Most computer users like to make things easier for themselves because there can be a lot of pointing and clicking while using your PC. Although keyboard shortcuts are a big time saver, many people are not proficient enough using just a keyboard and prefer to use a mouse to perform tasks. One thing you can do is use gestures and they are more common than you might think. Phones, tablets and touch screen computers use gestures all the time. Actions like swiping from side to side, pinch zoom or even sliding down to scroll are all types of gestures.

For a traditional keyboard and mouse things are a bit different. A mouse gesture is simply pressing a mouse button and dragging the mouse in a specified direction or pattern. Windows has no built in method to use an ordinary mouse gesture to do things like open programs or execute keyboard shortcuts. They are quite common in web browsers though, with Opera, Vivaldi, Cent Browser, Slimjet and others having the feature built in. Failing that, Firefox and Chrome extensions for mouse gesture are available.

Having mouse gestures in a supported web browser is one thing but if you want to use them within Windows itself, Internet Explorer/Edge or your favorite software, a third party solution is needed. Here we show you 5 mouse gesture programs to make your computing tasks a bit easier. All were tested in Windows 7 and 10.
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As you might expect, most computer users perform the majority of functions in and around Windows using their mouse or laptop touch pad. Sometimes a keyboard shortcut has to be pressed where there is no obvious mouse driven alternative such as Alt+Tab to scroll through open programs, but some users don’t like using the keyboard unless it’s to type a letter.

But if you think about it, using keyboard shortcuts could save time and effort compared to only using a mouse, and using both in combination can really help get things done more quickly. Many IT professionals and geeks can get away without using a mouse at all in Windows and applications quite often, but there are so many shortcuts available it’s hard for the average user to know what they are because there are so many available that a lot of us don’t even know exist.
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One thing experienced users will always tell you is when you are undertaking repairs or performing tweaks in Windows, you should always have backups to hand in case things go wrong. Full system backups are of course a good method but if changes are being made that only affect the system registry, then it makes sense that you only need to backup your registry files.

The Windows registry is essentially a huge database that stores thousands of configuration settings for Windows, third party software, hardware, services, user specific settings and much more. It only takes a bad tweak or a corrupt registry entry to cause Windows to become unbootable. Many fixes rely on editing registry values, and sometimes it’s unavoidable, but backing up is still an important first step however safe they appear to be.

There are several ways to backup your system registry but simply copying the files to another folder is not an option as they are locked by Windows and cannot be copied. Another way is using System Restore but that backs up and restores lots of other files besides just the registry. Here we show you some ways to backup just the system registry files so they can be restored in the event of system instability or Windows failing to boot at all.
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Most of us know that when you install an application, it’s not that uncommon for it leave bits of itself behind on your system after you uninstall it again, even using the official uninstaller utility that came with it. Security software is a prime example which can often leave a ton of redundant data behind and in many cases this causes system instability until all traces have been removed. Many of us have third party uninstall tools to help scan for and get rid of this leftover data such as Revo Uninstaller, but although they can do a fine job, these are after the event tools and sometimes not quite as accurate as they need to be.

The best way to make sure nothing gets missed after removing an application is to monitor and track the file and registry changes when you install the software so when it comes to removal, you have the chance to delete anything the original installer left behind. There are many tools around that can watch your system for certain changes and we’ve written about ones that can track changes during an installation in another article.

These 7 utilities below can monitor the install and then uninstall the software again removing all the changes the original uninstaller might have missed.
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If your Windows system runs into problems, with adequate backups available, recovering files and folders is quite easy. One area which is usually more difficult to recover data or information from is a Windows Registry which isn’t on the running system. You might have backup copies of the registry files, like SOFTWARE or NTUSER.DAT, but actually reading the offline registry itself and exporting data from it is not so straightforward.

What even some experienced users don’t realize is that the Windows Registry Editor has a built in option to load registry hives from an external source. Specific keys and values can then be exported to a .REG file and imported onto another system. The hive files can be from a backup of registry files or the registry from an unbootable or offline system. All you have to do is go to File > Load Hive and browse for the external registry file.

