Hard-Drive Headaches

Your eyes throb. your blood pressure soars. A deadline is crashing down on you, but you're staring helplessly at a "System Error" warning on your computer screen. Your machine has frozen up, you don't know why, and there's no one around to help you out. Suddenly you feel as if you're starring in that old commercial: Pressure. Tension. Pain.

R*E*L*I*E*F is on the way. We've isolated four common causes of the chronic aches and pains associated with the personal computer. And we've tested and selected the best modern pain medicine that money can buy: utilities and software that will return your machine to good health and protect it from recurring ailments. All you need do is follow the doctor's orders.

There now. Feeling better?

Medicine for a Messy Hard Drive

You need that report. You need it now. No excuses. And no file. Of course you've got it - somewhere. It's in that 2-GB mass of data that you've dumped into your hard drive over the years. But where?

Your mother always told you that neatness counts, and now - too late - you believe her. A good way to get organized and to keep track of files is to slice up your hard drive into independent segments called "partitions." Doing so tells your computer to treat one large drive (say, the C drive) as if it were several smaller drives (say, the C, D, E, and F drives). Then you can store, say, programs on the C drive, text documents on the D drive, financial data on the E drive, and so on. There's also a bonus: Partitioning often opens up more usable space on the original drive.

So why doesn't everyone use partitioning? Setting it up used to require a total wipeout of your hard drive. Not anymore. Now you can use PowerQuest's PartitionMagic 3.0 ($69.95), a clever utility that lets you rearrange disk partitions in minutes - while leaving all your data in place.

PartitionMagic is a straightforward, menu-driven program that walks you through the setup. You decide how much space to assign to each partition. For example, you can create a fat partition for bloated applications and several skinny ones for different types of data. Then you give each partition a name that will help you remember what's inside. Suddenly, it's a lot harder to misplace a file.

Got a lot of files that you use only occasionally? Keep them zipped up. Zip utilities compress large files or bundle multiple files into a single portable package. They're also an excellent way to separate the ephemeral from the essential, since they can zip dozens of rarely used files into one handy folder. That way, you'll know where you stored that one-year-old document - and be able to access it when you need to.

One of the best zip utilities is Quarterdeck's Zip-It ($39). Along with other top-notch features, Zip-It lets you view the contents of any zipped file that you find on the Web - without having to download it.

Even if you're the quintessential Organization Man (or Woman), you still have days when you can't put your cursor on an elusive document. Fortunately, the Digital engineers who built the AltaVista search engine have created a hot search tool for PCs that run on Windows 95ffNT.

AltaVista Personal Search 97 works on the same principle as AltaVista, which constantly trolls the Internet for new Web pages and creates a word index of every page it finds. When you run an AltaVista search, you're not searching the Web - you're searching that index. Personal Search 97 does the same thing for your hard drive. It generates and updates an index of every text file on the drive, including emails and word-processor documents.

As with the Internet version, you can search your personal AltaVista index by using any Web browser. Can't remember where you put the Hudsucker proxy? Just open your browser, type "Hudsucker," and this search engine will guide you to it. Personal Search 97 is a superb way to grab important data quickly, and there's no arguing with the price: It's free for the downloading at the AltaVista site.

Coordinates: PowerQuest Corp., http://www.powerquest.com; Quarterdeck Corp., http://www.quarterdeck.com; Digital Equipment Corp., http://www.altavista.digital.com

Remedies for Road Warriors

There you are, 2,000 miles from the office. You boot up your laptop to make a pitch to a hot prospect. Only the presentation isn't there. It's safe and sound - and a couple of time zones away. Rushing to catch the plane, you forgot to transfer those PowerPoint slides from your desktop to your portable. Oh, what a feeling!

It takes just one of these horror stories to understand why remote-control software is so popular: These programs enable you to retrieve files from your desktop computer - even when you're dialing in from the other side of the world. Products like Symantec's pcANYWHERE32 ($149.95) let your laptop link directly with your office PC. Need to control the office Macintosh from your PC laptop? Then consider Netopia's Timbuktu Pro ($139 for Macs; $99.95 for PCs), your best bet for a cross-platform solution.