Creating a full Windows backup by using the built it Windows Imaging Tool, Acronis TrueImage, EaseUs Todo Backup, or Macrium Reflect is pretty common for experienced computer users. However, it’s recommended for all users to keep backups in case of crashes or hardware failures. If your system is unable to boot, start up the computer with the imaging software’s rescue media and it can restore your system back to the time when you created the image.

Imaging is different from just backing up your files or selected folders because a complete copy is created for the whole hard drive or partition and its structure. The problem with some imaging software is it doesn’t allow creating backup images for external devices such as a USB flash drive, digital camera, or MP3 player. Or perhaps you prefer not to install a complete software package just to back up a small flash drive.

For someone with one or two flash drives, it’s useful to have full backup copies so you can swap between them when required. Here are 7 free and portable tools that you can use to create backup images of USB memory sticks, hard drives, memory cards, and MP3 players, then restore them when you need to.
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If you are performing resource intensive tasks and the system becomes unstable, crashes, or even shuts down while being put under stress, it will be a great cause for concern. This could be a problem such as the CPU or GPU overheating, or an overclock that doesn’t work properly. Maybe the power supply simply cannot cope anymore with all hardware components running at full intensity.

Whether you’re someone who wants to test their PC components because of a possible hardware fault or have a new PC and want to make sure it runs stably at maximum load, you need a program to be able to put the system under a sustained load for periods of time to monitor the situation. Here are 10 tools to do just that and put your system under huge amounts of stress to check for faults or problems.
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There are some important programs such as a gaming servers, webservers, databases or mail servers that we’d need to keep running at all times but not every piece of software will have a feature of monitoring itself and re-starting whenever it is closed. It’s a similar situation if you constantly download via P2P software or download managers because you might want to keep downloading or seeding even while you’re not at the computer.

It can be a source of frustration if the software crashes or hangs just after you leave it unattended because it will then have to stay that way until you come back to rectify the problem. What could be even more annoying is having other users or children closing the program down not knowing or caring that it’s supposed to stay running. This is where a third part tool comes in to help because you can setup your programs that are required to stay running to relaunch automatically if they are closed or crash. That way they will keep restarting to continue their tasks or until you stop them manually.
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Several countries are now actively introducing forms of internet censorship by blocking access to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Another common form of internet restriction these days is when you watch movies or television online, these are often geo restricted and can only be viewed from the country hosting the content. Several countries also block access to adult, political and popular file sharing sites like Kickass and ThePirateBay to stop you getting access to pirated content.

The popular way to circumvent these restrictions is to use a VPN or proxy service that fools the website you are trying to access into thinking you are from a different country than you actually are. One of the most used VPN services for several years has been Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree because it offers a free version to its paid Elite subscription that gives you many advantages of a VPN but at no cost.

There are however, restrictions to using Hotspot Shield Free. Firstly it only allows you to access its US based VPN so you can only have a US IP address. Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and UK VPNs are not available. It is also ad supported so every HTTP page you visit will have an inserted banner at the top of the page. Major streaming sites like Hulu or Netflix are forbidden and you must upgrade to use them.
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If you are having problems with Windows or a piece of third party software, something you might be asked to do is supply the information in any errors or messages that are being displayed to help with troubleshooting. Some error messages are quite short and not difficult to type in. Others could be long and a pain to repeat accurately with combinations of numbers, letters, and special characters.

It’s often better to also enter an exact error code or phrase into a search engine such as Google to get more precise results for the problem. Of course, taking a screenshot can be used to send an error message to someone else, but this isn’t always that helpful because they might have to re-type the message data in at the other end, and it also won’t help if you want to search the internet.

Windows error dialog boxes and general information windows don’t have a nice and easy button for you to copy all the error messages. They also don’t usually allow highlighting the text so it can be copied. However, there are ways for you to do it and copying information from Windows message boxes and third party software dialogs can be made easier. Here are 8 solutions to try.
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You may have noticed that there are times when certain buttons, checkboxes or windows in a software or Microsoft Windows operating system itself gets disabled or grayed out and clicking on them will have no effect. This limitation is there on purpose and for reasons like restricting the functionality until the software is activated or as a safety measure that requires to complete a step before allowing you to proceed to the next. It could also be a restriction set by the administrator to prevent other people from tampering the system and changing the configurations.

