LITTLE ROCK — Adding more RAM (random access memory) to a computer always speeds things up. Of course you have to pay for that extra memory, though these days it’s not much. One move that’s free is done regularly by people who manage systems for most companies is called defragging.
Over time, the programs you use and the data you enter into those programs becomes scattered across the hard drive. When you want it, the computer has to go pick up the pieces, so to speak, and glue them back together. It takes time. “Smart Defrag” is a free program at download.com that cleans up loose ends and makes the pickup job fast and easy.
You can use the built-in defrag program in Windows 7, though it doesn’t give you a picture of how defragmented your drive is, and the cleanup isn’t as good, according to our favorite tech expert. Smart Defrag showed Joy her hard drive and it was a sea of red, with pieces of data scattered everywhere. After running Smart Defrag, the pickup in speed was quite noticeable. It takes a while the first time it runs, but you can keep working on the computer. After the first cleanup, subsequent ones are quick. We’ve scheduled SmartDefrag to run every day at dinner time.
ONE MORE THING
“One more thing,” as Steve Jobs used to say while driving the engineers crazy. Well, one more way your computer slows down is when the drive gets too full. Joy’s laptop drive was three-quarters full when she decided to run “WinDir-Stat,” another free program from download.com. It tells you what’s hogging your drive.
It turned out that somewhere along the way she had created a clone, an exact copy of everything that was already on the drive. This meant everything had been duplicated, which naturally took up twice as much space as before. It was quick work to get that copy out of there and transferred to a flash drive.
WRIST-MOUNTED PIANO
Have you ever tapped your fingers on a tabletop, playing out a tune in your imagination? You may not know the notes but you can hear them in your head and tap it out.
Well, Bob does that, too. So we came across a small item about a device called the “Japanese Wrist-Mounted Finger Piano.” It was $40 at ThinkGeek.com and we just had to have it.
The instructions were in Japanese. But nobody ever reads the instructions, anyway, so we spent a few minutes fiddling with it and figured it out. You mount a 3-inch pad on your wrist and slip your fingers into the small pads attached to it. Push a few buttons and Viola!, as we say in fractured French: sound.
To say that it didn’t sound good understates the situation. There are three volume levels and three kinds of sound: piano, bells and cat. Or something like that.
The plain fact is, it sounded dreadful. But … there is the germ of a great idea here. Better touch-sensitive pads (instead of the klutzy push buttons they put under the fingertips), and the addition of motion-sensing chips that could translate the force of the fingers into differences in volume, and done right, this could be the piano of tomorrow. Needs work. Please ring up your nearest electronics wizard.
ANDROID BATTERY BLUES
Those free Android applications may not be worth it. You save 99 cents or so, but you get ads that drain your smart phone’s battery.
ZDNet.com did a study that found the free version of the popular “Angry Birds” game, for example, had enough ads to use 45 percent of the power required to play the game. Ads in the game “Free Chess” hogged about 70 percent.
ZDNet said better programming could reduce this problem by more than half. But in the meantime, consider paying the 99 cents for an ad-free version of the game, rather than have your phone go dead when you least expect it.
PORTABLE SPEAKER
The “Sound to Go” portable speaker won an innovation award recently, and it deserves it. The sound quality is about as good as our small Altec Lansing speakers.
Plug the Sound to Go into your PC with the supplied USB cable and it’s ready to play. It draws power from the computer, so it needs no other cord or outlet. The sound level is adjustable from your computer or you can use a button on the device. It’s 11 inches long by 2.4 inches wide and retails for $40 from edifier.com. Our Altec Lansing speakers, by the way, cost $15, but they’re not as portable.
THE NUMBERS REPORT
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the federal government throws out about 10,000 computers a week. The government has made improvements in its throwaway habits, the report said.
We’ve shortened the long link to the report. So you can get there by typing tinyurl.com/2GaoReport, or, you can see it at ElectronicsTakeBack.com.
INTERNUTS
CanvasPop.com can take your Facebook, camera phone, and low-resolution photos and turn them into a large work of art on canvas. Works with “Instagram” photos too. Costs $75 to $100 for a pretty big one. Double it for framing.
EveryArt.com lets you buy a work of art specially designed for you. You choose an artist from their list. Prices are not shown up front, which we don’t like, but this is how it is.
MeArket.com lets you see what stocks your Facebook friends are investing in. You don’t share how much money you invested, just the names of the stocks.
Ingo.com lets you book a hotel reservation and automatically get money back if the rate drops. The average savings is said to be $46.
APP HAPPY
Huddl is an iPhone app that gives you free group text messaging and photo sharing with anyone in your address book. They don’t have to have the app.
“Citizen Cosponsor” is a new Facebook app that lets you “co-sponsor” one of six congressional bills. It’s in the testing phase, so expect more bills later. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., designed it, and is the sponsor for five of the bills. Find it at MajorityLeader.gov/citizens.
NOTE: Readers can search several years’ worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
Business, Pages 20 on 04/02/2012