SAN FRANCISCO – Almost everyone uses Facebook, but almost everyone agrees that the social network has quite a few problems. Chances are, most Facebook users have encountered some feature or flaw–from overarching privacy concerns to assorted interface annoyances–that made them reconsider their membership in the social network. Nevertheless, Facebook users tend to stick around because they believe that the benefits outweigh the costs–and because they don’t know how to leave the service without losing a few valuable features, such as games or public photo albums.

Luckily, you can export or replicate many of Facebook’s most useful features with ease, so you can quit Facebook without losing what you love about it. If Facebook is your all-in-one stop for socializing online, you’re probably better off staying with the service and hoping that the company fixes a few issues in the next redesign. But if you’re hanging on for the sake of just one or two features even though you’d rather quit, take a look at the following tips and tricks. With some help, you’ll be able to enjoy the best parts of the most popular social network without all of that Facebook anxiety.

Export Info From Facebook

If you quit Facebook, all your personal data should be deleted from the Facebook servers. Eventually. But if you want to leave Facebook without losing any of your data, you can download a copy of your Facebook information fairly easily. Simply navigate to your Facebook account settings, and you should see a Download a copy of your Facebook data link at the bottom of the page. Click the link, and confirm that you’d like to have an archive created for you; Facebook will send a download link to your email address in a few hours when your archive is prepared.
Several mobile apps (such as the free SmartSync for iOS or AddressBook for Android) will scrape your Facebook friends info and automatically add it to your smartphone contacts database, as well.
Even so, Facebook offers far more information on you and your friends than you’ll ever really need, and it’s better to be selective about what data you take when you leave. Think of it as an opportunity to do some spring cleaning. Unless you really want your whole Facebook friends list clogging up your phone, do a quick manual review of your friend info and copy any pertinent information before shutting your account down.

Another trick lets you copy one of Facebook’s most used and least appreciated features: the birthday reminder. Navigate to your Facebook Events page and click the magnifying glass icon. Select Birthdays, click the magnifying glass again, and choose Export Birthdays to quickly and easily grab your contacts’ birthday info in formats compatible with every major scheduling program. This way, you’ll remember to drop your best friend from college a birthday note even after you leave Facebook.

Organize Events

I’ve kept Facebook around for years because, despite its many faults, it has been the single best way to schedule parties and other events with my friends. That’s starting to change, however. In the past, Facebook was a superior event-planning platform because users were sure to check it often enough to catch event invites; with the rise of event spamming, though, more and more of my Facebook-using pals now ignore all Facebook event invitations. This problem forces me to confirm through other channels, removing Facebook’s one real advantage over other event-planning tools.

If you want to invite people to your event without using Facebook, you can find a lot of options, such asEvite and Eventbrite, that are free and work well. I’m a fan of Doodle, which uses a simple, clean interface and is incredibly quick to set up. Just enter an event name and time, and Doodle will provide you with a link that you can send to your friends by email; they can then RSVP with one click.
Doodle also offers a killer feature that Facebook doesn’t: Doodle events allow participants to choose a start time from a list of host-provided options. This feature can save a lot of time, and it eliminates irritating auto-updates like the kind you get when you’re trying to coordinate event timing via Facebook.

Move Your Photos off Facebook

If you download your data from Facebook as described earlier, that archive will include any photos or videos you shared on Facebook. To start sharing them again, as well as to have the same quick online access without Facebook, you can transfer those photos to Google’s photo-sharing service Picasa.
Unfortunately, Facebook makes it all but impossible to export photo and video files directly to other hosting services. The easiest way to migrate photos over to Picasa is to download Move Your Photos, a Chrome extension that, once installed, will show you thumbnails of all your Facebook photos so that you can easily sort through them and transfer the ones you want to keep over to Google’s photo-sharing service. If you want to transfer your Facebook photos to a social-network-agnostic photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you must manually download the photos to your hard drive and upload them directly to Flickr.
Of course, you can’t replicate every Facebook feature without an account. (Sadly, a life without Facebook seems to mean a life without FarmVille; if you’re a social games addict, check out a few social games on Google+.) On the bright side, moving your personal info, photos, and event calendar to a better, safer service should make quitting Facebook much simpler. Good luck!