Logically most of the time the buttons are disabled for a good reason but there are times when you really need them enabled. For example, unlike fully functional trial software, some software demo has their main functionality crippled and you don’t get to test them out until you pay for a valid license to activate the software. Or perhaps the LiveUpdate button on Symantec Endpoint Protection client has been disabled and you urgently need to pull the latest signature from the server to detect the latest threats.

If you have a similar situation where you need to forcefully enable a disabled button, you can try any of the 6 tools listed below which we have successfully tested on Windows 7.
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It’s not uncommon for computer users to own a desktop PC and a laptop or a second PC. The problem with using multiple computers is each has its own display, keyboard, and mouse or touchpad. To make things easier, you can purchase hardware called a KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse). This operates one keyboard, mouse, and monitor across several computers by pressing a physical button to switch between them.

Another type of KVM switch is one that is software based. No hardware is required and switching is done automatically via the installed utility. A software KVM switch works through the local network so all the computers you want to control need to be connected to your LAN. Software KVM switches normally don’t have display switching and only work for the keyboard and mouse. In reality, they are KM switches.

Just install the software on each computer and configure which one has the keyboard and mouse you want to use across devices. Then you have seamless movement between computers by simply moving the cursor off the edge of the desktop. Here are 5 free KVM switch programs that can be used to share your keyboard and mouse to control multiple PCs. All have been tested on Windows 10 and Windows 7.
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Something you might have noticed while using Windows and various pieces of software, is that sometimes when there is a box or window on the screen, and if you want to alter its dimensions, you can simply hover the mouse over the edge and drag the window to a different size. The thing is, some windows allow you to resize them in their width and height, and some don’t. It’s also not uncommon for a standard window function like the minimize / maximize button to be missing or inoperable because the program has disabled its use or removed it altogether.

In most cases, the window has been given a fixed size because the programmer feels it’s the correct size and doesn’t need altering. It can become frustrating if you feel the window should be bigger to display more information, or smaller to fit a given size, to take a screenshot perhaps. It’s quite annoying for us to have to scale an image because a window is 20 pixels too wide to fit on the webpage and isn’t re-sizable. Scaling reduces image quality, and it would be much better to shrink the window slightly rather than resizing the image.

There are tools around that can help you reduce or increase the size of windows that normally don’t give the option to do so, or set a window to a preset dimension. Here’s a selection of 5 for you to look at. All tools were tested in Windows 7 64-bit.
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While computers are faster these days, there’s a couple of areas in Windows where you can get frustrated by the distinct lack of speed. They are during system startup and then also system shutdown. The latter of shutting the computer down can be especially annoying because a piece of software or a driver can cause the computer to take several seconds or minutes to power off, or even hang the computer completely.

It’s then that you might have to reach for the reset or power button which will produce an improper shutdown. If you’re having the shutdown or reboot slowdown issue, the last thing you want to do is sit there and wait for the process to finish before you can troubleshoot or try out a potential fix. A workaround to get your computer to reboot or shutdown a lot faster is to use a utility designed to perform the task almost instantaneously.
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There’s little doubt that being a computer user, you are bound to come across compressed archive files, at least from time to time or possibly every day if you download a lot. Archives themselves come in many different formats but the most likely type of archive you’ll encounter will be the ZIP format. The ZIP archive was invented over 25 years ago by PKWare and is the only archive format which has built in Windows support by default where you can create, edit and extract files and folders.

The ZIP format is not just restricted to archive files and can be found in special proprietary formats for games, applications, disc images and even Microsoft Office documents (XLSX and DOCX etc). Although many people might think of shareware program WinZip as the original ZIP archiver, the developer of ZIP, PKWare, released an archiver called PKZip a few years before WinZip.
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If you want to Install a piece of software, it’s obviously very easy to do generally speaking. Just run the setup file, agree to the license agreement, select destination location to install, confirm the program’s shortcut location, create desktop and tray icon, and finally install. It looks like many steps are involved but we usually just ignore all those and continue clicking Next until the setup completes. Obviously, these days you have to be a bit more careful because of all the extra options during installation such as installing toolbars etc, but it’s still pretty fast and easy with common sense applied.

