basically will solve your hard disk mysteries by letting you see your hard disk’s contents in a “bird-eye” view. If ever wondered where your space has gone off or if you want to know which file is eating your space away, this program will help you identify it. Yes, no more hard disk mysteries, bar none.

The first screen you’ll encounter is the hard disk selection (shown in a list above). You will see multiple entries if you have more than one hard disk drives. In my case I only have one, and there is less than three gigabytes remaining space on my 80 GB laptop hard disk drive. This is where the mystery kicks in: how come my hard disk is almost full? I will let WinDirStat solve this for me.

While the program is analyzing my hard disk, a cute Pacman-looking image runs back and forth (it replaces the typical progress bar I expected to see). After the analysis, you would see a colorful graphics chart representing the size of files in your hard disk. Big squares mean big file sizes and small ones are usually simple word documents or link library files in your operating system. Clicking specifically on a square will let you know the filename and file size – thus, revealing the truth of the hard disk mystery. Nice, isn’t it?

Now, WinDirStat can be downloaded for only 630 kilobytes – yes, just like that. It’s free but useful utility. It runs on all Windows systems (it works OK on Windows Vista). You can visit WinDirStat’s official website here.

Click here to download WinDirStat.

Try this program and drop a comment after you see for yourself how great it is. Two thumbs up!