SAN FRANCISCO – Solid-state drives are all the rage lately, thanks to their high transfer speeds and ultrafast access times, but most people still use cheap, spacious mechanical hard drives. Unfortunately, mechanical hard drives also constitute one of the most significant performance bottlenecks in modern computer systems. Even when paired with the fastest processors and lots of memory, a slow hard drive will drag down the a system’s overall performance and responsiveness, which is why upgrading to an SSD usually yields such significant performance gains.

If upgrading to a solid-state drive isn’t the cards for you right no, you can improve the performance of your hard drive through a technique colloquially known as “short stroking.” In simple terms, short stroking a drive means partitioning it so as to use its highest-performing sectors. Hard drives perform differently depending on where data is stored on their platters. Knowing where the fastest sections of the drive are and partitioning the drive to take advantage of them are the keys to optimizing it.

Finding the Sweet Spot

Generally, the smaller you make the initial, primary partition on a hard drive, the better that volume will perform. But no one likes to be limited by a tiny volume size, so it’s very useful to be able to determine where transfer rates begin to drop off on a hard drive. With that information in hand, you can tune your partition to balance overall performance against volume size.

All you need is a benchmark tool like HD Tune or HD Tach that evaluates performance across an entire drive and graphs the results. We used HD Tune in our tests.
To measure a hard drive’s performance, you’ll need access to a system that already has a fully functional OS installation on another drive. Connect the drive you want to test to this system as a secondary volume, and then run the benchmark tool. You’ll notice that performance starts at a relatively high level and then gradually tapers off. For this article, we tested a 1TB Western Digital Velociraptor drive and initially saw transfer rates in the vicinity of 210 megabytes per second, which gradually slowed to about 116 MBps. Similarly, access times were fastest in the early part of the test and grew slower as the test progressed. This phenomenon occurs because hard drives are fastest when they access data from the outermost tracks on its platters. Given a constant spindle speed (10,000 rpm, in the Velociraptor’s case), the drive’s read/write heads can simply cover a larger area in a shorter amount of time when positioned over the outer edges of the platter, resulting in better performance.
For optimal system performance, you need to place your OS and all of your most commonly used applications and files in the fastest areas on the drive. Accomplishing this goal involves creating a primary partition of the correct size on the drive and then installing your OS and apps there. You can partition and use the remainder of the drive, too, but you should store only infrequently accessed data there.

With the Velociraptor hard drive we tested, performance began to drop noticeably at about the 200GB mark, as the HD Tune graph above indicates. By the 300GB mark, transfer rates had fallen by about 50 MBps from their initial speed, and they continued to decline from there. 200GB is plenty of space for a primary partition, so that’s the size we’d make ours.

Once you’ve identified the sweet spot on your drive, create a primary partition of the optimal size. You can do this either during the initial setup phase (when installing the OS) or while the drive is connected to a system whose OS is already installed. To create a partition during a fresh installation of Windows, follow the on-screen prompts during the first phase of the setup process until you reach the point of choosing a target drive. Then click Drive Options (advanced), select your drive on the resulting screen, and specify the partition size. To create a partition on a drive connected to a system that already has Windows installed, connect the drive, boot into Windows, click the Start button, type Disk Management in the Search/Run field, and press Enter. The Disk Management utility will open and, if it detects a new blank drive, will usually launch a wizard. If no wizard launches, right-click the entry for the drive in the list at the bottom of the window, and choose the option to create a new volume. Because Windows uses binary measurements in megabytes to specify partition sizes, 1 gigabyte contains 1024 megabytes. Consequently, in specifying our 200GB partition, we had to identify a partition size of 204,800MB (200 × 1024).

