Everyone knows that when you delete a file in Windows it is first moved to the Recycle Bin. When the file is deleted from the Recycle Bin it is not completely gone but the space on the drive occupied by the file has been marked as available to be overwritten. That means the file’s data is still there and can actually be recovered using free data recovery software until it is overwritten by something else.

There are some dedicated tools to permanently wipe or shred the files to prevent them from being recovered as they are deleted. However, once the file has been emptied from the Recycle Bin, Windows does not offer a simple way to restore it back so the file can be shredded. Over time, the amount of data still readable from previously deleted files can become huge.

The image above shows a deleted sensitive file is still viewable in a Hex editor. A good way around this is to use a free utility that is able to make all recoverable data unrecoverable. This is done by erasing only the space on your drive that is not currently occupied by existing files. Once that is done, old data can no longer be seen or recovered. Here’s a selection of 10 free tools to securely wipe free disk space.
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Sometimes when you run an application or the antivirus decides to run a scan, suddenly the computer might become very slow to react or even get to the point where it seems completely unresponsive. When a program takes up all of your CPU it leaves very little left for the ordinary tasks such as running Windows or allowing your web browser to work smoothly. There may be occasions when you have felt the need to terminate the process through the task manager because it looks like the process has crashed, or maybe you simply want to use the computer for other things and not wait until it’s finished and releases the CPU back to the system.

Windows does actually have a way of dealing with this problem. Each process that starts on your machine is given a priority level by Windows, and these range from Realtime which is the highest, down to Low with some others in between. With the exception of a few core Windows processes, all programs will be given the default priority of Normal. A process with a higher priority gets to use the free CPU time available while a lower priority process only has access to the CPU when the higher priority application doesn’t need it.
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Everybody knows that like most other desktop operating systems, Windows can multitask and easily handles several different applications open at once. The way you can cycle through these open programs is by using the keyboard combination of pressing Alt+Tab. Depending on your version of Windows, you will either get a strip of icons or small thumbnail images to represent the open programs, which you can then use to switch between the required application’s window to bring what you want to the front.

Windows Vista and 7 also come with a more visually appealing task switching mechanism called Flip 3D which can be accessed with the Win key+Tab combination on all but the Basic versions of those operating systems. Whether you would like to get the Flip 3D switcher on Windows XP or like to have a more functional way of cycling your open windows while pressing Alt+Tab, a few 3rd party tools are on hand to help. Here’s a selection of 7 tools (6 free and 1 shareware) to help you get the most out of the Windows Alt+Tab function.
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The Windows Safe Mode is often used to perform a number of tasks when they can’t be undertaken in Windows during its normal use. Removing stubborn and difficult to uninstall software or faulty drivers, and deleting malware are just a few of the things that often require Safe Mode to be used because they are affecting Windows too much and cannot be removed in the standard way.

This “alternate” Windows you can boot to is simply a version of Windows that loads with the bare minimum amount of files, only the basic hardware drivers for the display, keyboard mouse, mass storage drivers etc, and no desktop themes, programs or extra services that would otherwise load up with your system are executed. When the files needed to be worked on are not in use, it’s much easier to delete or move them and help fix any problems you’re having.

Whenever I am required to service a computer that’s not behaving normally, the first thing I’ll do is try to boot in to Safe Mode. Or if I get a call from a friend saying that their computer is acting weird, I’ll also ask them to try and boot in to Safe Mode first and see if the problem will occur there. The problem is, for people who have never heard of or done this before, the chances are I’m going to have a tough time teaching them how to boot in to Safe Mode.
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Network connections are very common nowadays as virtually every phone, tablet or PC needs access to the internet or other devices around your home or office. Just about every computer, low end or high end,  comes with a built-in ethernet or WiFi network adapter. In addition to an internet connection, you can obviously set up a local network where the connected computers can transfer data between themselves.

Setting up a local area network is pretty easy because you only need a router or network switch. Plug in the network cable and it will work out of the box. Even a wireless connection can be quickly and easily established by pressing the WPS button that is found on most newer generation routers. Networks operate at different speeds so you need to make sure yours runs fast enough for your requirements.

