Catch that hard drive before it croaks
It only takes one catastrophic hard drive failure to make a strong man weep and to induce well-adjusted people into thrashing their PCs with baseball bats. In hopes of preventing further violence, a company called BinarySense has released a version of its HDDLife utility for notebooks.
HDDLife monitors the health of a PC's hard drive. A free version is available only for desktop PCs, but HDDLife Pro and the new HDDLife for Notebooks allow users to see a graphical representation of how much time they have left before that term paper vanishes and their system grinds to a halt. The software suggests whether a drive is about to crash or is in need of closer attention, giving a user time to backup files and seek assistance. The software can also put the drive into a standby mode if it detects overheating.
The utility supports all major types of hard drives, including Serial ATA, IDE and SCSI drives. The notebook version can be downloaded for $49. That may seems expensive, but hard drive recovery services charge far more.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