Performance Testing

To gauge the performance benefits of short-stroking a hard drive, we ran a couple of popular benchmarks–HD Tune 5.0 and PCMark 7–on our 1TB Velociraptor hard drive, first with a single partition that spanned the entire drive and a second time with a primary partition consisting of the drive’s highest-performance, first 200GB of space.
WD Velociraptor 1TB w/ 1TB partition

WD Velociraptor 1TB w/ 200GB partition

Improvement

HD Tune 5.0 (read test)

Average transfer rate

164.1 MBps

194.4 MBps

18.46%

Minimum transfer rate

116.2 MBps

181.7 MBps

56.37%

Maximum transfer rate

207.3 MBps

210.7 MBps

1.64%

Burst rate

336.0 MBps

335.2 MBps

-0.24%

Access time*

7.13 ms

5.43 ms

23.84%

PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Benchmark

Overall score

2699

2743

1.63%

Starting applications

5.9 MBps

6.05 MBps

2.54%

Importing pictures

11.74 MBps

12.17 MBps

3.66%

Video editing

21.11 MBps

21.36 MBps

1.18%

Gaming

7.97 MBps

8.03 MBps

0.75%

Windows Media Center

8.09 MBps

8.11 MBps

0.25%

Windows Defender

2.71 MBps

2.82 MBps

4.06%

Adding music

1.34 MBps

1.34 MBps

0.00%

* In milliseconds; on this measure, lower scores indicate better performance.

Test system: Intel Core i7-2700K, Asus P8Z68-V Pro (Z68 Express), 8GB DDR3-1600, Western Digital Raptor 150GB (OS), Nvidia GeForce GTX 285, Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

A hard drive’s access times and minimum transfer rates benefit most from short stroking, though the average transfer rate will also jump significantly. According to HD Tune, our drive’s minimum transfer rate increased from 116.2 MBps to 181.1 MBps, a boost of more than 56 percent. Also, our drive’s average access time decreased from 7.13 ms to 5.43 ms, an improvement of about 23.8 percent. And the drive’s average transfer rate saw a nice gain of 18.46 percent, from 164.1 MBps on the 1TB partition to 194.4 MBps on the optimized 200GB partition.

PCMark 7′s Secondary Storage benchmark–a suite of trace-based tests that measure performance of simulated real-world workloads, rather than raw transfer speeds and access times (as HD Tune does)–tells a somewhat different story. Though the gains reported by PCMark 7 are less dramatic than those identified by HD Tune, system performance improved nearly across the board. The drive’s overall score increased by 1.63 percent after short stroking, with the biggest gain coming in the Windows Defender test, which saw an improvement of 4.06 percent.

Ultimately, short-stroking a hard drive won’t raise your hard drive’s performance to the level of a solid-state drive. Nevertheless, the right partition configuration can yield tangible gains, as our test results show. A fast storage subsystem usually delivers perceptible performance improvements for the end user, so if you’re stuck with a hard drive in your system, why not ensure that it’s configured for peak performance?

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing by design, often hiding similar settings in totally different menus and defaulting to unnerving levels of public sharing. Ensuring that you share the right information with the right people can be difficult, and Facebook even has a few specialized settings that will override your other privacy settings if you aren’t careful. Luckily you can take control of your privacy on Facebook fairly quickly once you know what you’re looking for.

To that end we’ve assembled this quick guide to each part of Facebook’s Privacy Settings page (accessible via the menu that drops down when you select the downward arrow at the top right of your Facebook page). Following it should help you get your Facebook information locked down on the double. For each section of Facebook’s privacy settings, we provide a brief description of what to look for, along with notable settings that you’ll probably want to adjust. Click on any screenshot to zoom in for a close look at the different privacy settings on display.

Default Privacy

Description: Your default privacy setting is the first thing you’ll see on your Privacy Settings page. It’s also the most important item on the page, since it controls who can and can’t see content that you post automatically. Facebook provides three options here: Public, which lets anyone see your new posts; Friends, which limits access to your content to people whom you’ve friended on Facebook; and Custom, which permits you to take a more granular approach to your privacy settings.

Notable settings: For many users, the Friends privacy setting should be perfectly acceptable, but you may want to experiment with Custom and familiarize yourself with the privacy customization menu–it’s the same one you’ll see across all of Facebook’s privacy pages. You can configure the Custom setting to make posts visible to specific people, to custom lists of people, or to any school/work networks that you might be a part of. I set my default privacy setting to include friends of my friends, though some users may consider that setting too open to sharing.
How You Connect

Description: These settings, which control who can view your personal information and who can contact you on Facebook, constitute what most users think of as their Facebook privacy settings. Clearly they’re among the most important privacy controls on the site.

