How To Do A Clean Install of Windows 7 using an Upgrade Disc

Note: This article was originally published by Paul Thurrott and received a significant update on October 25, 2009. I now have three methods to try for performing a clean install with Windows 7 Upgrade media.

It was the final unanswered question about Windows 7. But now, thanks to numerous reader reports and my own hands-on experience, I’m can now report that Microsoft is still making it difficult to clean install Windows 7 with Upgrade media. But fear not, there is some good news. While you can’t simply use Upgrade media to do a clean install of Windows 7 on an unused PC with a blank hard drive, the workaround this time is easier than ever. Assuming you know the trick.

Remember how this used to work? In older versions of Windows, Microsoft would actually prompt you to insert an install floppy or CD from a previous Windows version, to prove that you qualified for the upgrade version. But beginning with Windows XP, PC makers were able to dramatically change the Windows install disc, so much so that, in some cases, those discs weren’t even identifiable as valid install media to Windows Setup. Clearly a different system was required.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft supported in-place upgrades from Windows XP, but if you wanted to use an Upgrade version of the Windows Vista Setup disc to do a clean install, you had to perform a weird double install trick. (I documented this process in How to Clean Install Windows Vista with Upgrade Media.)

When it comes to performing a clean install of Windows 7 using Upgrade media, there’s no simple answer. For some people, it just works. Why that is the case will vary from person to person, and while I suspect we’ll eventually understand why, for now all that really matters is that we have a way to make it work for you. So what I’d like to do is provide you with a number of things to try. I assume you just want it to work.

Let’s be clear about what we’re doing here

First up, let’s define what it is I’m describing. For purposes of this discussion, a clean install–or what Microsoft calls a custom install–is when you boot your PC with Windows 7 Setup media (typically a Setup DVD, but with this version it could also be a specially created, bootable USB memory device containing the Setup bits) with the intention of installing just Windows 7 on the PC. There could be a previous version of Windows (XP or Vista) installed on the PC already. You will either install Windows 7 to a separate partition or will wipe out the previous Windows version during Setup. (That is, you will not install Windows 7 on the same partition as your previous Windows version.) If it’s the latter, please–please–be sure to backup all your data first. Please.

A clean install with Upgrade media is just what it sounds like: You will perform a clean install of Windows 7 using an Upgrade version of Windows 7, instead of the so-called (and more expensive) “Full” version. Upgrade versions of Windows 7 are far more common than Full versions, both because they are less expensive and because Microsoft offered (and in some cases is still offering) exceptionally cheap pricing on Upgrade media.

Note: One such special offer, the Windows 7 Family Pack, consists of 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade media Setup discs and a single product key which can be used to activate three copies of the OS on three different PCs. The Family Pack costs $150, or just $30 more than a single copy of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade. It’s kind of a no-brainer.

But here’s the paradox. While anyone with a valid, licensed copy of Windows 2000, XP, or Vista qualifies for any Upgrade version of Windows 7–and by the way, that’s pretty much every single PC user on earth–only Vista users can do an in-place upgrade, which is the install type for which Upgrade media is optimized. If you’re an XP user (or, less likely, a Windows 2000 user), there’s no way to do an in-place upgrade. So you have to perform a migration, which consists of three steps:

1. Backup your crucial data and settings using Windows Easy Transfer (it’s on the Windows 7 Setup DVD) and make note of the applications that are installed, because you’ll have to manually reinstall them again after the fact.

2. Perform a clean install of Windows 7 using the Upgrade media. I describe this process in this article.

3. Restore your crucial data and settings using Windows Easy Transfer (part of Windows 7) and then reinstall your applications.

Put simply, there are millions of people out there who will be performing (or, as is too often the case, trying to perform) clean installs with Upgrade media. And for many of these people, inexplicably, it just won’t work. The reasons for these failures, again, seem to vary from PC to PC. But even without understanding the why of these failures, I think we can at least explain how to make it work.

Is this process bulletproof? I’m not sure yet, but I think so. In any event, here’s a checklist of things to try, in order from least painful to most painful. In my limited experience so far, one of these should work for you.

Note: In all of these methods, you should observe one simple rule. Do not enter your product key during Setup. Instead, you will attempt to activate Windows 7 manually after it is installed. So you can just enter your product key later.

Method #1: Just perform a clean install

Many, many readers report that they have been able to simply treat the Windows 7 Upgrade media as if it were Full media, and that it just works. And you know what? It doesn’t hurt to simply try this method, because if it doesn’t work, you can then try methods 2 and then 3, in order, afterwards. There is no downside to trying this.