Whether you are streaming music or video across the local network or constantly copying large files between computers, it is important to make sure that your network connection is working properly in order to achieve the fastest speeds. Here are 6 free network benchmarking tools that can be used to test your network speed between computers to make sure the network is running at the speeds you expect.
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There are many things going on when Windows boots, including loading core system files, loading system drivers, and also loading Windows services. A Windows service is a small program designed to run in the background in order to help other programs and applications function. One advantage of a service is it can automatically restart itself if you kill its running process. This is useful for important software to stay running.

Services control much of the workings of Windows, such as WiFi and networking, updates, search, firewall, and much more. A third party application can also install a service to help it function. A service can be manually started and stopped which comes in useful for troubleshooting software or Windows problems. To do that you need to know how to view the services and correctly determine which ones to look at.

Windows has a built-in tool to view all available services on the system. Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services or type Services.msc into Start or the Win+R Run dialog. One issue with the Windows Services console is it does not differentiate between services used by Windows itself and services installed by other software. There are no options for sorting the entries by the manufacturer or hiding services you shouldn’t touch.

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New viruses are being made and released onto the Internet all the time and it’s possible for antivirus software to only start detecting it after a few days. In the duration of staying undetected, the virus could have infected a lot of computers. Some viruses are invisible which can only be detected by using special tools and undetected so that the computer can stay infected as long as possible.

There are some viruses that will go to the extent of disabling tools such as the Windows Task Manager, Registry Editor, Folder Options, Command Prompt and other functions built into Windows to prevent users from checking and fixing the problems. One such virus that can cause the above mentioned problems is the Brontok virus, which will make some changes to the system restrictions in order to hide itself from easy detection and also from easy cleaning.

The Windows Task Manager is one of the most useful tools to check for any unknown running process. You can either access it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, right click on the Task bar and select Start Task Manager, or type taskmgr in the run box or search programs and files bar. If the Task Manager is disabled, you will see an error popup that says “Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator“.
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Let’s say you want to open some office documents such as spreadsheet on a cybercafe. If the cybercafe is using licensed software, you can be certain that you won’t find Microsoft Office installed on the computers because the license is just too expensive and mostly people go to cybercafe to play games, check emails and web browsing.

Or probably the Microsoft Office installed on your computer is unable to run and you urgently need to open a document file when you cannot get help at the moment to fix the problem. You are left with the choice of either to use some of the online cloud based office suites such as Google Docs, Windows Live Office, Zoho, ContactOffice or simply run any of these 5 portable free office suites directly from your USB flash drive.
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Almost everyone with a computer has heard of Bittorrent and how this peer to peer file sharing network continues to be one of the main sources for users to get nearly any type of files they are after. Huge amounts of the total internet traffic around the world is actually taken up by Bittorrent P2P traffic and whether you’re after legal files or otherwise, torrent tracker websites are available for you to get what you want if you know where to look.

Torrent tracker websites only host the .torrent file which you download and load into a torrent downloading program such as uTorrent. All pieces of the files you download are received from other users you’re connected to which is why you should always use an extra layer of protection such as PeerBlock to filter out any undesirable connections.

The problem arises when you go on the web to search for a particular torrent file, many of the search sites often have fake files, are full of popups, contain adware or malware, or have been shut down. And then you might run into region restrictions on certain sites like The Pirate Bay which may mean you can’t get onto the site from your country without using workarounds such as a VPN.

One of the go to tools for searching for torrent files from your desktop used to be Torrent Harvester which could search over 100 torrent tracker sites for your files. Sadly the project has been dead for a few years and its list of tracker sites is completely outdated while also not being fully compatible with newer versions of Windows. Thankfully there are a few alternatives available that are a bit more up to date and allow you to search more recent sites, here’s 3 for you to try out.
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It seems like every other piece of software these days wants to install a component that starts when you boot your computer. This can be quite a frustrating experience when the computer boots up Windows very slowly, and then you have to wait for all the unnecessary hidden processes to load and everything to get itself into the the system tray. Waiting for a few minutes or more is not uncommon after the desktop is visible while these extras are loaded and the computer is still virtually unusable until it’s all finished.