Notable settings: All of the settings in the How You Connect section are significant. They determine who can send you a friend request on Facebook, who can message you on the service, and who can see your Timeline. They also control who can see your email address and phone number if you provide that data to Facebook. The settings are structured to give you the same Public, Friends, or Custom options as does the Default Privacy menu and most of them default either to ‘Everyone’ or to ‘Friends of Friends’, so you may want to configure them to be a little less permissive.

Timeline and Tagging

Description: This menu contains the bulk of your Timeline settings, including specifications for who can post on your timeline and who can see those posts. Bear in mind, however, that the actual controls for viewing your Timeline appear in the How You Connect section (see above).

Notable settings: Though the timeline settings are important, the two settings here that will be most useful to users involve Facebook automation. The first controls Facebook’s unsettling facial recognition feature (added last year). To disable that feature, set ‘Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?’ to no one; if you go this route, you and your friends will have to manually tag your face in photos. The second setting lets you review firends’ posts that you’ve been tagged in before the posting is approved. If you’ve ever worried that an embarrassing and clearly labeled photo might circulate on Facebook before you can detag it, set ‘Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline’ to enabled and worry no more.

Next: Settings for ads, apps, and websites

Ads, Apps, and Websites

Description: This section controls how your Facebook profile and personal information interact with things outside Facebook proper, including Facebook apps, personalized ads, and websites that use Facebook data to customize your experience. It’s also where the truly Orwellian stuff lives; if you’re worried about Facebook destroying your privacy, head here first and turn pretty much everything off.
Notable settings: Everything here is worth scrutinizing, especially the ‘Apps you use’ control panel. Here you can review and remove all of the third-party apps you’ve added to Facebook. Be warned, however, that you must remove (and confirm removal) of each app separately, unless you elect to delete them all, so the operation may take a while to complete. In the Ads settings, you can turn off social ads and preemptively opt out of having your data used in third-party advertising. This section also lets you turn off Facebook “features” such as instant personalization (which exports your personal data to partner websites) and public search (which allows users whom you haven’t friended to see your timeline through search engines, even if you’ve set your Timeline to be visible to friends only).

Limit the Audience for Past Posts

Description: This section is an anomaly on the Privacy Control page. Instead of popping up a new window of settings, Limit the Audience for Past Posts generates a small pop-up box with text explaining that, when you confirm that you want to limit the audience for your past posts, Facebook will automatically set all posts in your timeline to be visible only to friends. This will retroactively change the status of your previously public timeline posts to friends-only.

Notable settings: The Limit Old Posts option is the only setting here (besides Cancel), but it’s a doozy. Facebook frames it as a kind of nuclear option, but for most people it’s a convenient timesaver. Unless you prefer to leave most of your timeline public, activating this option and manually making a few posts public should take much less time than managing the privacy settings for Timeline posts individually.

Blocked People and Apps

Description: The Manage Blocking settings let you selectively block Facebook apps and users from interacting with you. They range from relatively benign settings that help deter an overzealous aunt from inviting you to try Farmville (without offending anyone) to a full global block to prevent abusive users from interacting with you in any way on Facebook. These settings are unlikley to be of much use for you when you first establish your privacy settings, but they may become more useful when friends or apps start spamming your Facebook feed.

Notable settings: The ‘Block users’ setting is a fantastic tool if you’re being harassed on Facebook and want to take care of the situation yourself. Preventing all interactions with a threatening person through Facebook is easy (be sure to report the harassment to Facebook as well); for most users, though, the less serious settings will be more useful. For example, do you have a friend who asks you to come to arts events every weekend? Simply enter the person’s name in the Block invites from field of the ‘Block event invites’ setting, and Facebook will automatically block any new event invitations from them. Similarly, adding a friend to your restricted list will ensure that thenceforth the person will be able to see only your public posts, effectively unfriending them without inviting any unpleasant histrionics.