Here’s what you do. Insert the Windows 7 Upgrade DVD in your PC’s optical disc, reboot the computer, boot off the DVD, and then follow the steps to install Windows 7. If you are installing onto a computer that already has another version of Windows, be sure to back everything up first. Do not attempt to install Windows 7 to the same partition as a previous Windows version. Do not provide your product key during Setup.

After Windows 7 is set up, run Windows Update, download any pending updates, reboot as needed, and repeat until there are no more updates. Then, type activate in Start Menu Search to bring up the Activate Windows utility. Type in your product key and attempt to activate Windows.

If it works, you’re all set. You’re done. Congratulations.

Note: I have now tested this method with the standard Windows 7 Upgrade media as well as with Windows 7 Family Pack media, the latter of which I assume is identical to standard Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade media.

Here’s what you do want to see.

If this does not work, move on to method 2.

Here’s what you don’t want to see. But don’t worry, we can overcome this.

Method #2: Registry hack

Open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from “1″ to “0″. (Double-click it and then enter 0 in the dialog that appears.)

Close RegEdit.

Open the Start Menu again and type cmd in Start Menu search to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose “Run as administrator.” Handle the UAC prompt.

In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm

Then tap ENTER and wait for the “Command completed successfully” dialog.

Then, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows utility, type in your product key and activate windows.

If it works, you’re all set. You’re done. Congratulations.

If this does not work, you can try two different things.

First, ensure there are no pending Windows Updates to install. In my experience, some of these can cause this method to fail. Install them and reboot PC. Re-run the command line (with administrative privileges) noted above, reboot again, and re-attempt the activation.

If that does not work, try method 3.

Method #3: The good old “double install” method

If the above two methods fail, you can always fall back on the old “double install” method that I previously documented for Windows Vista. There’s already a whole article dedicated to this topic, but here’s the short version since you’ve already done the initial install:

1. Insert the Windows 7 Setup DVD in the optical drive if it isn’t already there and choose Run Setup from the auto-run dialog that appears. Or, if it is already inserted, navigate to the optical drive in Computer and double-click is icon to trigger Setup.

2. At the appropriate stage of Setup, choose Upgrade (and not Custom). Windows 7 will install as before, though you might notice that it takes quite a bit longer this time. Because you’re upgrading this time, you won’t be prompted to enter your user name or most of the other information that you need to provide during a clean install. Using the user name (and password) you created during the first install, logon to Windows 7.

Now, activation should work. To activate Windows 7 immediately, type activate in Start Menu Search. This brings up the Activate Windows utility. Type in your product key and attempt to activate Windows.

Final thoughts … For now

There are a few other methods for clean installing Windows 7 with Upgrade media. I haven’t tried these yet, but I will, and as I do, I’ll update this article to describe these methods in more detail. But at least one of the methods described above should work for just about anyone.

Please let me know if you have any issues with this or if you discover another method that did work for you.

–Paul Thurrott
October 22-25, 2009

10 Most Useful Google Plugins for WordPress

WordPress is a great and most popular blogging platform for it possibility to extend functions with plugins. WordPress Plugins make blogging easier for all of us who have chosen WordPress as our content management system. Google is best known as a search engine and Internet giant, bul check what Google can offer for WordPress users. This post lists the most useful Wordpress plugins related to Google starting from XML Sitemaps and ending with FeedBurner subscribers counter.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

2. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator easily adds Google Analytics tracking support to a WordPress-powered blog. Google Analyticator also comes with an easily customizable widget that can be used to display specific information that is gathered by Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API.

3. Google Analytics for WordPress

This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where.

4. Google Website Optimizer for WordPress

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme.

5. Google Doc Embedder

Google Doc Embedder will allow you to embed a PDF, PowerPoint (PPT), or TIFF file directly into your page or post, not requiring the user to have Adobe Reader, PowerPoint, or other software installed to view the contents.

6. Easy AdSense

Easy AdSense provides a very easy way to generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. With its full set of features, Easy AdSense is perhaps the first plugin to give you a complete solution for everything AdSense-related.

7. XML Google Maps

This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Map or Google Earth Plugin Maps into your blog.

8. Google AJAX Translation

The Google AJAX Translation WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple, and light way to add translation to your blog. A “Translate” button can be added to the bottom or top of posts, pages, and/or comments.

