SQLAndy » Reviews

Review: SSD Tweaker

Andy — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:03:00 +0000

Ran across this while doing some other reading, SSD Tweaker lets you change a few settings that are supposed to boost (or at least not degrade) performance on an SSD drive. No install, just download and run the exe. Tried it on my laptop and it turned off a few things via the ‘Auto Tweak’, can’t say that I saw any noticeable difference.

Here’s what it looks like:

Review: Ninite

Andy — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 05:29:00 +0000

Found Ninite while browsing a list of efficiency tools on PCWorld.com. It’s a one stop super installer, you run through the menu of available applications (subset shown below) and it builds a single MSI you can download and it is supposed to automatically disable any toolbars or similar that are ‘optional’ items during the install. I tested by selecting TeraCopy and CCcleaner, as far as I could tell it worked exactly as described.

I can see this making reinstalls a lot easier. I can also see me biasing towards tools listed here even if I’m used to using something different – maybe convenience is the trump card.

LinkedIn for Blackberry

Andy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 05:33:00 +0000

I’ve been waiting on this for a while, and missed the announcement that it was available, happened to see that Paul Waters had tried it via the weekly digest I get from LinkedIn. It runs on Tour, Curve, and Bold (my current phone). Installed easily enough, and the UI looks a like like a browser. You can view your network, view updates from your network, accept invitations, view profiles, and more. I can see it allowing me to do more timely invitations to people I meet at events. Was hoping to see some magic that made it easier to do this via phone, but no luck on that, you still search by name or invite by email address.

Worth getting if you use LI a lot. Details on the download are here.

Comments on the Bamboo Touch

Andy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:37:00 +0000

I bought a Bamboo Touch over the holiday break, it’s a multi-touch pad with stylus. Easy install, basically plug in to USB and go. Multi touch was similar to what you would do on an iPhone, lots of options to customize. The stylus was interesting, did pretty well even with my pretty horrible hand writing, and the editing after writing was gesture based.

I could see that if you did a lot of drawing or markup this would be a very useful tool. I was interested in two possible uses; one was “editing” documents that I’ve drafted, the other was for my kids to see if it would be an interesting way for them to improve their hand writing. Maybe I didn’t give it enough of a try, but had a hard time adapting to using it for editing, just used to doing it with mouse and keyboard. On the kid side, it was interesting, but not compelling, at least at this point.

So, at $100 wasn’t a great fit for me, right now, but in terms of what I saw and what it did, if you need it, the price is reasonable.