Thetownend.com

just got myself a spanking new one of these beauts....question is, how do you use it?? I thought it was simply a case of plug in and everything gets automatically transferred no??  ??? :-[

Should appear as an extra drive on windows explorer, you then drag and drop any files you want to copy to it.

most of them are,aslong as they are formatted for the right windows (xp/vista etc) or mac when you bought it. otherwise it'l need installin,hopefully u got a disk for that..

just try plugging it in,if its formatted correctly it'l install itself:)

right you are...I'll give that a go...top bombin

I'd never trust a disk which comes with an external drive because it's clearly only filled with bloatware and toolbars.

talking of portable drives, have been checking out Portable apps lately. I suspect one for the geekier members of the TEF but pretty fucking cool in my opinion.

http://portableapps.com/

Back in the day, all my essential apps ran off very portable little square disks or tapes. The world has gone full circle.

It is pretty cool though, I like software which doesn't decide it wants to integrate itself with every inch of an OS, even if I never go anywhere.

Anonymous browsing etc FB - leave no trace...like a ninja - shit in a bag and take it with you.

It's good that you can take all your shit on your keys; you're at someone elses house no need to worry about using their wanky IE or using hotmail - use your portable Firefox and Thunderbird, you've got all your favourites etc and don't leave history behind for them to nose at.

I love portable apps, I don't have many, but got had most of Adobe's product range as cracked portables. I have such a small amount of hard disk space left and don't wanna upgrade, so i should really move to some portable apps.

Or an external hard drive....

Yeah but i'm a smart arse and already have one. :D

It's a NAS though and is only ever connected for backing up - it's only use. I should really back up my drive again and just delete everything on my drive, which was the original idea. Robert's your cousin's father.

USB memory sticks are getting cheaper, you should be able to get 16 GB for twenty quid soon.  So why mess about with something with moving parts (hard drives I mean).

Because 16gb isn't very much?

I think I read somewhere about someone making really big thingy state drives, but they were super expensive and had issues with number of read/writes they could do without giving up.

Also 16gb for £20 is stupidly expensive when you can get 1 TB harddrives for under £100 (I think)

You have got a point, hard drives are ridiculously cheap, but solid state memory will take over in probably less than five years. 

You can get up to 128GB solid state now i think. Super fast access speeds, but yeah they're about £250 or something.

Oh undoubtedly at some point, but the cost will have to drop lots with storage increase.

I don't like this move away from moving parts. There should be more moving parts. Cogs and stuff, preferably powered by a combination of steam and clockwork.

Toshiba have already announced they'll bring a 512gb SSD out this year.

Still it's cheap to buy a couple of hard drives, stick them in RAID 1 and then not have to worry about data loss.