9. Google Custom Search Plugin

The default search engine that ships with WordPress is not the best search engine and bloggers every where should make the switch to WordPress Google Custom Search plugin. This plugin is a drop in replacement and works with minimum hassle.

10. FeedBurnerCount

A well-optimized and reliable plugin that connects to the FeedBurner Awareness API to retrieve your readers count, that you can print out in plain text.

What do you think about these plugins? Do you use anyone from this list?  Might we haven’t listed your favorite Google related plugin? Share your thoughts in comments

Updated – Install Snow Leopard On Your Hackintosh PC

Two weeks ago I detailed how to build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, start to finish, with a little Terminal work. If you’re not comfortable with command-line hacking, now you can install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh with just a few point-and-clicks.

So what’s changed between my last guide and this one? In short, one of the incredibly helpful and generous people who helped walk me through the installation process last time was kind enough to wrap all the tedious Terminal work into one dead simple installer. Where two weeks ago I showed you how to prepare your thumb drive (and after that, hard drive) with a custom bootloader that allows you to boot into OS X on regular old PC hardware, now all you have to do is run a package, point it at the drive you want to prepare, and then let it take care of all the nitty gritty. It could not be more simple.

Now onto the revised process!

NOTE: Just like the last post, this guide is focused specifically on the hardware I suggested in the previous guide—specifically the motherboard. If you try following this guide on other hardware, there’s a very good chance it won’t work as advertised.

What You’ll Need

• Supported hardware. I laid out my list of supported hardware in my previous post here. It’s not the only hardware that will work with OS X, but it’s the only hardware that’s guaranteed to work with this guide.
• A USB thumb drive that’s at least 8GB in size.
• A copy of the Mac Box Set-though, honestly, Apple’s practically made it hard *not* to buy the fully functional install disc.
• Another Mac to prepare your thumb drive. (You’ll only need this other Mac for a few steps. I used my MacBook Pro, but you could also borrow a friends for an hour or so, too.)
• The EP45UD3P Snow Leopard install package. This package allows you to skip all the command line work in my last guide, and you can download it here.

Step One: Prepare Your Thumb Drive

In this step, you’re going to format your thumb drive and then restore the Snow Leopard DVD image to the thumb drive because later we’ll be installing Snow Leopard to your hard drive using this thumb drive rather than the DVD. Why? Because in order to boot the installer, we need to customise the disk image with some special helper files of our own.

I went into great detail on this process last time, so this time I’m just going to include the step-by-step video below (made by the same generous man who created the EP45UD3P Snow Leopard installer package). If you want to read the very detailed version for a detailed explanation of how to rip the Snow Leopard install DVD to a disk image and then restore that image to your thumb drive, go here. (Come back when you get to the “Semi-heavy Terminal work” warning. That’s when you’re ready for the new and improved easy part.)

Note: Watch the video in HD and fullscreen to get a closer look at everything that’s happening.

As you can see in the video, after you restore the Snow Leopard install DVD to your thumb drive, all you’ve got to do is fire up the EP45UD3P Snow Leopard.pkg file (if you haven’t already downloaded and unzipped it, you can grab it here), select your thumb drive, and, let the installer take care of all the dirty work that you previously had to do one line at a time in Terminal.

Once you’ve finished there, you’re ready to set your BIOS and install Snow Leopard.

Step 2: Set Your BIOS

Before you can boot into or install OS X on your Hackintosh, you’ve got to make some small adjustments to your system BIOS (press Delete at system startup to tweak your BIOS settings). Rather than taking you step by step through every change you need to make, I’ve simply snapped a picture of the relevant BIOS screens and added some notes. Just go to Step 2 here and make sure your BIOS settings match up.

Step 3: Install Snow Leopard

If you’ve made it this far, the hard part is over. Now it’s time to install Snow Leopard, which—unlike what we’ve done so far—is extremely easy.

Make sure you’ve set the boot priority in your BIOS to boot from your thumb drive (you can see how in Step 2: Set Your Hard Disk Boot Priority), then simply plug your prepared thumb drive into your Hackintosh and power it up. Since screenshots aren’t really an option—and since it’s a fairly easy process—my install instructions come in video format:

The quick version goes like this: Boot into the Snow Leopard installer, format the hard drive you want to install Snow Leopard to (go to Utilities -> Disk Utility, then click on the drive, select 1 Partition, Mac OS X Journaled (Case-Sensitive Update: Several readers have suggested that case-sensitive formatting can cause problems with some applications, like Adobe’s Creative Suite, so you may be better off sticking with plain old Mac OS X Journaled.), give it a name, and make sure GUID Partition Table is set in the Options. After you Apply the new partition, go back to the installer and install like normal to that drive. When you reboot after the install completes, press the arrow keys at the graphical boot menu and select the drive you just installed Snow Leopard to.

