Format a USB Drive as NTFS in Windows XP

Windows XP only: Today's USB flash drives are huge, but they come formatted with the FAT32 limit of 4GB files—if you want to format them as NTFS under Windows XP you'll need a little trick.

Windows XP does have the ability to format drives with the NTFS file system, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the format dialog—normally the option is disabled. To enable it, open up Device Manager and find your USB drive, go to the Properties -> Policies tab and then choose "Optimize for performance". Once you've done this, you'll see the NTFS option in the format dialog.

Readers should be warned, however, that once you've enabled write caching you will need to use the Safely Remove Hardware dialog to avoid losing data—though once you format the drive as NTFS you can switch the write caching back off.

The choice between NTFS and FAT32 isn't cut-and-dry—while NTFS does allow larger file sizes, encryption, compression, and permissions, there's a lot more overhead to using it—and more importantly it won't really work on non-Windows systems. Hit the link for the full walk-through and more information about the pros and cons.

Gmail Search Autocomplete Makes Searching Your Inbox a Breeze

Gmail Labs has released a great new Search Autocomplete feature today that offers search suggestions for all kinds of Gmail searches, from simple search-by-contacts to more advanced search queries—like for specific attachments.

The autocomplete is very smart, too, so when you want to search for a specific attachment type—like photos—you can just choose the has photos autocomplete, and

Gmail will generate the much more complicated filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png) search operators. Handy, huh?

Likewise, it'll autogenerate the before and after date operators for you (before:yyyy/mm/dd), which have always been too complicated to remember all that well. As always, to enable this feature, just point your browser to Gmail Labs, enable Search Autocomplete, save your changes, and enjoy.

MindRaider Organizes and Visualizes Any Note Style

Windows/Mac/Linux: MindRaider wants to be the place you stash all your sudden thoughts, organizational notes, and inter-connected ideas. That's because it offers links, visualizations, and other tools to help you make sense of it all.

From the outset, MindRaider, a Java app that can run on any system that supports Java, looks like a kind of multi-window outlining program. And it is, in a way, but the idea is to use it as an uber-outline. You can attach files to

notes, or create symbolic links to local files. You can inter-link notes, documents, and outlines, use contextual tagging for an extra layer of finding something later, and use any of the pre-defined categories to segment out your ideas into broad containers. It supports a huge range of note formats, from simple text file to TWiki exports, and has a number of visualizations that help you kinetically wheel your thoughts around and pick what to fill out next.

Honestly? It's an application that would take more than just a glance and quick twiddle with to get comfortable and productive in. That sounds like a deal-breaker to most idealistic productivity minds, of course, but it looks like MindRaider can be pretty powerful, once you get your system rolling with it.

MindRaider is a free download, works wherever Java does.

Download Link : http://mindraider.sourceforge.net/