The long weekend found me - naturally - doing some PC housekeeping. Specifically, I wanted to copy a five gigabyte wodge of songs from our home PC to my roving notebook, just to make sure we had a back-up.

These days there are a how bunch of options for transferring or backing up huge files, including wired and wireless networking, DVD-RWs, and network attached storage devices for the home market (that is, terabyte-sized hard drive boxes, formerly the preserve of big companies, now being re-deployed for humongous home video libraries and photo collections). And we cover these in July PC World, on newsstands July 2.

But a quick and easy product I used chez Keall was Targus's new "Mobile Data Transfer & Synchronisation USB 2.0 Cable". It's a simple little 1.5m length of USB 2 cable, with PC and data synchonisation software built into it (in that fat, python bit near one end). There's no driver discs to install. I simply plugged one end of the cable into our desktop PC and the other end into our notebook. After a minute or so the cable's software had self-installed into a temp file, and started a simple app that gives you a Windows Explorer view of both PC's hard drives. To copy files, you simply drag and drop between two windows.

The speed was blistering. Each song (about 3MB) copies in 0.2 to 0.4 seconds, and all the files were moved in a shade over five minutes, or just a tad under 1GB per minute. The no-fuss, bam-bam-bam nature of the transfer gave me a total geek buzz. It's a nice comparison to the unexplained pauses and slowdowns that seem inherent to our home wi-fi network, which I'd never even consider for such a gargantuan file transfer (though admittedly we haven't upgraded to 802.11n yet; see Bruce's feature on that new tech).

Anyhow, the Mobile Data Transfer & Synchronisation USB 2.0 Cable model ACC96AU (note to Targus's marketing dept: "iCable" would have been snappier) sells for $99 through Dick Smith and similar outlets. It'll also work for Mac to Mac or Mac to PC transfers, and its built-in software will also handle Outlook email and calendar syncs, or synching any file or folder rather than copying it wholesale. And it'll work with even a relatively ancient PC (a 133MHz Pentium with Windows 2000 being the minimum).

So: not a lot to it. But it's a skill to do simple things well, and something that doesn't happen very often.