Two Last Tweaks

You could just stop there and be pretty happy at your new Hackintosh, but there are two little, easily performed tweaks you’ll want to tackle to get everything in tip top shape: The first will get your sound fully working, and the second will allow you to boot into Snow Leopard without your thumb drive.

Tweak One: Snow Leopard should be up and running on your Hackintosh like a dream—with one exception: Sound isn’t entirely working yet. You may notice that sound actually does work in some instances, but not all. In the old guide, you needed to install a custom audio kext (your Mac’s equivalent to a driver); the setup has been slightly tweaked in this new method, so all you should actually need to do is open up the Sound preference pane in System Preferences (/Applications/System Preferences), click the Output tab, and change the output device to Built-in Line output (I haven’t tested with digital out, but it should in theory work fine).

Tweak Two: At this point, in order to boot to your newly installed Snow Leopard installation, you need to have your thumb drive plugged in so it loads the custom bootloader, from which you can select your new Snow Leopard hard drive. To install the custom bootloader to your hard drive (so you no longer need the thumb drive to boot), again download the EP45UD3P Snow Leopard.pkg zip file and run it, but this time, instead of choosing to install the package to your thumb drive, select the hard drive you’ve installed Snow Leopard to. Once the installer completes, you’ll no longer need your thumb drive plugged in to boot into Snow Leopard.

Congratulations! You’ve Got a Fully Functional Hackintosh—the Easy Way

Where the method I covered previously required a good amount of time and care in Terminal, this new and improved method is a breeze, and it works even better. (Sound works out of the box without any custom kexts, for example.)

It’s also worth noting that you can go ahead an upgrade to OS X 10.6.1 without any problems.

If you’ve given the Hackintosh route a try since my first post, let’s hear how it’s been working out for you in the comments. If this extra ease-of-installation was just what the doctor ordered, go grab the parts listed in the last post and get ready for a fun weekend.

Animoto Now Lets You Remix Video Clips; It’s Simply Awesome

Gmail Tip – How To Send E-Mail From Another Address Without “On Behalf Of”

Quite a few of you use Gmail’s custom “From:” to send messages with one of your other email addresses listed in place of your Gmail address. Since these messages are sent by Gmail’s servers but “from” a non-Gmail address, we have to include your original Gmail username in the “Sender” field of the message header to comply with mail delivery protocols and help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email programs just display the “From” address and not the “Sender” field, but some (including versions of Microsoft Outlook) show these messages as coming “From username@gmail.com On Behalf Of customaddress@mydomain.com” which really annoyed people.
We heard your request for another option that wouldn’t show the “on behalf of” text loud and clear, and now there’s a new option that does just that. Instead of using Gmail’s servers to send the message, we’ll use the servers where your other email address lives. Since Gmail isn’t the originating domain, we don’t have to include “Sender” info in the header. No more “on behalf of.”

Here’s the difference. All custom “From:” addresses used to work like this:

Now, if your other email provider supports POP and/or IMAP access, you can choose to send your message like this instead:

To switch to this new method, go to the Accounts page under Settings, and click “edit info” from the “Send mail as” section. Then choose the option to “Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers.”
We recognize that your other address might not have a server that you can use to send outbound messages — for example, if you use a forwarding alias rather than an actual mailbox, or if your other email provider doesn’t support authenticated SMTP, or restricts access to specific IP ranges. For this reason, we’ve kept the original method as well. Check out our Help Center for further details on these two “send mail as” configuration options.
If you use Google Apps Premier or Education edition and would like to send mail as another address within your domain or within an aliased domain, no sweat. We do all the work behind the scenes so your original username won’t be listed in the “Sender” header, and your recipients won’t see “on behalf of.”

How to Delete a Single Saved Form Data Entry in Mozilla Firefox

Have you ever mistyped and saved something in a form while using Firefox? How about submitting something on a form that you’ll never need to use again? When you go to enter information in a form, does it gives you a long list of suggestions, when you regularly only use one entry? As a regular user of products like Google Calendar I often have this problem. Here is a simple trick that will let you clear out the bad or outdated form entries, without clearing all of your form data.

