Turn Your SkyDrive Account Into a Virtual Drive

Much as we love our shiny new 25GB Windows Live SkyDrive accounts, we hate the interface for uploading files. In Firefox, there's no drag-and-drop option -- we have to manually browse for and select each and every file. Bleh.

Enter Gladinet, a free utility that turns your SkyDrive into a virtual drive you can access right from Windows Explorer. It's extremely easy to set up: Just select the SkyDrive service (the program also works with Google Docs, PicasaWeb, and Amazon S3 accounts), enter your username and password, and presto: You've got a new drive on your desktop.

Now it's a simple, straightforward matter to add files (and folders!) to your SkyDrive and/or pull them down to your PC. That said, Gladinet is definitely a beta, and it shows. Public folders are flat-out not working (though this will get fixed in next week's build, the developers promise), and I'm seeing some folder duplication on the Web side after copying a file to my Documents folder.

Even so, this is a big step in the right direction toward making SkyDrive infinitely more useful. Definitely worth a look if you're in the midst of testing the SkyDrive waters. [via Lifehacker]