SAN FRANCISCO – Every now and then I come across great PC tips and share them with you. A few months back I told you how to put Linux on a USB drive (and why you’d want to), and how to bypass Windows Updates. Today I’ve found some interesting research on using Sleep Mode (vs. leaving a PC running), plus a great tip on how to quickly remove USB devices without hassling with the “Safely Remove Hardware” routine.
Leave Your PC Running? Put It to Sleep and Save Cash

When it’s time to turn in for the night, what do you do with your PC? Turn it off? Leave it running? Put it in standby (aka sleep) mode?

There are different schools of thought on which is best. For example, some feel that the startup and shutdown processes create extra wear and tear, and therefore opt to leave their machines running 24/7.

According to Iolo Labs, which recently completed some studies on the subject, sleep mode wins the day (make that night). Their findings:

1. When you put your PC to sleep at night instead of leaving it running, you save $2 per month.

2. When you put your PC to sleep at night instead of turning it off, you save at least 25 minutes per month (in startup and shutdown time, I’m guessing), while spending only an extra five cents monthly.

I’m waiting to hear back from an Iolo rep on whether hibernate mode was considered in this study, as that would save you some startup/shutdown time and save you money as well.

(When your computer is in standby, it continues to draw a bit of power. In hibernate, however, it’s effectively off.)

In any case, I think there’s something to be said for pocketing an extra $24 annually just by putting your PC to sleep at night. And as someone who has long been annoyed by annoyingly long boot times, there’s much to be said for resuming your work session almost immediately, right where you left off.

Safely Remove USB Drives Just by Unplugging Them

Most Windows users have become conditioned over time to never unplug a USB flash drive or hard drive without first clicking Safely Remove Hardware in the System Tray.

Why is that necessary? In theory, it’s to ensure that Windows isn’t busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted data or even a damaged drive.

As it turns out, however, you can safely sidestep Safely Remove Hardware with little to no loss of performance. In fact, this option may already be enabled on your system, and you just didn’t know it. Yep, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.

Do this:

Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager. (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look different in previous versions of Windows.) Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it’s called “USB2.0 Flash Disk USB Device.” Right-click that entry, then click Properties. Click the Policies tab; you should see something like the screen below. If the first option, Quick removal, is already selected, you’re good to go. As noted in its description, “you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon.” If Better performance is selected, switch to Quick removal and click OK.

So, what are giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results posted at 7tutorials, almost nothing. The performance impact was negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it’s worth a few milliseconds to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.

SAN FRANCISCO – Although office suites have been available on mobile phones for more than a decade, touch interfaces have made them much simpler and more efficient than before. Now, iPhone and Android users wanting to work with office documents while on the go have at least three great options each, and two of them in common. This guide will walk you through the process of choosing an editor and getting started in editing documents on your smartphone.

Both Documents To Go ($10) and Quickoffice Pro ($15; a stripped-down iPhone-only version is available for $10) offer a full editing suite for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. The extra $5 for Quickoffice will be well worth it to some people, as that suite offers the extraordinarily convenient option to sync documents with cloud hosting services such as Dropbox automatically. This feature is terrific, since it allows you to keep all of your documents up-to-date without having to plug your phone into your computer. Of course, the choice is yours–Documents To Go has plenty to recommend if the automatic Dropbox sync doesn’t appeal to you.
One aside: If you’re new to cloud storage, you could do worse than signing up with Dropbox. It’s one of the most popular cloud storage services–almost a household name by now–and it gives you a nice 2GB of storage space for free. By default the desktop installer will create a Dropbox folder within your Documents folder, and unless you have reason to be concerned about cloud security issues, I recommend keeping the majority of your documents in there. Not only will the Dropbox folder provide seamless access to your files on your phone, but it will also help to keep them safe in case you ever experience a hard-drive failure.
Quickoffice Pro vs. Documents To Go

Getting started with Quickoffice is as simple as tapping the Accounts icon in the bottom-right corner of the start page, and entering the credentials for the cloud service of your choice. You’ll need to log in only once. After you’ve done so, the interface for opening documents is simple: Either choose an application (Quickword, Quicksheet, or Quickpoint) and a document (from your Dropbox folder or from your phone’s storage), or skip the first step and use Browse or Search from the start page. The Documents To Go interface, lacking Dropbox support, is even simpler–choose the type of document, and then browse your device or select an item from a list of recent docs.