• Go to the form where the mistake is.

• Put your cursor in the text entry widget and hit down until the incorrect entry is highlighted.

• Now press shift + delete

It’s that simple. I hope this helps. Kevin

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3) Part 3 – How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3)

Part 1 – File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

Part 2 – Adding External Storage

It doesn’t matter if you have the 20GB, 60GB, or even the new 80GB PlayStation 3 — you can always use more storage space. All that available hard-disk space quickly disappears once you start downloading games, demos, and HD videos. Fortunately, Sony has designed the PS3 to allow console owners to perform their own hard-drive upgrades. You can go out and select your own hard drive instead of being forced to buy an official first-party hard-disk accessory. However, giving console owners that freedom means that aspiring upgraders will need to know how to select the right hard-drive upgrade and the proper installation technique.

Hard-disk manufacturer Seagate supplied us with a 160GB Momentus 5400.3 for our upgrade.

The first step to replacing the hard disk is going to the store or visiting an online retailer to pick up a new hard disk. The PS3 is compatible with just about any 2.5-inch SATA notebook hard disk. Both 5400-RPM and 7200-RPM drives should work fine. The physical size of the hard disk is important because it has to fit the PS3’s 2.5-inch drive tray. As far as storage capacity goes, it doesn’t make sense to go through the trouble of upgrading unless you go big: We’re talking 120GB, 160GB, or even 250GB.

Once you have your upgrade drive, the next step is to back up the data on your current PS3 hard drive to an external storage unit. You can skip this step if you aren’t attached to your music, videos, and game saves, but most of us will probably want to save all that information. The PS3 has a built-in software backup utility that can copy the PS3’s hard-drive contents to an external storage device, such as a USB thumb drive or a memory stick. The removable storage device must use the FAT32 file system in order for the PS3 to recognise it. If you have an external hard drive that’s formatted in NTFS, you can use the Disk Management utility in Windows to reformat the drive, but you’ll need to create partitions on large external hard drives because Windows can only do FAT32 on drives 32GB or smaller.

Save your data using the PS3’s backup utility.

If your storage device isn’t large enough to handle a full system backup, you can selectively copy data over through the various music, photo, and game menus in the XMB. Your PlayStation Network login and system settings will remain safe on the system during the entire process. After you have your data safely backed up, you can move on to the actual hard-drive swap.

You will need a Phillips-head screwdriver to complete this part of the installation process. The PS3 owner’s manual also includes step-by-step details on how to replace the hard drive, in case you need more instructions.

Turn off and unplug the system. Remove the plastic HD side-panel, and remove the blue screw.

Open the metal latch, move the drive tray to the right, and slide out the drive.

Remove the four screws that hold the hard drive to the tray. Use a screwdriver that fits snugly because the screws are extremely tight and easy to strip.

Swap in the new drive, and replace the screws.

Put the drive tray back into the system and slide it into place. Then replace the blue screw and snap the side panel back onto the system.

Turn on the console and let the system format the new drive. Then load up the PS3 backup utility to restore data from your external storage device back onto the PS3 hard drive.

At this point you should have a newly upgraded PS3 and the leftover hard drive. You could try selling the old drive, but small-capacity used drives might not fetch enough money to be worth the hassle of finding a buyer. If you still want to make the drive useful, you can buy an external drive enclosure to make it into a portable storage device.

Automatically Backup your Computer with SyncToy 2.0

While we all know that it is important to backup our computer files, how many of us ever really do it. Even with the best of intentions it often gets forgotten, that’s why the process needs to be automated. After experimenting with a few different types of backup software I have found the most reliable to be Microsoft SyncToy 2.0, and the good news is it’s completely free.

Schedule SyncToy 2.0

While you do not have to schedule SyncToy to use it, some users may find it helpful to schedule recurrent SyncToy runs. Perhaps you have a folder pair that takes a long time to sync and you want to run SyncToy in the middle of the night, for example.

