Q. What is Bluetooth

A. Bluetooth is a telecom specification that  tells how mobile phones, computers, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) can be connected together using a short-range wireless connection. With Bluetooth cellular phones, pagers, or PDAs  can buy a cell phone type device that can be used as a cordless phone at home or office, synchronized with a computer, send or receive a fax, or print-out a document. In general, it allows many different mobile devices to be interconnected with fixed devices and share information wirelessly.

Bluetooth operates on a rarely used channel in the 2.4 GHz, frequency range, the same general frequency that most wireless computer networks and cordless phones use. It uses an inexpensive transceiver chip that must be included in the devices. In addition to data, up to three voice channels are available.

Connections between portable and fixed devices can be point-to-point or multipoint, with the maximum range of 10 meters (about 30 feet). Data can be exchanged at a rate of up to 2 megabits per second, about the speed of a fast DSL or cable connection.

Bluetooth is supposedly have gotten its name from Harold Bluetooth, king of Denmark in the mid-tenth century.

Q. Do you know of a utility that will tell me what programs are taking up how much space on each drive? I really would like to know what is taking up so much space.

A. You do not need a special utility to tell you the size of any file or folder. You can do that by using explorer.

Open Explorer and RIGHT click on any folder and select Properties. This will open a dialog similar to that shown on the right. The folder used in this demo was MS Office. Shown is the type of object, its location, the size of the sum of all the bytes used by the files, the size needed on the hard drive to store all these files, the total number of files and sub-folders. Also shown is the date and time that the MS Office folder was created, and its attributes.

This raises another question. Why are the actual bytes used by the files different from the bytes needed to store them on the hard drive?

Space on the hard drive to store data is allocated by the operating system in clusters. The size of the cluster is determined by the type of file system, and the size of the hard drive. On most Windows XP computers, the file system used is called the NTFS, for NT File System.

On any hard drive up to 32 GB on a XP computer using NTFS the cluster size will be 4 KB. If the older FAT system were used, the cluster size would be 64 KB. Now, if a shout cut file which are usually about 2 KB were wanted to be stored, XP would allocate 4 KB to store it. The file needs 2KB, and the other 2KB is wasted space. It cannot be used for anything.

On a computer using the older FAT (File Allocating Table) file system, this same short cut could have as much as 64 KB allocated for it, meaning that 62 KB would be wasted. This is why all XP computers, especially those with large hard drives, should be using the NTFS file system. The FAT 16 file system can only address up to 4 GB. The FAT 32 system can address up to 32 GB. The NTFS file system can address up to 2 Terabytes. (A terabyte = 1024 GB).

A hard drive of 1000 GB seems larger than anything the normal user would ever need or want. I can remember, not that long ago, when I said the same thing about a 2 MB hard drive.