Computers in the home are obviously very common these days and it’s not unusual to find more than one Windows PC or laptop in a household. Perhaps the parents have the desktop PC and the kids use a laptop or you have desktop machines networked together in your office for work. With the increase in computers at your disposal comes an increase in looking after them when they developed a problem, need tweaking or don’t work as efficiently as they should.

One of the ways to work on another computer without physically being in front of it is of course via networking. Besides the obvious of being able to read and execute files on a remote computer or transferring files between computers, you can also perform more advanced maintenance tasks such as starting or stopping remote processes and even controlling Windows Services to be started, stopped or completely disabled.

Here we’ll show you some ways to view the status of Windows Services on a remote computer in addition to having the ability to start and stop them without leaving your own computer.
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The Microsoft Windows operating system has always been well known to be easily infected by computer viruses. This is why there are so many viruses that can infect a Windows machine, but very little in other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS. Since viruses can spread quickly through the network, one of the efforts made by the Microsoft team in Windows XP is the half-open TCP connection limitation to slow the propagation of malware from the infected machine.

This feature was implemented in Windows XP Service Pack 2 but has been disabled since Windows Vista Service Pack 2. This would also mean that any Windows operating system later than Vista SP2 such as 7, 8 and even 10 will not have this half-open TCP connection limitation anymore.

The default number of maximum half-open connection is 10 and most people who download files using BitTorrent would normally want to increase it to 50. However most people don’t know that increasing the number of half-open connections does not increase the download speed, but it only decreases the time to connect to the maximum number of peers. Setting this limit too high may greatly slow down your router in making new connections. If you’re looking to increase the half open-connection limit, here are 4 tools to do that.
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Floppy boot disks used to be one of the most important tools for any computer technicians because they can be used to start up a computer in DOS mode when Windows cannot be booted. While in DOS, the technician is able to investigate the cause of the problem and even possibly fix it.

In a Windows network environment, a custom floppy boot disk containing the compatible network adapter can be included which can be used to boot up the computer in DOS with networking support. This is very useful because you can map a shared drive to backup files by copying to them to the server and then restore the computer using a backup image created with Norton Ghost.

Creating a network floppy boot disk from scratch may not be an easy task especially for beginners. Thankfully there are already 3 different ready made floppy boot disk that include drivers for most of the popular network adapters. Although it may sound impossible to use them today due to most modern computers coming without a floppy drive or because it might be difficult to purchase floppy disks from computer shops, there are workarounds to get them to work.
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There are several ways to install software and also a number of different solutions to create the setup file for end users to get the product installed. Inno Setup, InstallShield, and Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) are applications that help create a setup installer, another is Microsoft’s own Windows Installer. Windows Installer files are known as MSI files because of the file extension.

Windows Installer files are used extensively by Microsoft for updating and installing Windows and other related software. They also have issues such as MSI files not being usable in Safe Mode. Software components for Windows Installer are integrated into Windows as standard and MSI packages can be used by system administrators and over networks for remote installations.

An MSI file is often embedded inside an executable setup installer so its usage is invisible to the end user. Sometimes, even when a program might not need installation because there’s only a few files, an MSI installer is used. If you are having issues installing a software package as an MSI file or want to get at the files inside, perhaps to make a program portable, there are ways to do it.

Here we show you 6 solutions for viewing or extracting the contents of MSI install packages.
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It’s quite mystifying that Microsoft constantly does nothing to enhance a potentially very useful feature built-in to all versions of Windows, namely the Clipboard. The Windows Clipboard has been untouched for years but can be incredibly useful when you’re copying text or data from one place to another. The major drawback of the Clipboard has always been that there’s just a single slot for the data. As soon as you cut or copy something else, the original data is completely overwritten, all data is also lost when you logoff or shutdown.

Bizarrely Microsoft actually removed one of the few Clipboard related functions after Windows XP. It isn’t that well known because it’s not available from the Start Menu, but the ClipBook Viewer (type clipbrd into the Run box) is a small utility that shows you the current textual content of the Clipboard. Although not available in windows Vista/7/8, you can still copy Clipbrd.exe from a Windows XP system to the System32 directory of a newer operating system and use it.

It’s not unusual for you to want to recall something you copied to the clipboard and have since overwritten. Did you copy a website URL a few hours ago and can’t recall what it is? Are you performing repetitive tasks copying text from one document to another? Did you reboot your computer while you had something you wanted in the Clipboard? Being able to store multiple data entries in the Windows Clipboard and have the ability to recall that data, even after a period of time or a reboot can be very useful, here we show you 10 Clipboard utilities that can do just that…
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Converting, ripping and encoding is all the rage these days when it comes to video and multimedia files and just about everybody who uses a computer has, or probably would like to be able to do it at some point. As you might expect, when it comes to video and audio files, there are literally hundreds of different file formats around, and many of them need to be specific to be able to work on certain devices such as mobile phones, tablets, personal music players or dedicated multimedia players.

