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Closed down a tab you needed in Safari? In the latest version, the same keyboard shortcut you’d use to undo an oopsie in any other program will bring it back. That’s right—Command+Z (Control+Z on Windows) to the rescue.

It makes sense, of course, but it’s also different from the Command+Shift+T (Control+Shift+T) standard that’s emerged on Firefox and Chrome browsers on Mac and Windows. Still, knowing this shortcut should save you some time from looking for an extension to get the same job done.

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You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures.

10. Quiet It Down

Over time, the moving parts and powered pieces that move your magnetic disks around at lightning speed will wear, age, and get noisy. In a desktop computer (a Windows PC, generally), you can quiet the drive with rubber shock absorbers or elastic suspension. Toting a laptop? NotebookReview has a good starter guide to cleaning your laptop, which reduces noise, removes dust, lowers temperatures, and gives your drive a bit more life—never a bad thing. (Original posts: Rubber shocks, elastic).

9. Erase It Entirely, the Right Way

There’s a huge range of tools that offer spy-agency-level data wiping—some of them are complete overkill. What software actually wipes the slate clean? Jason ran through them and picked out the good stuff, along with the physical, take-no-prisoners means of data destruction, in his advice on how to properly erase your physical media. If you need to pass on or reuse a disk, those apps and boot CDs will get you there. When you just need to make sure your credit card numbers are hidden forever, there’s always a hammer. No, seriously.

8. Make a Complete Image

Backups keep your data safe, but a complete image of your system on an external drive ensures that everything—applications, data, settings, wallpaper choice, the whole shot—make it back onto your system if things go wrong. Windows users can image their hard drives with DriveImage XML, a great free tool. Another free tool, SuperDuper, makes it easy, if not exactly quick, to mirror your entire Mac onto an external drive.

7. Convert It to an External Drive

Whether it’s an old desktop with a surprisingly large drive, or a laptop that’s getting an upgrade, you can save that once built-in storage and turn it into an external drive, one you can just plug in with a USB cable and use for backup, media storage, or whatever you need.

6. Visualize Your Usage to Free Up Space

The strangest stuff ends up clogging up your hard drive unnecessarily. Leftover files from CD rips, huge data folders from games, backup files for apps you don’t have installed—the list goes on. We’ve previously shown how to visualize your usage, but we updated with a new look at more simple tools for analyzing and freeing up space on your hard drive. Once you know what’s there, and how big it is, you can start toward getting rid of some of it.

5. Recover Files and Rescue Your System

When things go wrong with your hard drive, they usually go really wrong—lost files, no booting, and general panic ensues. Adam’s run down recovering deleted files with free software, with a focus on Windows utilities, with a few cross-platform goodies sprinkled in. When you can’t get into your system, we heartily recommend a live Ubuntu thumb drive to grab files and fix things up, though a system rescue CD session can work wonders, too. When we put the call out, the answer that came back for the best recovery tool was Recuva, a Windows utility that can save files from hard drives, SD cards, iPods, and much more.

4. Install a Drive Yourself

Tech shops and laptop sellers will charge you a good bit over the parts cost to install a new, likely larger hard drive in a computer. Whether it’s a desktop, a MacBook, or an SSD drive, you can likely take an hour and tackle it yourself. Adam explained the desktop hard drive installation, while tech blogger Dwight Silverman has explained a MacBook hard drive upgrade. Each laptop is build differently, but if a solid-state drive is in your future, this tutorial on MacBook installation should give you some general guidance on the job. It’s a good skill to have, in general, because as Silverman writes, “Whatever you have now, it’s not enough. And when you add more, that won’t be enough, either.” (Original post: MacBook hard drive).

3. Dual-Boot Windows, Mac, and/or Linux

Just because your computer only came with one operating system doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. If you’re a Mac owner who’d like a little Windows time now and again, read up on Gina’s guide to setting up Boot Camp for Mac and Windows. If Windows 7 looks appealing, and a virtualized XP Mode isn’t quite enough oomph, you can still boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista, and just choose your Windows flavor at start-up. And if you’re keen on giving Linux a real go, why not dual boot it with Windows 7 in a way that makes it easy on both systems? It’s so nice when everybody at the (partition) table just gets along.

2. Upgrade It Without Re-Installing

Maybe you’ve settled on a spacious new hard drive for your laptop, a solid-state drive for durability, or just need to rescue your stuff before your drive goes. Time to re-install Windows, right? Not so much. Using the Clonezilla Live CD, it’s possible to upgrade to a spacious new hard drive without having to completely re-arrange your operating system and applications, and tediously transfer all your media over. It’s a step-by-step process, it’s fairly straightforward, and you get to trick Windows, somewhat, into believing that nothing ever happened, which can be its own reward.

