You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website

That’s it!

Anyway, if you want to add this feature to your Windows XP… someone has done it: WinFlip is a little and free addon that is capable to re-create the same effect. Just download it and try!

http://winflip.stylekings.de/

It can be downloaded for free; the same site offers other nice screensavers for Windows.

http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html

It was very useful for me, because I have to test my sites on Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 but IE 6 is still popular, so I must test everything (at least) on these 3 browsers.

Microsoft Windows can’t mount FTP servers on the local filesystem as network folders (you can do it only with computers that are connected in your local network), so it’s impossible to work with a local application (PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Notepad++…) loading and saving documents directly on the remote server.

There is some software that is able to add this functionality to Microsoft Operating System, like the old Novell NetDrive, that is not freeware but is considered as abandonware by the same software house. Now Novell suggests to use a newer product like WebDrive, but it’s unfortunately a commercial software.

I Googled for a while and finally I found a solution.

Killer{R}, a Russian guy has developed a very good alternative: FTP Drive is freeware and available for download, and it offers a quick way to emulate a network folder for your FTP connections. It installs a virtual drive in “My Computer”, with a letter of your choice, in which it puts a folder for every your FTP account.
Now you can load and save on FTP exactly as you usually work on your local files

Configuration is not harder than a traditional FTP client: FTP Drive stays in the systray and it requires not much RAM just (3-4Mb).
Just click FTP Drive settings and then “Edit server list manually” (it can also automatically retrieve FTP accounts from Netview, a freeware TCP Manager by Killer{R}); type the address of your FTP server, you login and password and some additionaly option, like the preferred transfer mode and the threads limit. Then click the add button and you’re ready to go: a new folder will appair in “My computer”, under FTP Drive’s network folder, and you”ll be able to operate directly on remote files.

Applications are unlimited: you can load a PHP page into your editor, change something and save directly from it to have the online page immediately updated, or you can save a picture found on the Internet from Firefox directly to an FTP drive to have uploaded it on your web server and immediately available for your visitors.

http://www.killprog.com/fdrve.html

Its free version is the only available (this is not a “lite” implementation of a more featured application) and it offers a nice interface and great defragmentation speed, compared to the defrag tool that is provided with Windows XP.

It worths a try

http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag