Last week I went out and bought a new external hard drive . I had been meaning to get a new for a while now but just didn’t get round to it. So on my way home from college I went into PC World and bought a new one.

I already have an external hard drive, however it requires a mains adaptor, so it is not the best “portable” hard drive. So the new hard drive had to be USB powered.

After a while of looking at the various hard drives available I knew that the Western Digital was definitely the best. The one I bought is called Western Digital (My Passport Essential) Portable Hard Drive it looks really nice with a gloss finish.

I got the 250gb version for only €59.98, which is far cheaper than what I paid for my last one that required mains power. My old external cost about €120, basically double the price! But that is just because it has been so long since I bought my old external hard drive. Prices were definitely going to drop over the years.

One thing I hate is how hard drives are advertised, they say that you will have 250gb however you really only get 232gb! I have no idea what is taking up the other 18gb!i have formatted it a few times and still it is only 232gb, this was the same with my old hard drive, I think that the storage space that we actually will get should be on the front!

A good thing to note about this hard drive is that it can transfer data really fast! I transferred 8.05gb in only 2 and a half minutes!

Also I finally found out how to get the larger hard drives to get picked up by the PS3, all you have to do is format it to FAT32 . Just thought I would throw that in there, it is great, now I can play all my music and videos on my TV through my playstation!

**UPDATE**

Ok I found out why I am missing the 18gb, it is all to do with the American version of gb, in America they see a gb a 1000mb however really a gb is 1024mb. So those extra 18gb being advertised are not real! If it was the standard 1024mb as a gb then I would have had my full 250gb .

I have always wanted to have a big set of headphones. The sound that you get from the bigger headphones is far better than earphones. I find that when it comes to a certain time at night, playing my music too loud will disturb others so I used to turn off my speakers and not listen to my music after a certain time.

No point just turning down the music! Music is meant to be played loud in my opinion, the louder the better . So I went looking for a cheap enough pair of headphones on Amazon, after a while of looking I came across these, Sony MDR-XD200 Stereo Headphones – Silver, they looked good and had been given some good reviews, and had an overall rating of 4 out of 5 stars, so they had to be good enough, so I bought them .

Here is someone else’s thoughts on the Sony headphones:

I recently purchased these headphones to listen to Mp3’s via my PC.
So far I have to say I’m impressed. I wanted a big pair as we have two PC’s in the same room and I wanted to listen to my music rather than gameplay behind me. They are not too heavy and I sit here for hours at a time and can with these on quite comfortably.

I have to agree too, the headphones are comfortable, and for the price at €16.49, I thought I might as well get them! Now don’t expect the sound quality to be the same as a set of headphones that cost €100 or €200, obviously the more you spend then the better the quality will be.

However when I got these in the post they were much better than I thought they were going to be, I personally think that the sound is great, and they are definitely good enough for what I want .

Back in August of this year I bought a kit for connecting hard-drives to a computer via a USB cable. This is really useful especially if you are regularly fixing computers and need to get access to a hard-drive.

I have been using this a lot since I bought it. If you cannot access a hard-drive for reasons such as it is taking far too long to load the operating system or if the windows operating system has crashed and is no longer accessible then these cables will definitely be very useful.

In order to access these hard drives all you have to do is remove them from the laptop or pc and then add in the connector that is in the kit and then use the usb  and power cord to get into the hard drive, it’s that simple!

A lot of times people have issues where Windows has crashed and they think all of their data is gone! I have found that once the hard drive is taken out and connected to your computer via USB you can still browse through the files and save all the files that they think they lost .

When I bought this back in August it cost me €17.98, which is really cheap and I think is definitely worth the investment. Also these cables can be sued for a lot more than just hard drives, if you have an old internal disk drive you can use these cables to power up them too! This is really useful for Netbooks which have no disk drive.

For anyone looking to buy a set of these cables they are: USB to IDE & SATA Adaptor Cable 2.5 3.5 Inch Hard Drive

So what’s in the box?

• USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter
• 2.0 Amp AC Power Adapter
• UK Mains Cable
• User Manual

And here are the features of the product, and it fits basically all hard drives! :

• Compatible with any 2.5″, 3.5″, 5.25″ IDE or SATA drive!
• Dual Output Switch with LED Power ON Indicators
• Hot swappable and truly Plug and Play
• No driver needed
• Supports IDE & Enhanced IDE 3.5″ Hard Disk
• Supports ATA/ATAPI-6 Specification 1.0
• Supports SATA I and SATA II

These cables are also compatible with both PC and Mac! I bought mine with the UK Mains adaptor, however these are available with other mains adaptors such as US mains. If the images are too smallm just click on them to see a larger version!

For some reason I have managed to get half way through the month of November without making a single blog post! I know I am prone to going long periods without a post however I usually try to have 1 post by the 1st or 2nd of a new month!

Anyway, what has been keeping me busy? Since it is the Christmas season, I am now swamped with work! I have virtually no weekends anymore , working late after the store closes to get everything back in order for the next day takes a long time, with tidying and restocking.

I have been enjoying playing around with Windows 7 since its release date and as I said I will try and get a post up with my thoughts of the new OS!

Over the next week I will be getting a lot of reviews up on this site. I have bought a lot of things over the past few weeks and have yet to make my reviews on them! So for everyday next week (16th – 22nd of November) I will be posting a review a day! I said I had a lot of reviews to do .

I may even through in an odd normal blog post if I get the time in between writing these reviews .

Now to turn the focus to my blog, and its design. I said a while back that I am still not happy with the look of it, I feel it is still a bit dark and that it could do with a bit of a speed tweak! I have settled with a new theme for the blog and now I need to just add some personal changes to the theme.

Getting it to fit with certain components that I have on my site currently such as flickr and making sure that It will not break if I add it to my site. When adding new themes to a site it can always cause problems mainly because they can conflict with some plugins.

So today the clocks went back 1 hour . I always love when the clocks go back rather than forward because the main advantage I see is that everyone gets an extra hour in bed getting that all important sleep .

However changing the clocks back and forward throughout the year causes a lot of disruption for companies and businesses. People miss meeting, deadlines and fail to turn up to work on time.

Now most people are used to the change in time occurring just twice a year however it is always funny watching people rushing about thinking they are late when the clocks go back an hour, it hasn’t dawned on them that they are actually really early!

Where I work they always make it a point to let everyone know that the clocks are changing so that we have no excuse for turning up late for work .

The reason for this time change is simple, to keep up with the sun rising and setting at different times, then we set our clocks accordingly so that we maximise our use of the daylight this was once considered important to save in electricity!

An easy way to remember the time changes is by using this season reference, Spring forward, Fall back .