1. Automatically Back It Up

Don’t sell your computer data short—even if your documents don’t seem all that important, the time you spent setting installing applications and putting everything in order is definitely worth saving. If you’ve got a good spare hard drive or an web space you can FTP into, you can set up automatic hard drive backup through Windows. Most folks, though, will want to go with one or both of two routes: online backup, for the entire-house-burns-down security, and/or offline backup, for speedy backups and convenient restoring. The best tools for doing so, when we asked, were Dropbox for online syncing—even though it’s not exactly proper backup—and Time Machine for external hard drive backups. For two solutions that make the process mostly painless and care-free, try web-based, automated systems like Mozy or Carbonite.

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You’re planning on upgrading your hard drive, but there’s one small problem: How do you get your data from the old hard drive to the new one, without reinstalling everything? Here’s a step-by-step guide to seamlessly transition to a new drive.

If you’ve bumped up against the limits of your small, old hard drive over and over, it may be time to upgrade. In some instances, all the desktop user may need to do is install a second (or third) hard drive for a little more space. But that’s not always an option, especially for laptop users. The solution: Clone your old drive—complete with your operating system and all your data—to a new, bigger drive.

For the purpose of this article, we’re going to start after the point at which you’ve physically installed the hard drive—there’s just a couple of screws and a cable, after all, but if you still need some help you can check out our guide to installing a hard drive for a primer on the basic technique.

Below, we’ll highlight a few tools that can help you clone your old hard drive to a new one (and choose a favorite we’ll use), detail a few of the finer points for getting started on a laptop or desktop computer, then guide you through the cloning and upgrading process.

Options for Cloning Your Drive

To upgrade your hard drive without reinstalling everything, you’ll need to use a utility to make an exact copy, or clone, from the old hard drive to the new one. A number of commercial tools will do this for you, and even some free Windows utilities can make a copy of your drive while your PC is running. For example, see our guide to using DriveImageXML to hot image your PC’s hard drive, which is an excellent tool for making a backup. The problem, however, is that it doesn’t create a true clone of the drive, since you’d still have to reinstall the Windows bootloader using a repair CD if you wanted to boot into your cloned drive.

The bigger problem, particularly if you’re upgrading a laptop, is that you need to have a copy of Windows already running for most of the free utilities to work; most laptops can only have one drive hooked up at a time. In this case, your best free option is the Linux-based Clonezilla Live CD, which streamlines the process of imaging your drive to an external drive or even a shared folder on another PC.

Upgrading a Desktop Hard Drive

When it comes to upgrades, desktops are always going to be easier to deal with since you can easily get in there and move cables around, and in this case, because you can hook both drives up at the same time, greatly simplifying the whole process.

What you’ll want to do is hook the new drive up—since we’ll be using a boot CD, you can save a step by plugging the new hard drive into the primary slot, and move the old one to the secondary—so once the cloning is done you won’t have to do anything else.

Upgrading a Laptop Hard Drive

Method One: While some laptops have the capability to swap out the optical drive and add another hard drive, it’s not common, so you’ll need to use an external USB hard drive, or potentially another PC with a shared folder, to save an image of the current drive. Once you’ve created the image, you can install the new drive, and then restore the image onto the new hard drive.

Method Two: Your other option is to install the new hard drive, use an external USB to SATA adapter to hook the old drive to the laptop, and then clone the drives that way. This eliminates the extra step of copying to a secondary device, but requires spending a little extra money for something you might not use very often—so you might want to borrow one from a geek friend that does PC repair (or just use the first method above).

How to Clone Your Drive with Clonezilla

Now we’re ready to clone our old drive to our new one. The first thing you’ll need to do is download a copy of the Clonezilla ISO image, and then use a software like ImgBurn to burn it to a CD. For best results, you should grab the Alternative Ubuntu-based version, which has better compatibility with modern hardware.

Once you’ve got the live CD burnt to a disc, restart your computer, boot off the CD, and accept all the default settings until you get to the screen where you can choose to create an image of the drive, or sync one drive directly to another drive. If you have both drives connected, you can simply use the device to device option, otherwise choose to create an image.

Assuming you chose to create an image, you will need to choose where the image will be stored, whether on an external drive, SSH server, or you can use the SAMBA option, which will allow you to connect to a Windows shared folder to store the image. Either of the latter two options will step you through a set of wizard screens to help you get hooked up to the server.

If you chose the local device option, you’ll be prompted to select the drive that you want to save the image on. Make sure that this drive is formatted with NTFS or a Linux filesystem—you should not use a drive with FAT32 since the 4GB maximum file size will probably cause the cloning to fail.