Loading external registry hives does have a restriction, which is they can only be loaded within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_USERS in your local registry. Highlight one of those first or the Load Hive option will be greyed out. You will also have to give the loaded hive a custom name and it will sit inside HKLM or HKU as a key. The external hive will stay permanently attached in Regedit until the entry is selected and you go to File > Unload Hive.
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There’s probably quite a few users reading this who have got at least a couple of bootable CD’s laying around for performing various repair tasks. A lot of developers these days make available ISO images which can be burned onto CD of even transferred onto USB stick. From Antivirus scanning and Linux distro’s, to password resetting tools and data backup or recovery, there’s a massive selection of disks that can really give you a comprehensive repair and recovery collection of disks. Oh, and not forgetting a lot of peoples favorite repair utility disk, Hiren’s Boot CD.

For a long time though, when you downloaded one of these CD’s, it had to be one ISO image to one CD or DVD. That makes it rather inconvenient if you wanted to take your whole repair collection with you to another location. There are tools that let you write an ISO onto a USB stick such as Rufus and UNetbootin which is helpful but still doesn’t make the best use of your disk space.
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When you download a file from the internet, quite often you cannot be 100% guaranteed that the file has not been changed in some way from the original. This could either be by the site you are downloading from, corruption due to errors in the download process, an individual who has uploaded the file for you, or possibly the most dangerous, the file has been infected by malicious software.

One of the ways you can identify whether a file has been changed from its original state is to check its digital signature. Or you can verify a file’s integrity by checking its hash value. Every file has unique data contained within it, and when you apply a certain algorithm called a “cryptographic hash function” to it, a string value is returned which is only valid for that file in its current state.

If even one byte in the file changes, the value given when the check is run again will be different. A couple of popular hash algorithms are MD5 and SHA-1 and you will sometimes see these values listed on website download pages. A prime example is ISO images for operating systems like Linux and Windows. All the official Windows ISO images will have an SHA-1 hash listed somewhere online which you can then compare against to see if the one you downloaded is identical to the original.

If you have something like an MD5 or an SHA based hash value from a website and want to check the integrity of the downloaded file, a way to calculate its hash value is required. Here we show you 10 different tools that can calculate and compare hash values, they were tested on Windows 10 and 7.
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Windows drivers are important because a badly coded driver can cause instability and even blue screens of death. Most of the time, a driver file has a .sys extension and a .inf file is often used to install it. Besides Windows already having dozens of drivers installed by default, lots of software can install a driver for both hardware components and to help run the software itself, somewhat like a Windows service.

Drivers can also be used at a low level, such as anti piracy DRM for games and applications, and even malicious programs, such as rootkits. You can, of course, view running drivers in Device Manager. Unused drivers can also be viewed in Device Manager by adjusting a couple of settings. It is not as easy to view drivers that have been installed and are not part of Windows but belong to third party software.

A lot of third party software can leave unused drivers behind which could cause issues affecting your system now or at some point in the future. Below, we list a number of tools that can filter out drivers made by Microsoft or are installed by Windows. This can help narrow down old, unused, or unstable third party drivers you might want to investigate further or remove.

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Most average computer users like to use the mouse for performing the majority of tasks in Windows. It makes sense because Windows is primarily point and click. More advanced users and professionals prefer to use the keyboard for many tasks because Windows has tons of keyboard shortcuts. Therefore with just a few key presses, you can do something which might take several mouse clicks.

If you send loads of emails or write lots of documents and endlessly type in the same text time after time, it makes sense to set up a keyboard shortcut to help you out. With a configured custom hotkey you can insert a block of commonly used text or run a program that doesn’t already have an assigned shortcut. That could be a big time saver and reduce mouse actions or repeated typing by a sizable amount.

If you are simply looking for an automatic text replacement tool, there are many dedicated programs available like WordExpander or PhraseExpress. If you’re looking to insert text, run programs, or perform other tasks from a custom hotkey, we have six free tools for you to try out. All were tested in Windows 10 and 7 64-bit.
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Many advanced users use the keyboard to run applications or Windows tools, either through the Start menu or the Run dialog box by pressing Win+R. Both can open websites, run command line tools or open specific folder paths. While the Start Menu search box and the Run box are similar, the Run box is slightly more advanced with its previously used command history and browse box to find and launch specific programs. Run can also launch Control Panel applets with Control commands.

