Apple’s Mac OS X’s a great operating system, but however much you love it, few of us can get by without running Windows for some reason or another. When it comes to running Windows on your Mac, you have two choices: use Apple’s boot camp or run Windows virtually using either Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion.

When Snow Leopard was released, new versions of both these applications were released, each offering their own strengths and weaknesses. Parallels Desktop 5 comes with some great new features, some more polished than others, and offers a great incentive when using Windows applications in an OS X environment.

Setting up Parallels is an extremely simple process which allows you to install an OS of your choice (Windows or Linux) virtually, by using either a physical install disk or installing from a disk image (this comes in handy when installing Linux distributions especially, as many are downloaded as an .iso image). The install process is the same as you’d see when installing Windows on a physical drive, so there’s nothing unfamiliar to worry about – in fact, it’s significantly simpler, as you Parallels requests your Windows license key before installing, to make the process as automated as possible.
[Read more…]

Cloudberry Online Backup doesn’t quite follow suit with other online computer backup solutions like Carbonite, as in it’s designed specifically for use with Amazon’s S3 storage system, Cloudberry helps users manage their online file storage and bolster their backups for $30. When using Cloudberry Online Backup, you’ll be able to schedule your backups, encrypt the contents of your backups and if disaster strikes, you can restore your computer to how it was at a particular date to keep things as simple and efficient as possible.

When you open Cloudberry, you’ll be presented with a tabbed interface which allows you to select from the welcome screen; your backup plans; online backups and your backup history. I found the interface to be extremely intuitive as a first time user, and quickly got used to the layout of the program. Setting up a backup plan is extremely simple — on the welcome page there are two buttons to select from titled “Setup Backup Plan” and “Restore Backup”. To the right of the page, you can see an overview of your backup, including how much space you’ve used and a list of your backup plans. [Read more…]

I’ve never enjoyed the prospect of editing the partitions on my PC; my data’s too precious and I’m a computing malfunction magnet! So I was naturally cautious when I downloaded EASEUS Partition Master to review, which is available as a free download from EASEUS’ site. I’m always slightly wary about editing/creating/deleting partitions, but Partition Master gave a good impression from the offset, in fact it works better than a lot of paid solutions I’ve come across.

Partition Master does everything you’d expect from such a piece of software — you can manage partitions on internal and external drives (both USB and Firewire) and even copy entire partitions and disks, which makes a very nice feature list for a free piece of software. The user interface is extremely simple to navigate for both beginners and professionals whilst still offering more than enough features to keep even the most demanding consumer happy (although no one can complain at the price).
[Read more…]