Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Recently, I asked iTunes to organize my music directory (getting music from different sources other than just the iTunes store left it a little messy and I decided I’d let iTunes do its thing) and it did a great job; however, it left a bunch of empty directories. Although these empty directories didn’t pose any performance impact, they just looked… messy and I decided I’d delete them. I started doing this one by one and soon realized I had over 50 empty directories and sub directories. Being lazy, I decided to run a command to remove these directories. I’ve done this a lot in Linux so I figured it was easy; well, not quite, but it’s also not that hard. In this guide, I’ll show you what I did and hope you can find this useful in some way.

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If you are looking for a way to speed up your computers read and write speed and you like taking chances, then Striped Volumes are the way to go.

A striped volume uses the free space on more than one physical hard disk to create a bigger volume. Unlike a spanned volume, a striped volume writes across all volumes in the stripe in small blocks, distributing the load across the disks in the volume.

How does it work ?

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In this guest post, James Ricketts explores the basics of computer drivers. Find out more about James at the end of this post.

Device Drivers – An Introduction

Computer operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and Mac, and hardware components, such as sound cards, memory cards, and video cards do not speak the same language. To communicate effectively, hardware devices and operating systems require an interface. This interface is provided by device drivers. These drivers enable the computer operating system and installed software to communicate with the hardware devices.

In this article, you will learn:

• Why it is necessary to use only the latest drivers
• Which is better – manual driver updation process or automatic driver updation process
• What is Driver Finder?

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In the last guide, I showed you how to extract files from multi-part archives. If you want to create on of these archives yourself, follow this guide. This guide will show you how to create multi-part archives with the following tools:

• 7-Zip
• WinRAR

Why would you want to create a multi-part archive?

• You want to email a large file to a friend but your email limits attachment sizes to 20MB.
• You want to host a file and want people to have a greater chance of wasting less time with failed downloads.
• You have a file that’s over 4GB and you’re moving it to a file system that doesn’t support such a large size (i.e. FAT32.)
• You need to spread the archive across multiple thumb drives, CDs, DVDs etc.

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Every now and then I come across something I want to download and find it’s been separated into multiple archives. This is usually done because the file size is large and, to avoid failed downloads, it’s split up into multiple pieces before it’s uploaded. The archive may also be split because the site on which it’s hosted restricts the maximum file size.

Case in point: the mintywhite 1003 font megapack is split into 20MB pieces so users are less likely to experience a failed download and have to start from the beginning (as many people don’t use download managers.)

This guide will show you how to extract multi-part archives like the mintywhite font megapack.

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Do you have several physical hard-drives on your computer, but would like to have them collaborating as one? This can be useful for smaller SSD-drives or similar.

A quick Note before we continue!
Spanned volumes are not RAID volumes and they are not fault tolerant. If one of the disks in the volume should fail, you lose the data on both disks. That being said, let’s continue…

Preparations

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