Tip #35: Burn disc images without third-party apps in Windows 7

NO - again, disc images are not photos of CDs.

(Photo credit Alison Ng)

Have you seen files ending with .iso, .img or .nrg before? Those are called disc images (no, not photos or pictures of CDs). A disc image is a snapshot of the contents of a CD or DVD, be it a data CD, audio CD or video DVD. You can think of disc images as zip files, which contain files copied from a CD or DVD. Disc images are convenient because they let you store whole CDs and DVDs on your hard drive for easy retrieval. You can also burn an image file onto a CD or DVD, in other words, make copies of a disc. Often, disc images are used to distribute operating systems such as Linux and the release candidate version of Windows 7 (during the testing period before launch).

If you've used disc images before, then you may know that in prior versions of Windows, you need to use a third party burning application like Nero or Roxio to burn the image onto a disc. New to Windows 7 is native support for .iso and .img images. In other words, you can now burn image files of these formats, without having Nero or Roxio installed.

Tip #32: Shrink your current disk partition to create new partitions

Most new PCs come with only a single partition
for programs and files.

Reader Kam Yew recently received a new laptop with Windows 7. He pointed out that in Tip #15: Disk partitions, or "I have a C and D drive in My Computer", there were no steps on how to create a second partition if there is already a single partition occupying the entire hard disk.

Most new laptops or desktops purchased from an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) like Acer, HP and Dell usually come with only one usable partition whereby the operating system is installed and where they expect you to store your files. If you're not happy with that, it is possible to shrink (make smaller) that partition so that there is room for a second partition.

To do this, you must be using either Windows Vista or Windows 7. Windows XP is not capable of shrinking partitions. And like all potentially-dangerous disk operations, there is always a possible chance of losing data, so do a backup if you can. With that in mind, let's get started.

Tip #21: Get Dropbox

1. You have more than one computer (e.g. desktop and laptop), and you often find it troublesome to move files between the two.
2. You are working on a team project, and you want to share files with group members and keep the files always up to date.
3. You want to share some files for downloading from your blog, using a public link like this, but your file is too big for certain online file hosts. (e.g. Rapidshare has a limit of 200MB per file)
4. You just want to store your files online so you can access them away from home.

If any of your needs look like the ones listed above, you need Dropbox. Dropbox is an online file storage service which gives you 2GB (up to 5GB via referrals) for free. You can use this 2GB to store any of your files, synchronise them among your computers (and iPhone), and share them with others who may or may not be using Dropbox.

Tip #15: Disk partitions, or "I have a C and D drive in My Computer"

A peek in My Computer...

Most Windows computers have two hard drives visible in My Computer, usually named C: drive and D: drive (or E: drive). Often, I hear them say "I have two hard drives" - this is usually not true, if your desktop was just purchased, or if you are using a laptop. In actual fact, there is usually a single hard drive, which contains two partitions, shown as two seperate drives in My Computer.

Imagine that we have a huge rectangular apartment with an area of 320 m² and has no walls, which we can both live in it and use as a store room to keep things. A room this big may be difficult to organise its contents and you certainly don't want to live among your pile of collectibles or junk. To make life easier, we could divide the room into one or more smaller rooms by using wall partitions. I could divide the apartment into two smaller rooms or "partitions", one that is 120 m² which I use as my living space, and the other which is 200 m² which I use as my storeroom (so I don't need to look at the mess all the time). How nice!

Tip #9: Cut huge files into smaller pieces

Previously, we've learned that pendrives or hard disks formatted as FAT can not store files larger than 4GB. To overcome this, you would need to reformat your pendrive to NTFS or HFS+. Or, you could also find a way to split that file into multiple pieces, each smaller than 4GB, so that they can be copied onto your pendrive.

There are other situations where splitting files can be useful. Suppose you want to send a file which is 20MB in size, but your email provider limits attachments to a maximum of 10MB per email. No problem, just split the file into two 10MB pieces, and attach them to two emails seperately. What if you wanted to send a 100MB file via MSN Messenger? Messenger doesn't limit the maximum size of files you can send, but what if your connection gets dropped halfway while sending? A safer bet would be to split the file into 10 or 20MB pieces and send them one by one. If you get disconnected, you wouldn't need to send everything again.

Tip #8: Is your hard disk FAT or NTFS?

The first thing that you should do as soon as you purchase a new external hard disk, is to check what filesystem it is formatted with.

The filesystem can be thought of as the "format" of a hard disk. There are several filesystems currently in popular use: FAT (FAT32 to be precise), NTFS and HFS+. Usually most external hard disks nowadays come pre-formatted as FAT, but some also come as NTFS, and if the packaging of the hard disk specifically mentions "for Mac", it should be in HFS+. It is important for you to recognise some of the characteristics of these filesystems to avoid the hassle of reformatting your hard drive later on.

Tip #7: Understand bits and bytes

Ever wondered why, any storage media, be it a hard drive, pendrive or memory card which you own or buy, always seems to have less capacity than advertised? Suppose you buy a 8GB pendrive, when you get home and plug it in, you realise that in My Computer, it shows up as 7.44 GB or so only. Where did the remaining 0.56 GB disappear to?

Before we get to that, let's take a minute to understand how file sizes are calculated.