The document editing interface in both Quickoffice Pro and Documents To Go is fairly clear and consistent on Android and iPhone. Both suites allow you to highlight, cut, or navigate the text by tapping and dragging anywhere in the main body, and both have a menu of formatting and saving options accessible from the bottom of the screen (or the Menu key on Android). The Quickoffice menu scrolls to reveal a familiar Undo arrow, an invaluable tool.

The spreadsheet editors have a few differences. In Quickoffice, most of the options for copying or inserting cells are located in the bottom toolbar. You access an Excel-style function menu by clicking the function icon at the top of the screen, which reveals an elegant function-search wizard. In contrast, Documents To Go handles these kinds of things through a comprehensive Insert pop-up menu on Android, and via the bottom toolbar on iPhone. Of course, you can still enter functions manually in either case, and you can resize or copy cells by tapping or dragging anywhere within the main interface in either application.

Documents To Go’s slideshow editor is pretty convenient if you’re working on a presentation that consists mostly of text, since it allows you to do all of your work on a single outline (by opening the View menu and selecting Outline View) without needing to scroll slide by slide. This design, however, masks the fact that the app can’t do much in the way of editing slide layouts–which is both a blessing and a curse. By comparison, Quickoffice Pro allows you to add many simple shapes from the menu in the bottom corner, each of which you can resize by dragging their corners, just as on the desktop. The butterfly icon allows you to import photos from your phone.

After Documents To Go and Quickoffice, Android users’ third option (and their only free one) is the officialGoogle Docs app. While it’s simple enough to use–virtually all of the menu items move you to a list of your online documents, and from there it’s just one more click to Google’s famously bare-bones editor–it doesn’t allow you to work on any documents that you haven’t already uploaded to Google. Unfortunately, it also refuses to let you export or email documents in Word or Excel format, the way the full desktop interface does; you may only invite other Google users to edit them (via the Invite pop-up menu). For this reason, the app is a bit of a niche choice, though if your colleagues are amenable to the Docs interface, it helps that this program is free.
iPhone and iPad users have the option to use Apple’s own suite of office software, dubbed Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. At $10 each, they aren’t cheap (particularly since they lack the Dropbox support of Quickoffice); on a larger screen like the iPad’s, however, they’re great for working with image-heavy documents, or in other cases where layout is especially important. (Keep an eye out for our guide to editing office documents on a tablet device, coming soon.)

Editing Documents on BlackBerry

Veteran BlackBerry users will likely remember Documents To Go, which has served as a free document viewer since OS 4.5, released in late 2008. As of OS 7 (late 2011), the full version of Documents To Go, which allows editing of documents, is now free–saving users at least $50, and effectively killing its remaining competition. The app’s victory is well deserved, as it’s difficult to imagine a better package for working within BlackBerry phones’ relatively small screens.

Documents To Go installs as four separate programs–Word, Sheet, Slideshow, and PDF–within the ‘Applications’ folder. After opening any of the programs, you’ll see a straightforward prompt to open an existing file or create a new one. On other occasions, you’ll likely find yourself wanting to open email attachments, which you can do by highlighting them within the mail application, pressing Menu, and then selecting Open Attachment, which will shepherd you directly into Documents To Go.

The app is fully compatible with Office 2007 documents, and it supports many important smaller features such as Word’s Track Changes functionality (available under Menu and then Show Changes). On spreadsheets, users with touch-capable phones will have a much easier time with scrolling, although shortcut options are available from the Go menu to help other users jump around. Slideshows, however, get short shrift: Most slide transitions from PowerPoint are not preserved on the BlackBerry, so I recommend that you work only with simple text-and-image slides.

Although Documents To Go can’t wirelessly synchronize documents, if you’re a Windows user you candownload an application that does the job each time you connect the BlackBerry to a PC, with only a couple of clicks. You might also make judicious use of the ‘Send via Email’ function, which is located adjacent to the Save menu–most modern email services make for fine cloud-like storage in a pinch.