Something to make the Run box more efficient is shortening commands to make them quicker to type. Instead of typing a long command or path, type just a few letters that link to the command, otherwise known as an alias. Windows has a very basic alias function built in but it’s stored in the registry and not immediately obvious. The Run dialog checks this registry key so if you can add an alias to the it, the shortcut will work when you use Run. The registry key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/App Paths

There is also another similar key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER that affects just the logged in user but it’s rarely used. There will already be some aliases there and it’s possible to manually add your own but having a tool do it for you automatically would be easier and less problematic.  Here we show you 3 ways to create a keyboard shortcut alias in the Run dialog box to make typing commands quicker.
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Are you annoyed by confirmation windows asking questions like “Are you sure you want to continue”, “Are you sure you want to do this”, or something similar? These confirmation windows are there to prevent against accidental termination of programs for careless users but it can get really annoying especially if you know for a fact that you are going to click the Yes button every time you see that window. Depending on your level of expertise for computers, you may either prefer to have the warning windows every time you close a program or perhaps you don’t even want it at all. Below is one example when terminating Zemana AntiLogger.

Previously I have introduced 5 software that is able to prevent programs from closing by disabling the close button, today we will be taking a look at a program that does the opposite, which is auto clicking on the button found in the confirmation windows.
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Previously I have written an article on how to prevent Google Chrome from closing when there are multiple tabs opened by prompting a warning window when you try to terminate the program either by clicking the close button on the top right or via Alt+F4. This annoying behavior still exist on the current Google Chrome 20 which can be easily solved by installing the Google Toolbox extension.

The solution above is application specific but what if you want to prevent other programs from closing such as Microsoft Outlook, or any other software of your choice? Good news is I found 5 software that claims to prevent accidental closing of software by disabling the close button and have put them to test. Weirdly out of the 5 programs, only 1 of it is a freeware.
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If you are not from the US, you may not know what is Hulu or probably just heard about it. Basically Hulu is a website that allows Americans to watch free TV episodes and movies by streaming it to their computer, media players and mobile devices. If you are not connected to the Internet from the US, accessing Hulu.com will display a popup message saying “Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States” and when you try to watch any videos, it will show “We’re sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States”. This is a simple restriction which can be easily bypassed by connecting to a VPN server that is located in the US or you can change your DNS settings.

Now that you are able to start watching the free videos from Hulu, you probably want to download Hulu videos and save them to your computer for later offline viewing when you know that you may not have an Internet connection at that time. Unfortunately Hulu does not provide a way for you to download the videos. I did a search and found that there are a few tools being reviewed such as Foxreal YouTube FLV Downloader by dotTech and StreamTransport by MakeUseOf but unfortunately both of the software can no longer download Hulu videos. Foxreal YouTube FLV Downloader merely detected the link to download the advertisements before the video while Hulu displays the following error “Unfortunately Hulu is not supported on your device. We apologize for any inconvenience” on StreamTransport.

I did some extensive testing and here are the current working methods to download videos from Hulu.
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With so many programs working in the background performing their own tasks, it can be quite difficult sometimes to know what is being written, deleted or modified on your drives. There always appears to be something making changes somewhere. Some operations you might be fully aware of such as file downloading, video encoding, antivirus scans etc, but there might also be something writing to the drive when you don’t really expect or want it to.

Being able to monitor files across the board would work, but isn’t really practical. As it would be a thankless task trying to keep watch over all this activity yourself, having a piece of software to help you find out what files are being created or modified could be a real time saver. Thankfully, there are tools around to help you out and keep watching these areas for you, here’s a selection of 10 free programs to have a look at. All tools were tested in Windows 10 and Windows 7 64-bit.
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Most Windows installs will have a fair amount of software installed, even light users will have a few programs to do the bare essentials. It could be just basic things like a web browser, Flash player, PDF reader and a few others, but it’s all software that gets updated at regular intervals. Many popular applications these days have a built in function to update themselves automatically by downloading and installing new versions without asking or requiring user interaction.

While auto updating is likely to be perfectly fine and a good idea for most users, it does become a problem if you are trying to troubleshoot instability with Windows or the specific application. Some software that auto updates makes it very easy to temporarily turn the option off but other software makes it very difficult. Some doesn’t even have the option available and you have to use another method. Here we show you how to disable automatic updates for a few common applications.

Important: A lot of software is updated regularly to fix security issues and you leave your system more vulnerable by not using the latest version. While we are showing you how to disable automatic updates for selected applications, you should not turn off the option indefinitely. Once you have finished the task, it’s highly recommended updates for the software should be turned back on as soon as possible.
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