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Posts Tagged ‘Ask a Geek’

The free backup service offers much more than just backup

But there’s a lot you can do with Dropbox beyond just backing up your files. You can use it to quickly sync files between your devices, and, since it’s available anywhere, it provides an easy way to get a hold of information on the go. For example, you can upload recipes or shopping lists to access later on your phone at the grocery store, store nutritional information for restaurant menus in a PDF file for reference while dining out, or print important receipts to a file for safekeeping. To ensure security, all your files are encrypted; even Dropbox employees can’t get at them.

If you want to get more geeky, store portable applications in your Dropbox folder that don’t require installation. TiddlyWiki, which lets you create your own personal wiki—an editable Web page used for storing notes, links and other information—is an especially useful one. And be sure to keep Firefox, VLC and KeePass in the folder, so you can use your preferred browser, store your passwords, or play your media on any computer.

Lowell Heddings explains technology at howtogeek.com.

Say you want to open a file you downloaded from a questionable source, kick the tires on a new operating system like Linux, or even run an older OS from the familiar environment of your main desktop. If anything goes awry in your virtual machine, you can reset it to a previous state or just delete it altogether, with no harm to your system. You could even run a separate operating system as a virtual machine just to use that one killer app that’s not available on your OS of choice.

Free applications like Microsoft’s Windows Virtual PC (micro soft.com), VMware Player (vmware.com) and the open-source app VirtualBox (virtualbox.org) are great for getting your feet wet. Setting them up is a similar process to installing a regular operating system. Once you’ve done it, it will seem like you’ve got a real, separate computer living inside your system.