Not only does this problem cause the machine to boot much slower, these startup items also consumes more system memory, can increase internet traffic, and use extra processing power to keep everything running in the background. With that in mind, it makes sense that reducing what starts with your PC can make a BIG difference. And not just to the speed of your Windows boot, but also some improvements can be made to general all round performance.

Disabling programs from booting with Windows is one of the most common system tweaks you can perform and it’s even easily possible through Windows itself. Here’s a few programs that can display your list of startup items and help to disable or delete them.
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You may have noticed that some commercial software especially accounting related ones requires a USB dongle connected to the computer in order to run the program. The USB dongle works as a physical license where it is difficult to pirate or even reproduced to share with people that you know. Unlike password or serial number that can be cracked, forgotten, or stolen without your knowledge, using a physical device such as an affordable USB flash drive as a password seems to be a good idea. Some laptops do come with a biometric fingerprint reader where you can login using your thumbprint but it is not normally available on desktop computers.

Using a long password is essential to prevent against cracking with Ophcrack that uses rainbow tables but then it can be easily forgotten and it might be troublesome to type in such a long password every time you want to login. One easy way to go around this is to login to Windows using your USB flash drive.
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A lot of computer devices and gadgets uses USB connectivity to connect to the computer because it offers the convenience of immediately initializing the device, unlike the using the PS2 keyboard where it needs to be connected before Windows is started up to work. Other than that, most of time the USB device will work without even require to install a driver. Although convenient, USB also poses a security risk where someone can easily steal a huge amount of data out from the computer by just plugging in a really fast 128GB USB flash drive. Locking up the computer when you’re away from the computer should stop this from happening but you may never realize that there are times when you are careless and forgot to lock it.

Fortunately Windows keeps a history of all connected USB device not for the sake of forensics but for performance purposes. Here are two free tools that reveals all USB devices that were connected to your computer.
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Although MKV video format are gaining popularity these days as you can find many movie rips and HD camcorder records in MKV, AVI video format that was very popular many years back are still commonly being used today. One of a good reason to use AVI format is the built-in Windows Media Player 12 that is built in to Windows 7 can most of the time play AVI files without installing any third party codecs. There are also many screen recording software such as CamStudio, HyperCam 2 and Bandicam that saves the video recording to AVI only.

It is possible to encounter a corrupted AVI file where it doesn’t play on any media player software at all including VLC Media Player. One example is the popular CamStudio that outputs a corrupted AVI file when the result file is at several gigabytes. Opening on Windows Media Player would prompt an error window saying “Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file“.

Here are 5 free methods that you can use to repair or fix the corrupted AVI video file.
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Whether it’s freeware, commercial software, shareware or Windows itself, keeping your installed software up to date is a good idea. New versions often bring security updates, bug fixes, enhancements and new features. Checking for updated software yourself is not very appealing especially if you have a lot of programs installed. Some might have an automatic update function somewhere inside the settings, but many do not.

Using a program to check as many of these software titles as possible for you, and telling you if updates are available or not, could be a potential time saver.

Here are 4 different tools that can help tell you if your current software is out of date.
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If you are someone that leaves your computer switched off overnight or while it’s not in use, when you turn it on, the machine it has to go through a full boot. The speed at which your computer boots is dependent on several factors including system hardware specification and the type of boot device. For instance, an SSD will boot the system much faster than a mechanical hard drive.

Something else that makes a difference to boot times is the number of third party programs starting up with Windows. If you have several programs trying to load all at once it could still be several seconds or even minutes before the system becomes responsive enough to use. One solution is to go through everything starting with Windows and disable the programs you don’t need.

Instead of disabling some startup programs altogether, another option is to delay those items and put them on a timer to start after a period of time. This way Windows will load and become usable more quickly with the most important software loaded. The less important delayed programs will load a bit later. Delaying startup programs is quite easy and here we show you seven ways in which to achieve it.
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