SAN FRANCISCO – As we reported earlier today, the “default configurations” of Windows 8 will not include Windows Media Center. Likewise, Windows 8 won’t offer DVD playback capability.
I’m hopping mad.

For the uninitiated, Windows Media Center is the Windows component that turns your PC into a robust, well, media center. It serves up photos, music, videos, and, best of all, TV, all via a gorgeous 10-foot interface that’s great for controlling from the couch.

Indeed, a PC running Windows Media Center makes a killer DVR, whether you pair it with an over-the-air tuner or a cable-company CableCard. I’ve professed my love for WMC many, many times in this space.

But over the years, Microsoft has treated it like the red-headed stepchild, barely acknowledging its existence, acquiring and then effectively killing off one of the Web’s most popular WMC forums, and, now, relegating it to a Windows 8 add-on.
Now, I’m the first to admit that not everyone needs or wants Windows Media Center, so I can see Microsoft’s reasoning behind unbundling it from Windows 8.

But making users pay extra for it (the price has yet to be announced) after including it for free with Windows Vista and Windows 7 is a slap in the face. Microsoft doesn’t charge for extras like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, so why not just make Media Center another freebie for those who want it?

What’s more, Microsoft has stated that very little has changed in the Windows 8 version of WMC, so it’s not like your investment is buying you extra capabilities (like, say, Hulu Plus integration, which would be awesome).

For years I’ve championed Windows Media Center as a great alternative to the likes of TiVo, but I’m so furious with Microsoft right now, I feel like boycotting all future coverage of the product. As a technology writer, I don’t really have that luxury, but as a consumer, I can vote with my wallet.

I won’t be upgrading my current media-center PC to Windows 8. And I sure as heck won’t be paying for Windows Media Center, which continues to be a great asset in Windows 7.

Let me know how you feel about this. Do you think I’m over-reacting? Do you agree that Microsoft is making a mistake? Are you on the fence pending the price tag for Windows Media Center? Share your thoughts in the comments.

SAN FRANCISCO – Most Windows users have become conditioned over time to never unplug a USB flash drive or hard drive without first clicking Safely Remove Hardware in the System Tray.

Why is that necessary? In theory, it’s to ensure that Windows isn’t busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted data or even a damaged drive.

As it turns out, however, you can safely sidestep Safely Remove Hardware with little to no loss of performance. In fact, this option may already be enabled on your system, and you just didn’t know it. Yep, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.

Do this:

1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager. (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look different in previous versions of Windows.)

2. Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it’s called “USB2.0 Flash Disk USB Device.”

3. Right-click that entry, then click Properties.

4. Click the Policies tab.

5. If the first option, Quick removal, is already selected, you’re good to go. As noted in its description, “you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon.” If Better performance is selected, switch to Quick removal and click OK.

So, what are giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results posted at 7tutorials, almost nothing. The performance impact was negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it’s worth a few milliseconds to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.

SAN FRANCISCO – Back when I had a morning commute, I would often pop in some earbuds before hopping on the bus and rock out to one of the many tunes on my iPhone as we rode through Chinatown. The problem, of course, came when I reached my desk mid-song: Did I pause and try and find the song on my Mac’s iTunes library? Or did I continue to listen through my iPhone, only to look up hours later and realize I’d drained my phone’s battery when I should have switched to my desktop?

Luckily, there was Seamless (Mac App Store link), a little app–actually, a pair of apps, a free one for the Mac and a $2 app for the iPhone–to rescue me from this daunting first-world problem.
Seamless allows you to easily transition a song, podcast, or audiobook mid-play from your Mac to an iOS device, and vice versa. The Mac and iOS apps even coordinate fades on each device, bringing the volume of “Don’t Stop Believin’” down on your Mac as it cranks up the volume on your iPhone. Both devices need to be on the same Wi-Fi network at the time of the transition, and, of course, each must have access to the same audio file to pull this off, but fulfill those two criteria and you’ve got yourself a magic trick.

Even though my morning commute has now been shortened one bus ride, Seamless is still a fantastic little gem, and one I’m glad exists. I do wish there was a way to transition music from one iOS device to another–say, iPhone to iPad–but that’s about as far as my complaints go. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to transition Cake’s “I Feel Free” over to my iPhone and go out for some lunch.