At this point you’ll be prompted to either save or restore a disk or partition—you should always use the disk image option here, and not single partitions, as you need the bootloader to stay intact on the new drive to make sure Windows is bootable. Since we’re making an image file here, choose the first option, and follow through the wizard to select the drive and give it a name.

Creating the cloned drive image will take a while, but at the end you should see the option to shutdown or restart your PC. Laptop users, it’s time to swap out the old hard drive with the new one, so we can restore the cloned image. If you did a direct disk to disk copy (which you probably did if you’re on a desktop), you can skip the next step (”Finishing Up”).

Restoring the Cloned Image

Now that you have the new hard drive installed in the PC, boot off Clonezilla again, follow through all of the same prompts until you get to the screen where you have to choose to save or restore the image. Choose the restoredisk option, choose the image to restore from (it’s the one we just created above), and then choose the new disk that you want to overwrite.

You’ll be prompted twice to make sure that you really want to overwrite the drive (make sure you’ve got the right drive installed—that is, the new, big, empty one), and the restore process will take a while. Once it’s all done, you can remove the CD and reboot the PC from your new drive, directly into Windows.

Bonus: The Expert Linux Method

If you’re a little more comfortable with Linux, there’s any number of command-line tools like partimage or dd that can get the job done easily from an Linux Live CD. For instance, to copy one drive to another using dd, simply use the following command, substituting sda and sdb for your source and destination device names

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

To create an image file instead, you can use a command similar to the following one suggested by reader @zarekthenerd, substituting sda for your source drive name, and modifying the path to your external hard drive:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img bs=4096

Once you’ve created the image, you can swap out your hard drive, boot from the live CD again, and then reverse the command:

dd if=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img of=/dev/sda bs=4096

Finishing Up: Boot Up and Expand the Partition

Now that we’re all done cloning the drive, all you need to do is boot up your PC, wait for Windows to finish figuring out that you have a new drive and installing the device drivers, and then we’re ready to fix the one remaining problem—the current drive partition is the same size as the old drive.

If you’re using Windows 7 or Vista, open up Windows Disk Management through the Start menu search box, or by right-clicking on Computer and choosing the Manage option. Once there, right-click the partition and choose Extend Volume to make the partition fill the entire disk.

At this point you should be able to head into Computer and see that your new hard drive is now nice and spacious.

f you’re using Windows XP, you’re going to have to take another route (it doesn’t have a robust, built-in partition manager); you could choose to create another partition, or if you want to resize your primary partition, you can boot from the GParted Live CD and make the changes in there by clicking on the partition and using the Resize/Move button.

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Windows 7’s taskbar is undoubtedly a great addition to Windows, but if you’ve got more than one application window open, you’ve got to either click twice or patiently hover to navigate to an open window. Reader Richard details how he fixed this:

I’ve been frustrated as of late with the Windows 7 taskbar (which led me to try hot-dogging it on the left-hand side as detailed here—by the way GREAT and useful tips in the 331 comments!). The fundamental problem was that you needed two clicks to navigate to your document if you have two instances of a program running. Or you’re stuck with hovering for what feels like an eternity.

At Windows 7 Forums I finally found a nice step in the right direction. Full post is here, but summarized below. In short, this hack causes an applications last active window to activate when you click the taskbar icon, and the next window in the second click, etc. The hover preview still works if you hover to begin with, but if you want the preview after you’ve click on an app’s icon in the taskbar, you can Ctrl+Click to bring it back. The current default settings are the exact opposite (that is, Ctrl+Click cycles through the last active windows of an application).

Launch regedit.exe (Win+R, then paste regedit.exe)
Navigate in the left tree control to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
Go to Edit->New->DWORD (32-bit) Value
Name the value LastActiveClick
Hit enter to assign the value and change it to 1
Restart Explorer and you’re good to go.

To restart Explorer without rebooting, open the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and end the Explorer.exe process. Then create a new task (under “File”) and paste “explorer.exe”.

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In college, as the burgeoning P2P world opened up before me, I spent four years moving, burning, and ultimately sacrificing the free and ambiguously legal media I had been downloading on my 20GB laptop.

Since that time PVR functionality has replaced my P2P addiction (sort of), and my used hard drive space is still bumping up against its limits. Now that I’m out of college and enjoying the luxury of a desktop computer, I need worry no longer about limited storage.

Adding new hard drive devices to your PC is a quick and simple operation. With hard drives available to the discerning buyer for prices as low as $0.25/GB, greatly expanding the storage space inside your computer has never been cheaper.