Installing an application one time on your computer is not a problem but what if you have just installed Windows and have loads to install? Or worse still, what if you need to install applications on several computers? Sitting there and installing each program manually can be frustrating and a huge waste of time and something you’re not going to enjoy doing. Do we all want an easier solution? Of course we do!

The useful things is, there are hidden command line switches in most installer packages or setup files which be can used to bypass all those confirmation message boxes. With these commands you can install just about anything automatically, if you know the commands to use. Some software developers will include the command line switches in their documentation but many do not and you have to search the internet to find what they are.

Thankfully, there are a couple of easier ways to find the unattended install switches and install software silently.
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Any computer user will know that the default actions for the standard mouse buttons are left click to select, right click to show the context menu and the wheel is used for scrolling. Most mice also have a third button on the scroll wheel that doesn’t really have a default function and can perform different actions depending on the software you are using. For instance, the middle mouse button in Google Chrome can close tabs, open links in new tabs and auto scroll.

More expensive or premium mice can come with upwards of ten or more buttons. Using the software that is designed for the mouse, you will be able to configure the buttons to perform a number of different tasks. The company that makes this software will usually only support the mice it manufactures, so you can’t use Logitech software with a Razer or Corsair mouse, and etc.

While most companies support their mice with software, some mice are more generic or come from a manufacturer that hasn’t made its own software. If that is the case, you will need another way to change and customize your mouse button actions because Windows doesn’t have any built in options to do it. Here we show 5 ways how you can assign various predefined actions to your mouse buttons.
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For many people who spend a lot of time on their computer, it’s a valuable and precious item which they can’t do without. That’s why it can be a little bit worrying when toddlers or young children get close to your computer, especially when you’re not 100% sure what they’re going to do when they’re near it. Most of them will be quite fascinated and want to play with the keyboard or move the mouse around.

Children and pets are quite good at touching your computer when you don’t really want them to, and when they do, it could cause something untoward to happen. One of the simplest ways of stopping that from happening is to lock down the machine so when a key or mouse button is pressed, nothing happens and your system is safe. Or if you want to play a video on the screen it can’t be interrupted.

Here’s a selection of different ways you can lock the keyboard and mouse from user interaction. These tools are also useful if you want to clean your keyboard and mouse without unplugging them from a computer that is currently being used.
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Windows has System Restore built in to help revert file and registry changes to an earlier point in time after software installs. While it’s useful, System Restore still has issues like being a bit unreliable and possibly including malware in the restore points. An alternative is to sandbox software installs so no changes are made to the system files. Another option is using software that can completely discard any changes made to the operating system when you reboot.

The advantage of protecting your system in this way is software installs, setting changes or certain malware infections can be wiped away and the computer restored to a previous point in time. It’s not only helpful when you want to test software but you can also deploy a restore on reboot if other users are using the computer. When you reboot, anything they have done is forgotten and Windows is back to how it was before.

Here we look at 4 free applications that can quickly eradicate anything done in the session by restoring the system during startup, keeping your Windows install safer and cleaner. The programs were tested in Windows 7 and 10.
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When Windows is sitting idle and you think it’s doing nothing, it is often reading from or writing to your hard drive, even if it’s only a few bytes here and there. Sometimes there may be constant drive activity when you think there really should be very little, or none at all. This could be due to a number of factors such as security software updating or running background scans, scheduled defrags, Windows updates being installed, web browsers or download managers, the list goes on.

Checking what processes are constantly and actively accessing your hard drive is important to detect suspicious or unnecessary activity. Solid State Drives (SSDs) only have a limited number of writes so it is especially important that those devices don’t have programs constantly writing to them when they don’t have to. Also if you’re using a laptop, a constantly working hard drive will help shorten the battery life.

One of the improvements in Windows 8 was the updated built in Task Manager that includes a column for each process’s disk usage. This is something not included with the Windows XP, Vista or 7 Task Manager. While it’s not particularly advanced, the Windows 8 and 10 Task Manager disk usage column does at least give you a good idea if something is using the hard disk more than it should.

If your version of Task Manager doesn’t have disk usage activity monitoring or you want to separate reads and writes, which the Windows 8 and 10 version cannot do, here are 5 alternative ways to find out what programs are accessing your hard disk drive.
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