SAN FRANCISCO – No one would argue that Google Docs is a great tool, but it remains, stubbornly, a Web-only tool.
That’s why I’m jazzed about GDocsDrive, which solves several of the big hassles associated with Google’s cloud-based office suite.
This $19.99 utility bridges the gap between your Docs account and your PC, effectively providing a local front end for your documents library. After you sign in (i.e. give GDocsDrive permission to access your account), you’ll see everything you’ve ever created with or stored on Google Docs.

GDocsDrive effectively duplicates what you’d see in your Web browser, with options to show only starred items, “owned” items, and so on. But there’s one key advantage right from the get-go: with one click, GDocsDrive can display only your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, or drawings. Google Docs proper has no such quick-click filtering option.

You also have quick access to features like Open (which immediately opens the selected document in your browser), Download, Upload, Share, and Search — in other words, everything you can do in your browser, you can do here.

However, because GDocsDrive supports drag-and-drop, it’s incredibly easy to add local documents to your Docs account or download documents from Docs to your PC.

This also adds a cloud-storage element to Google Docs, as you’re not limited to documents — you can also upload photos, videos, and pretty much anything else on your hard drive. And GDocsDrive automatically handles file-format conversion on the fly.

Another big perk: You can open and edit Docs files in your local office suite, be it Microsoft Office, Kingsoft Office, or whatever. And when you’re done, the changes will immediately get synced up to your Docs account.
However, GDocsDrive makes this function a little more complicated than it should be. Although there’s an “Open” button in the toolbar, that will only open the selected document in Google Docs proper. If you want to open a document in, say, Word, you must select it, then click File, Open with local app. There’s no dedicated button for this option, nor even a right-click context menu.

That’s really my only complaint with this otherwise handy utility, which, in an ideal world, Google would buy and make available to users free of charge. Because, let’s face it, Google Docs needs some kind of local component that serves as a link to its cloud self. For the moment, GDocsDrive is that link.

SAN FRANCISCO – I’m an American working for the U.S. government and assigned overseas in Italy. Around Thanksgiving, I bought an Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 tablet from Overstock.com and had it sent to my FPO mailing address. When the tablet’s screen died a while later, I opened two Asus support tickets: one on the Italian site and one on the U.S. site (since I purchased the tablet from an American vendor). Asus in Italy merely asked, “Did you buy the tablet in Italy?” I wrote back and explained the situation, but never got a reply. An Asus rep in the United States told me that they could fix the tablet, but would return it only to a family member or friend in the United States, since the company does not ship to AFO or FPO addresses. This would add eight to ten weeks to the total turnaround time for the repair. Can you help? –Rick Shores, Rome, Italy
On Your Side responds: We contacted Asus, and a company rep helped Shores fill out a return merchandise authorization request on the Italian website. The request was granted, Asus sent the tablet out to the Czech Republic for service, and just two weeks later the repaired tablet made it back to Shores via UPS.

Consumer electronics companies that operate internationally have different policies for warranty repairs on devices bought in one country and used in another. If you plan on traveling long term with electronics bought in the United States, or if you are purchasing from a U.S. vendor that will ship overseas, look into the manufacturer’s international warranty policies so that you’ll know what to expect.

Hard-Drive Merry-Go-Round

Hard-drive makers have been gobbling one another up in the past few years, making it difficult to know where to turn for warranty service.

• In December 2005, Seagate agreed to acquire Maxtor. Though Seagate services Maxtor drives, you can’t return a Maxtor drive through the online system; you have to contact Seagate’s technical support.
• In October 2009, Toshiba began supporting Fujitsu drives, following approval of its bid to buy Fujitsu’s hard-drive unit.
• Having acquired Samsung’s hard-drives business in December 2011, Seagate now provides support for Samsung drives.
• In March 2012, Western Digital completed its purchase of Hitachi’s storage division. It operates the Hitachi business as a separate subsidiary.

Many recently sold drives have five-year warranties that companies should still honor despite all the mergers and acquisitions. If you’re wondering about support for a drive maker not listed here, try a search for “[your brand of drive] warranty.”