That’s right, inside. For half the price of an external hard drive and slightly more work, you can add a new hard drive inside your computer with ease.

To those of you afraid of opening up your computer:

Computer hardware isn t the mysterious bad-boy you always thought. It s actually more like the mysterious bad-boy who just wants to be loved. Once you show hardware acceptance, it ll open up and totally love you back.

Please note:

Opening up your computer comes with some risk. Always keep safety in mind when working inside your computer (as you should with any electrical device). That said, getting comfortable with cracking it open and fiddling around opens up a whole new world of options and upgrades to your personal computing experience.

Whether you’re installing an IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics, aka ATA or PATA, common for older hard drives and optical drives) or SATA drive (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment – the newer, faster interface supported by most newer motherboards), the installation process is virtually the same and very easy. It’s up to you to find out what interfaces are supported by your motherboard. As always, be sure to read your manual so that you know the in’s and out’s of your computer before attempting any installation.

What you’ll need:

• Hard drive device or optical drive
• The appropriate interface cords (should be included with your hard drive)
• Phillips screwdriver
• Needlenose pliers (IDE only)
• Your computer

For my sample installation, I’ll be using the IDE hard drive pictured above.

Step 1: Install new drive software

In many cases, the hard drive will come with software to run before installing the drive. To be sure, read the manual accompanying your hard drive. Most of the time hard drive installation can be successfully completed without taking this step, but this included software can be very helpful when it comes time to format and set up the drive.

Step 2: Prepare your computer

To get your computer ready, you need to make it safe. That means turning off the switch on the back of the power supply unit. (If you’re going to be using your PSU as a grounded metal source, you’ll want to keep it plugged in. If you have another ground, it’s best to unplug the computer completely.) After turning off the power supply, wait at least 10 seconds before cracking open your case to allow the motherboard’s capacitors to discharge. Once you’ve done this, you can sigh a deep breath of relief – you’ve circumvented the most dangerous aspect of installing your hard drive – electricity.

Once you’ve rendered your computer powerless, it’s time to open up your case. This process varies from case to case, but it’s relatively simple, especially with newer cases and usually involves the removal of a couple of screws and a side panel. This should give you easy access and plenty of room to install that hard drive.

While working inside your case, be mindful of static electricity. To avoid building up a static charge that could potentially short out a component, some people use an anti-static strap to ground themselves (available from most computer hardware retailers). I prefer not to use the strap. Instead, remember to touch a grounded metal surface from time to time to prevent a static charge from building. Touching your computer’s power supply unit (provided it remains plugged in and turned off) should do the trick.

Step 3: Find an empty space and mount the drive

Generally the hard drive bays are located toward the front of the PC. It should be easy to find an open spot near your existing hard drive.

To keep your hard drives cool, it’s a good practice to keep an open hard drive bay between your installed drives if you’ve got the space.

Mounting the hard drive in your enclosure varies from case to case. On my case, the hard drive mounts to a slide that can easily snap in and out of the hard drive enclosure. Other cases require you to mount directly in the case. Either way, this isn’t difficult. Just line up the screws with the holes in your hard drive and mount away. Some cases require you to mount to the side of the drive, others mount to the bottom.

Step 4: Find and connect the proper cables

From here out, it’s a simple of matter of matching square pegs to square holes. First, find a free power connector and connect it to the hard drive.

Next, connect the interface cable to your hard drive (see below). In my example, the cable is an IDE connector, but it’s the same idea with an SATA drive. If you’re installing an IDE drive, you can often piggy back off an existing drive’s cable (for 2 IDE drives per channel).

Step 4: Set the drive jumper (IDE only) [1]

If you’ve installed your hard drive on the primary IDE channel as a second drive and it’s sharing a cable with the your current drive, you need to designate your new drive as the Slave drive. However, if your new drive is going to be used as your PC’s new boot drive, you want to set the jumper to the Master setting.

Setting the drive jumper is simple. Consult your drive’s documentation to verify the jumper settings (jumper settings are generally printed on the drive). Using a needlenose pliers, move the jumper to the appropriate setting for your installation.

Note: In addition to setting the drive jumper on your new hard drive, check to make sure your original hard drive is set to the appropriate jumper setting as well.

Step 5: Finishing up

It’s all pretty simple from here on out. Replace your computer’s side panel and screw it into place. Plug in your power supply unit (remembering to flip the switch back on) and boot up.

Now you’re back in the realm of software where you’re the undisputed master. Check out your new drive to see that everything’s looking good (and why shouldn’t it be?).

Easy, right? Who knew installing new hardware in your PC didn’t involve soldering guns and blowtorches? Your newfound ability to install hard drives and optical drives should take care of those nagging low disk space warnings, at least for the time being.

