Diagnose And Manage Hard Disks with HDD Scan
HDD Scan is a very sophisticated hard disks diagnosing and managing tool that provides a wealth of information and options to the user. It basically provides the user with information about the hard disks that are installed on his computer, with ways to tests those hard disks and with options to change certain settings of those hard disks.
The program recognized IDE, SATA, Firewire and SCSI hard disks. A click on Tasks > Identity opens a new window that displays all information that could be gathered about the hard disk including serial, firmware and manufacturer among 50 or so additional parameters. Those information can be printed if desired.
Far more interesting than those are the tests the user can conduct. Tests are divided into surface tests for all hard disks and special SMART tests for hard disks that support SMART.
Four surface tests are available and the user can select additional parameters like Block Size and Start & End LBA. The tests that are available are Read, Verify, Butterfly Read and Erase and only one test can be selected to run simultaneously.
One interesting option of HDD Scan is the ability to manage certain disk features. Available are AAM, APM and PM which translate to Automatic Acoustic Management, Advanced Power Management and Power Management.
The user could use the first to change the noise of the hard disk if that feature is supported. A slight drop in performance would be the consequence but it's in my opinion well worth it.
HDD Scan is a very interesting application that provides access to features, especially those to change the Automatic Acoustic Management that are not available in many other tools of its kind. It is compatible to Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. No word on Vista compatibility though.
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Unfortunately, this process is not simple. Flameshot is a much better alternative.
Lies, there’s nothing anybody reasonably needs that isn’t covered by snipping tool or printscreen. As someone who takes a lot of screenshots, that is my opinion.
Some social media sites (such as discord) will even accept the “copy” from a snipping tool (straight from clipboard), meaning you dont have to save it as a local file before uploading it.
You didn’t say anything about the method introduced in W10–while holding down the Windows key (to right and left of Space bar, either one), press the Print Screen key. The screen darkens for a second, and the image is placed in the Screenshots folder in the Pictures folder. Of course, it stays there until you delete it. Using the method that places the screenprint in Clipboard, eventually the image will disappear. Maybe there’s a set, definite time for contents to stay there and then they’re gone, I don’t know, but eventually stuff there will disappear; at least, that’s my experience.
Dude if you’re using printscreen just open a “paint” instance and paste in there, your printscreen will be preserved until you save it, freeing up your clipboard.
Dude (basingstoke), I don’t know what a “‘paint’ instance” is, and I normally create screenprints using the Windows key method I described. My Clipboard is in fine shape. Thanks.
You wrote this:
“Using the method that places the screenprint in Clipboard, eventually the image will disappear. Maybe there’s a set, definite time for contents to stay there and then they’re gone, I don’t know, but eventually stuff there will disappear; at least, that’s my experience.”
The method that places the “screenprint” into clipboard is called the “printscreen” button, am I wrong? Well I have described a method of making things not “disappear” when using printscreen by itself, because it seems you didn’t know of it. Feel free to keep using windows key + printscreen by all means – but pasting a printscreen into paint is a really old trick, i’m not making up random stuff here.
Btw a “paint instance” is the same as a “chrome instance” or an “audacity instance”, it’s an instance of an application or program.
And just to throw two cents in, i don’t believe a printscreen result ever disappears from the clipboard, you probably just used ctrl+c at something else which overwrites the clipboard, which is a very easy to make mistake.
One thing I don’t like about windows+printscreen is that you have to navigate to the screenshots folder anyways afterwards to check the result (as I usually use printscreen to capture things that happen too quickly for snipping tool to grab, I need to make sure I timed it right). Printscreen+paint gives the benefit of showing you what you captured without navigating file explorer, and if the screenshot didn’t come out right, just close the window, no file was created, nothing ends up in recycling bin.
But if you’re 100% sure you took the printscreen of what you wanted, I guess yours is a good method.
Don’t know that navigating to the screenshots folder is any more trouble than “open[ing] a ‘paint’ instance.” And again it’s permanent without any accidental deletion, timing out, or being pushed out of the stack of 24 entries in Clipboard. My only use of Paint has been to do some type of graphics on something (like a screenshot) (like drawing a box around something) to highlight something I’m going to send to somebody as an email attachment.
Basically, I can’t believe the person who wrote this article didn’t mention the method I described.
Totally fair – no need to argue about this, i guess. As you can probably guess I am not using Microsoft’s latest and greatest, so don’t have 100% knowledge of the new methods.
One thing I’ll throw in that should have been mentioned is irfanview – the lightest photo viewer (that can handle huge multi-gigabyte pictures even better than the Win7 and Win10 photo viewers), it’s screenshot feature captures the cursor which is highly useful for writing guides and documentation.
Do any of the windows 10 screenshot methods allow capturing the cursor, out of curiosity? No built in Win7 method does.
This is a great tip. Do you know how to change the naming template so it uses date and time instead of just sequential numbering?
The latest update of the W11 Snipping tool is just a complete failure. It places the working icons at the bottom of the working screen and it’s very difficult to get access to them if not enabled full screen. Also the taskbar is so big that it’s almost a weird difficult obstacle to work properly. If the taskar could be placed at top of the screen this serious problem would be less improductivy. W11 is the tomb of the competence and clever people, they don’t do nothing good recently.
Any particular reason you’re using it, then?
Good old, snipping tool, helped me to save, some dosens of ladies pics ;) Nowdays, I’m using an trully storng ‘n’ good app, that is of course the ShareX. Most features, includes region capture, video capture (from whatever area you want), media convertion, direct uploading and plenty of other usefull tools. Using it mostly to share photos on forums.
For my option, windows snipping tool is dead.