It will come as no surprise that because of its popularity, there are literally hundreds of tools and utilities available to manipulate media files. This comes with its own set of problems because many tools are crippled shareware or even the same program underneath and re-branded to look like different products. Others can be very complicated to use, some just aren’t that good, and most are bundled with some form of adware in the installer.

One type of popular conversion is extracting audio from video files or DVD’s so you can play the music from a movie, music concert or listen to a soundtrack on your MP3 player, mobile device or in the car. Here we have listed 7 free tools that are easy to use and allow you to get the audio track from a video file or DVD and convert it to various different audio formats to help with compatibility on your music players.
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Although it’s not such a major problem with computers manufactured in more recent years, if you have a slightly older computer, something it might not be able to do is boot up directly from a USB device. Being able to boot your computer from USB flash drive is an advantage because there are so many tools around that can be used to install or repair Windows such as Antivirus discs, and repair CD’s. Having them on USB is easier and quicker than burning discs every time.

Installing Windows by running the setup files from a USB drive is also popular because it can be a good bit quicker than installing from a CD/DVD drive, even Windows 8 setup files can be downloaded and copied straight onto USB these days. It depends entirely on the computer’s BIOS as to whether USB booting is supported and some manufacturers may have provided a BIOS update to enable it. However, what if you encounter an old computer that doesn’t support booting from USB?

Thankfully, all is not lost because there is an excellent little tool called Plop Boot Manager which can do the impossible and allow you to boot the computer from USB even if the BIOS does not support it. Plop can boot different operating systems such as Windows or Linux from hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB.

There are probably 2 main scenarios where you would like to use Plop; firstly to be able to boot a USB device when you already have Windows installed, maybe loading a Live Linux or a rescue/antivirus disc etc. Another way is when you have no operating system currently loaded and perhaps would like to install one via USB. Here, we’ll show you both ways to install the Plop boot manager, one using the Windows Boot Menu and one from a bootable CD.
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Although the Microsoft .NET Framework is something that’s not liked by many people, it has become something of a necessary evil because so many developers makes use of its functions to help make programming software easier. A major issue with .NET is it’s huge in terms of disc space and seemingly getting bigger with every release. Another issue is the sheer amount of security fixes for it and a large proportion of Windows updates will likely be .NET related every month.

We did some small scale .NET testing a while back and found it doesn’t really impact on system performance but what it does do is install thousands of files, folders and registry entries onto your system. With so much data surrounding .NET and the complexity of the installs it’s quite easy for updates to, or the framework itself to fail because something has been corrupted and programs that rely on it won’t run. Here we show you some ways to fix .NET Framework issues.
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Everybody knows that when using Windows and other desktop based point and click operating systems, a cursor appears on the screen. This tells you where the active area is to perform specific actions at any given point in time. There are several ways to move the cursor around, including laptop touchpads, trackballs, mice, and even keyboards.

Even if you plug in more than one device that can move the cursor around, you will only ever get one visible cursor on the screen. All the connected devices will then be able to move the single cursor. While this is by design, you might want to have more than one user interact with the desktop at the same time or have one user on one monitor and another have a separate cursor on a second monitor.

Functions like these are not possible in Windows without using third party software. Here we show you seven free programs that allow more than one mouse cursor on the screen at once. They were tested on Windows 10 64-bit.
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One of the first things any knowledgeable user would do if they suspect there is something slowing their computer down or a suspected malicious program might be running in the background, is press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open the Windows Task Manager. From there you can view what’s running and detect if any programs are using too much CPU time or memory, or look suspect and shouldn’t be there. Although the Windows Task Manager is a valuable tool, there are better alternative Task management tools out there that you can use to replace it with.

Using the built in tool to manage tasks or a third party task manager on your local computer is great, but what about if you have more than one computer in your network to keep an eye on? Process Explorer, Process Hacker or System Explorer etc cannot show you what’s running on another computer so ordinarily if there is something that needs checking, you would have to go to that computer physically and view or kill any processes.

Thankfully there are ways to access other computers in your local network remotely, and you can also view and manipulate processes on another computer without leaving your own. Here we show you 5 ways to view and manage another computer’s tasks remotely.
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The Master Boot Record (MBR) is quite possibly the most important piece of data stored on you hard drives or USB flash drives. For those that aren’t exactly sure what the MBR is, it’s basically a small dedicated section of the drive which holds vital information about the disc including its boot information and the layout of all the partitions stored. The MBR area itself is tiny being only a 512 byte sector and is the very first piece of information held right at the beginning of the disc.