And when the low disk warnings do start popping up again and you can’t bear to rid yourself of the hundreds of episodes of The Simpons stored on your new drive, you’ve got the know-how to install another larger drive. Or follow the same instructions to install a DVD-R drive and backup your files that way.

Whatever you choose, you should never have to delete beloved media from your computer again.

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Rumors fly that Google will soon release their own phone build around Google Voice (not just another Android handset), the upcoming Chrome for Mac beta will be lacking several important features, and Gmail’s creator thinks Wave could someday integrate nicely with Gmail.

• Features Chrome For Mac Beta Will Be Missing
  When Chrome for Mac hits sometime this month, it’ll be missing its bookmark manager, Fluid-like app mode, possibly the task manager, and definitely Gears, among other potentially missing features. Beta indeed. [TechCrunch]
• LEAK: The Google Phone “Is a Certainty”
  The gadget gang at Gizmodo is fairly certain a Google phone is in the works (not just another Android phone), and that it’ll be based around Google Voice. [Gizmodo]
• So I finally tried Wave…
  The guy who created Gmail gives Google Wave a rundown, says Google should eventually integrate it with Gmail. [Paul Buchheit]
• Google set to map the world — and push out GPS makers as a result?
  GPS manufacturers can’t help but be scared by Google’s free foray into turn-by-turn directions, but consumers aren’t complaining. [BloggingStocks]
• Mullenweg Speaks Out on Twitter, WordPress and the Question of Competition
  The creator of our favorite open-source blogging platform WordPress talks about how Twitter and blogging aren’t either/or publishing platforms. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Apple to Take iPhone’s Maps App to ‘the Next Level’
  Our suggestion: Approve Latitude and Google Maps Navigator for iPhone. [MacRumors]
• The iDoctor will be right with you
  Apparently a yet-to-be-approved iPhone application is under development with the goal of analyzing your cough to determine what kind of illness you have. And there may actually be science behind it. [Download Squad]

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Reader Sweetshop Union’s Windows 7 desktop has been completely transformed with the Gaia09 skin for Rainmeter, complete with widgets, wallpaper, and a visual style to match.

The desktop is a combination of:

• Rainmeter with the Gaia09 theme.
• Rocketdock
• Gaia09 Visual style for Windows 7 (includes wallpaper)
• Full instructions for installing Gaia09 Rainmeter skins can be found here.

This desktop not your style? Why waste time complaining? Instead, get started creating your own killer desktop with the easy-install Rainmeter 1.1 package and show the world what you can do. If you get stuck and need some help, join up with the Lifehacker Desktop Customization Google Group to collaborate on new ideas for desktop configurations.

Once you’ve created your own beautifully tweaked (and hopefully productive) desktop, post it over in the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Group complete with a description of the programs and tweaks you used (and preferably links as well!), and we just might feature it here.

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Google Tasks, the to-do manager that has everything but its own dedicated page, gets the next best thing with an iGoogle gadget that can go mostly full-screen. That makes doing everything beyond adding tasks easier from a desktop browser.

Tasks brags on its home page about its accessibility inside different Google apps, but from a standard browser, you have to settle for the condensed sidebar views inside Gmail or Google Calendar. Hitting the “maximize” button in iGoogle gives you a view with a nice toolbar for managing multiple lists, knocking down multiple items, editing longer tasks, and a few other functions.

Wide-view Tasks doesn’t quite grow the service beyond its too-simple nature, but it does help out those tired of squinting to see what’s up next on their to-do list.

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Windows only: Fans of TweetDeck with a preference for open source will love MahTweets, a plugin-based Twitter client that also integrates with Facebook, Flickr, Twitpic, and more, and offers all kinds of handy customizations.

The first thing you do upon opening MahTweets is choose what plugins you want to install. Right now it’s only got a few, but they give you the opportunity to choose what networks you want integrated (including Facebook, Twitter, and RSS) and where you want to upload pictures (Facebook, Flickr, or services like TwitPic or yFrog). It then navigates you through the rest of the preferences, in which you can enable notifications, automatic translation, a screensaver based on your networks, and tweak a bunch of performance-based options.

After you’re done with the initial setup, you’ll see the client itself. It starts off with only one column (shown above), but you can add as many as you want, with all sorts of different kinds of filters in each to keep your groups organized (like TweetDeck). In addition to the basic features for updating your status, sending direct messages, and re-tweeting, you can also take webcam snapshots, upload pictures to Facebook or Flickr, and view links to pictures inline—no more clicking on links to open images in your browser.

MahTweets is a free download, Windows only.

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