SyncToy does not provide a user interface to schedule folder pairs to run at designated times. However, there is a method to schedule tasks using the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Windows Vista

To schedule a task using the operating system:

1. From the Start menu, search for Task Scheduler.
2. Select Create Basic Task in the Actions pane on the right.
3. Add a Name and Description and select Next.
4. Choose when you want the task to start and select Next.
5. Choose date/times (if applicable) to run task and select Next.
6. Choose Start a Program option and select Next.
7. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe. (Programs, SyncToy)
8. Type “-R” in the Add Arguments textbox. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\ and that you want to run a folder pair named “My folder pair.” Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\SyncToyCmd.exe” -R “My folder pair.” Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Windows XP

To schedule a task using the operating system:

1. From the Start menu, select All Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Scheduled Tasks.
2. Select Add scheduled task to start the Scheduled Task Wizard. You will see a list of possible programs to run.
3. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe.
4. The wizard will next prompt you to enter how often you want to run the scheduled SyncToy (for example, daily, weekly, et cetera). Select a frequency.
5. The next page asks when to start the task. Select a start time.
6. The next page asks for the user name and password to run the program under. Enter your user name and password.
7. The final page contains an option to open the properties dialog when the wizard ends. Select this checkbox.
8. Modify the Run textbox to include the –R command line option. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0 and that you want to run a folder pair named “My folder pair.” Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\SyncToyCmd.exe” -R “My folder pair.” Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Note: With this version of SyncToy, it is now possible to schedule execution of a folder pair in the following scenarios:

1. No one is currently logged into the machine.
2. A different user is logged into the machine.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3) Part 2 – Adding External Storage

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3)

Part 1 – File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

Part 3 – How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

The Playstation 3 is available with several different hard drive sizes, but quite often you may want or need a bigger one. You can replace the internal hard drive using a standard laptop hard drive, but this tends to be expensive. An easier and cheaper method is to add an external hard drive to your Playstation.

1. Connect the hard drive to your computer using a USB cord.
2. Check what the drives  "File System" type is by going to Start, Computer, Right click on the USB drive, and select Properties.
3. The file system type must be "FAT32" in order for the Playstation 3 to recognize it. If it is a different format please read this article explain how to format a large USB drive.  
4. Once you have confirmed the file format you need to create a folder system identical to that on the Playstation 3.
5. Please create four folders labelled "Picture" (not Photo), "Music", "Video" and "Game".
6. Load all the music you want into your music folder, all the video you want into your video folder, and all the photos you want into your picture folder. Your game folder should still be empty.
7. Disconnect the hard drive by clicking the green arrow in the icon list and the bottom right hand corner of the screen and select "Safely remove…"
8. Once your computer tells you "XXX drive can now be safely removed", unplug the hard drive from your computer.
9. Connect the hard drive to your Playstation 3 and use the extra space to save information and access all your extra content saved on your external hard drive.

 

Tips

Alternatively to the "prebuilt" folder system, you can press triangle on your hard drive and click "Display All", but you still need to select Video to see video files.

Folder system works as follows – Dir/files* or Dir/folder/files – example: Video/files* or Video/Home Movies/files* – Dir/folder/folder/files doesn’t work without "Display All" explained above – example: Video/TV Shows/Simpson’s/files*

You can copy files to and from HDD & PS3 but you cannot edit files/folders on the HDD from the PS3 – you must copy to PS3 or do it from your computer.

If you lay your Playstation horizontally, do not place the external hard drive on the right side where the exhaust fans are aimed. The air coming out of the Playstation is very hot and will cause your external hard drive to malfunction.

DO NOT PLAY WITH YOUR PS3 VERTICALLY! IT WILL SLOWLY RUIN THE LASER READER AND WILL NO LONGER RECOGNIZE ANY DISCS YOU PUT INSIDE…

How to Convert a Large External USB Hard Drive to FAT32

When working from a Windows environment (particularly Windows XP), you may experience difficulty using the default Windows format tool to format your large external USB hard drive as Fat32.

This is due in part to the fact that the Windows format tool can only format a drive using the Fat32 if the drive is 32GB or smaller.

While a great number of external hard drives are being manufactured with capacities in excess of 40GB we indeed need another method of formatting these devices using a single Fat32 partition.

After dabbling a bit with a few different free software formatting tools that are launchable from within Windows, I have come to a nice solution. The utility is called CompuApps SwissKnife and works great for those that need to format their USB hard drives from a Windows XP environment.

SwissKnife is a stand alone solution that will allow you to format your external USB devices as Fat32 so that the information you put on the device can be read across multiple operating platforms. This is great since some of us are using Linux, Unix and other operating environments along with Windows and wish to access our data via these platforms.

Below is a simple screenshot of the application:

The application is easy to navigate and straightforward to use.

It is completely free to use and you can grab it from HERE

The product website is HERE

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