If you’ve made the leap to a laptop some time ago, you may have some hard drives lying around. Even in 2-3 year old PC’s you will find 60-80Gb hard drives and it seems such so useless to just waste that space.

I just bought and external hard drive case that can connect to my laptop via USB connection. Just pop the hood of the PC, take out the old hard drive, place it in the external case, plug it in, and off you go, an additional 80Gb of space.

I use this for storing media and backing up my important files. I have a lot of music on there, all my pics, and backups. While it won’t fit in my pocket, it is small enough to take with me if I really need it, like on a longer trip, so I would say it’s sort of mobile too. The drawback is that you probably need a power source, although some models can use two USB cables to power themselves.

I am in my most productive mindset when things around me are just so. Nice music, clean room, etc, and especially, the state of my desktop. If I have icons cluttering everything, bad wallpaper I can not work at my best.

I was going to write a post about desktop wallpaper originally, but I found an awesome post by lifehacker, rounding up their top ten places for wallpaper, icons and such. I recommend number 2 on their list, Interfacelift, which has been a favorite of mine for years, catering for my wide screen needs.

Top 10 Free Wallpaper, Fonts and Icon Sources by Lifehacker

When I use Outlook I really hate the Trash. I have to delete a message, then it goes to the trash, and then I have to delete it from there as well and if I deleted an unread message, an ugly bracketed number will show its face there until I do so! How awful!

There is a keyboard shortcut you can use to skip the Trash altogether. All you need to do is press “Shift + Del” together, and the Trash is out of the way. You do have to tell Outlook you are absolutely positive you want this, but it’s still quicker.

That being said, I think it’s easier to have the right filters set up. I have to delete a message about once every month and I get about 300 e-mails a month.

Tip thanks to My GTD Stuff

The time may come when you too will want to change the file extension of a file. In windows this can be quite tricky, since it hides the extensions and if you try renaming a text file to “mp3″ you will get the following file: “mysong.mp3.txt”. Here’s the hack to solve your file renaming problem.

Windows Xp users open My Computer or any folder and select “tools -> folder options”. Then, click on the “view” tab and scroll down until you see “Hide extensions for known file types”. Un-check the box next to it and click ok. You should now be able to see, and modify extensions.

Windows Vista users should open Computer or any folder and click on “Organize” in the top bar. Click on “Folder and search options” and then click on the “view tab”. From then on it’s the same, go down until you see “Hide extensions for known file types”, un-check the box and click ok.

A nice feature built in is that if you rename a file, windows automatically highlights the filename, but only that, not the extension. While I do rename file extensions I rename filenames way more often, so a nice touch by Microsoft (for once?).

Amazon has been working on a revolutionary e-book reader for three years and now’s the time they delivered. Personally I think it’s great, but I wouldn’t exactly call it revolutionary. It just mixes and matches existing technology to its advantage, but it does that very well.

The aim of this e-book is to bring a sci-fi style book to your hands that gives you access to any book you want (if you buy it), enables you to email yourself documents to read or pictures to view, all this on the go, in the hospital or while riding the train home.

There are a lot of positive things thrown in. The ability to buy and read a book in under a minute, the fact that it’s thinner and heavier than a 200 pager, it has a nice big display and has an all-round coolness about it. They also seem to be a user friendly bunch at Amazon, giving you free access to Wikipedia through the book.

I only really see one downside (apart from the bad product naming). To me it looks like a bit of an advanced phaser from Star Trek. It looks cumbersome (due to the buttons) and has a sort of “it could fall apart any second” plastic look to it. I don’t know why they couldn’t put in a touch screen for the price tag it has, especially considering that whoever buys this will probably be buying many books from them also.

Looks like a great product, a step in the right direction I think. I will of course only be happy when I have a gadget the size of my Sony-Ericsson W880i which can be folded out into a laptop, or half folded into a Kindle that can be modified to replicate any amount of Ice Tea. Make it so!

If you plan on buying, please support the blog by ordering through this Amazon link.

This productivity hack is not for you, it’s for your trusty sidekick (or despised evil foe if you use OS X or Linux), Windows! Have you ever tried a process-heavy app, only to see that it slows down your whole system (some Photoshop reference is in order here…)?

You may be able to get rid of this problem by setting priorities in your task manager. Call it up using “ctr+shift+esc” (this is the way intended, not ctr+alt+del, in Vista this doesn’t bring up the task manager anyway) and find the process hog. Right click on it and then on “set priority”. I would recommend setting it to high, not real time, since this may inhibit you from using anything else. If all goes well this may speed up your experience significantly.

Please be aware that this may not always work. In Vista I could see it VERY noticeably while playing poker online (heavy 3d graphics), but on XP I couldn’t see such a visible productivity enhancement. Also, this is a good example because I rarely want to exit my poker game, so a slow down of other programs was not a problem.