If your Master Boot Record becomes corrupted through drive errors or malware etc, it could stop you booting your operating system and in the worst case, cause all the partitions on the drive to be lost because the drive doesn’t have the correct information to identify them. If your system has a standard disc layout, it’s always possible to write a new standard MBR using the Windows XP Recovery Console and the FixMBR command. Or you can use a Windows 7 install disc and select the “Repair your computer” -> Command Prompt option with the Bootrec /fixmbr command which also works on Vista and Windows 8 from the Windows 7 disc.

As the Master Boot Record is such a vital part of your system, it makes sense to have a backup of it just in case the worst happens. And being only 512 bytes in size means it takes up no room at all and can be stored anywhere. This could save hours of frustration trying to recover your files from damaged partitions. So here are 8 free tools that can help you to easily backup and restore your system’s Master Boot Record (MBR) for some extra piece of mind.
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Every once in a while we’ll encounter a program that stops responding in Windows due to multiple reasons such as misconfiguration, conflicts between applications that are trying to do the same thing or a bug on the software itself. On newer Windows operating systems such as Windows 7, you are able to click on the X button located at the top right even when a program has hung and Windows will tell you that the program is not responding and you have the choice of either forcefully closing the program or waiting for it to respond.

However, sometimes a full screen game can block the standard hotkeys in Windows such as the Alt+Tab, Win+Tab, Win key, Ctrl+Escape or Ctrl+Shift+Esc as a way to stop you from getting back to the Windows desktop while the game is running to prevent cheating or hacking of the game. This can be a problem when the full screen game hangs and the only way for you to recover is to press the Reset button on your computer to force a cold reboot.

Here we have 6 different free tools that can forcefully kill the foreground process by pressing a hotkey.
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Nowadays most people are connected to the Internet using a router instead of a modem. One of the main differences in using a router is your computer’s connection to the router is hidden behind it and not directly exposed to the Internet unlike using a modem. It is generally safer but also creates a huge problem which is a lot of applications that work over the Internet might stop working. The solution is to forward the port which can be a daunting task for a lot of users as it needs the correct IP address, port number and transport protocol (TCP/UDP) or else it won’t work.

Fortunately the process of configuring port forwarding has gotten a lot easier through the years. Instead of connecting the router using a telnet client to view the text-based settings and manually typing commands to add a configuration, port forwarding is pretty much automatic these days thanks to Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). For automatic port forwarding using UPnP to work, both the software and router must support this feature.

In this article we’ll show you how to add or check port forwarding in your router using a software and also to manage the port mappings of a UPnP router.
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A keylogger can be either a piece of software or a hardware device that can capture the keystrokes typed on the computer’s keyboard. A software keylogger can be run in the background and not get noticed by average users. They’ll have to depend on security software like anti-keyloggers or antivirus packages to tell them that a keylogger is present on the system, or else they will have no idea that things they do on the computer are being monitored.

There are many legitimate uses for a keylogger such as monitoring your children, making sure that they stay safe on the Internet especially when chatting and making friends with strangers. Or maybe even monitoring an employee making sure that they do not copy or leak out any confidential files. However, it can also be used for illegal or unethical purposes such as stealing passwords, reading private data and etc.

There are many software keyloggers around, some are freeware while others require a paid license to use. Free keyloggers are often more limited in functionality and stealthiness. After testing several free keyloggers, we’ve picked what we thought were the best and sorted them into a top 10. In addition to keylogging and features, we’ve also taken into account the ability of the keylogger to hide itself from the average user to prevent detection or tampering. All programs were tested in Windows 10 64-bit.
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It seems that however powerful your computer is in terms of hardware, it’s never quite quick enough to do what you want. Whether it’s playing the latest games or video editing/authoring/encoding, most users will want to squeeze every last ounce of performance they can out what they have. Of course you could resort to overclocking, but for for some users that just isn’t an option.

If you’re in the middle of something which requires all the resources your computer has got, it’s not ideal if Windows decides to look for updates, run a scheduled task, defrag the hard drive or enable the screensaver, or a background program tries to do something that can interrupt what you’re doing. Many tasks on PC’s these days also require you to close all currently running programs, and many software installers ask you to close all other applications to minimize conflicts and to avoid replacing in-use files.

One way to quickly close down unneeded programs and services is to use a tool that can do it automatically for you. Theoretically the less you have running in the background taking up CPU time, memory and using the hard disc, the faster and smoother a game or intensive application will run. Here’s 7 free tools for you to try.
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