I'm now using Clonezilla to back up my MSI Wind netbook Windows XP partition, using a USB thumb (flash) drive. I actually found it by accident when I was looking for a suitable disk imaging application for Windows. For the uninformed, Clonezilla runs on Debian Linux.
Why is that when Google announces a new application or product, the Google fanatics come out of woodwork? Not everything Google produces are as good as those people make them out to be. In my own opinion, the Google search and Gmail are the top performers and everything else is ho-hum. I'm talking about everything from their RSS feedreader (Google Reader) to their browser (Google Chrome). Speaking of Google Chrome…
One of the problems with netbooks that have solid-state drives (SSD) installed is that the space on those drives is limited. It's a fact that the Windows operating system uses up most of that space. What happens when you want to use a bunch of applications with it and then find out that the space is nearly gone? A USB drive (preferably a flash drive) can save you hours of grief if you know what to put on it.
While this primarily applies to netbooks without optical drives, it can apply to any PC that where the optical drive is missing or broken. You can indeed install from CD without any optical drive of any kind.
I left one important step out of the last post, "How to Watch DVD, DivX or XviD Movies on a Netbook". You can't use the software mentioned to re-encode the DVD files into something else if you can't copy the DVD in the first place. While the movie (and TV) industry says copying DVDs is illegal, people have every right to an archived copy and you just can't make one without the right software to remove the copy protection during the copying process.
I'm going to tell you the easiest ways I've found to watch DVD, DivX or XviD movies on a netbook. If you have a netbook (without an optical drive), this will be of much interest to you. If you have a laptop that includes an optical drive, you may only be mildly interested in the information I'm about to share with you.
I ended up buying an MSI Wind 100 LXP+ instead of an MSI Wind 100xp. I don't know what the exact differences are, but they were the same price. I spent a few hours adding my preferred software to the netbook (which MSI still calls a notebook) and I'll tell you what I already installed and what I plan to install.
Well, if you're not using a netbook or a netbook running Windows, then you obviously don't need to buy the new CheckIt Netbook Utility Suite. If you're using a netbook with Linux or Mac OS X installed, feel free to move on.
If you ARE running Windows (and preferably Windows XP because Windows Vista is too much of a resource hog), then you should pay attention to keeping it running at peak performance.
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