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The short answer: Yes. The long answer: I am not somebody who likes to create charts and do mathematics in order to prove whether a piece of hardware is good or bad, so don't expect any of that. I am going to break this down into categories. The Good: Works on multiple windows platforms. The Tornado File Transfer Tool works with Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, and Windows Vista. It is completely plug-n-play compatible with everything except for 98SE. When you are using it on 98SE you have to download and install a small driver from TheTornado.com.
No batteries required. The Tornado uses the USB bus to self power itself. It's easy. Just plug the tornado into a USB port on each computer and the file transfer screen usually loads in under 10 seconds. After that you must navigate to wherever the files are and navigate to where you want to put them and then just drag and drop. It's fast. I can honestly say, that when working on computers that are somewhat new (3 years or less), this file transfer tool is extremely fast. I plugged this thing into my computer and a friend's laptop just for fun and transfered my 19GB music library in about 10 minutes or so. Comes with free PC Eraser software. I haven't used the PC Eraser software yet but I am sure it's pretty cool. It allows you to securely delete data for good. This means that instead of just the icon disappearing from your screen, PC Erase actually overwrites the deleted data with random data so it gets completely removed. The Bad: Doesn't work with Mac, Linux, or anything else that isn't windows. Aww so sad. Only has a four foot length. Be sure to pick up a USB 2.0 extension cable because a four foot reach kind of sucks. But when extension cables are usually six feet, that gives you a ten foot reach if you buy the extension. Some computers just suck. I've used The Tornado to do transfers between six computers so far. I had a horrible time with this one laptop. I would guess the laptop had 512MB of memory and it was slowed down by all kinds of spyware and AOL programs running in the background. I was transferring approximately 20-30GB of data and the transfer froze up four or five times. Also, I think the laptop had USB 1.1 ports which made the transfer slow. The transfer interface needs improvement. It would be nice if you could quickly navigate into the My Documents folder instead of having to go to C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents. Also, if the transfer freezes and you can't tell which files have already been transferred the only options that you get when replacing files are: Cancel, Replace, and Replace All. Not having the No to All option can turn what should be an easy file transfer process into a tedious project of manually moving files over one by one. Some of these negatives aren't really big deals. The really big ones don't happen too often. But they have happened to me before so it's always a good idea to have a backup method to transfer files. So is The Tornado worth buying? I definitely believe so. The lowest price I've seen so far is at Staples for $49.99. Also, if you spend $50.00 or more at Staples.com you get free shipping so go buy a pack of pencils or some paper so you can get free shipping on it! Hehe
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