If you spend a lot of time at your computer it probably means you are going to be doing a lot of typing. That will be the case if you use the computer to work, write letters, documents, emails, articles or simply spend time on forums or social networks. Whether you realize it or not, you’ll very likely be typing in the same things like long words or common phrases, names, addresses or email signatures over and over again. That all takes time that could be saved if you shorten the process.

It’s possible to use something like the Clipboard to paste in the same text over and over, but the Windows Clipboard has it’s limit of pasting a single copied item at a time. Users of Microsoft Word will likely know about the Autocorrect function that can take an abbreviation or short string and replace it with another word or short phrase. While that works in Word it doesn’t help when you want to use something similar in other applications or web browsers.

As Windows doesn’t have the ability to expand words or strings into phrases a third party application will be needed. We’ve previously written about how to insert words or phrases with hotkeys, but here we list 5 free tools that can quickly or automatically expand a short typed string into a longer string. All programs were tested in Windows 7 and 10 64-bit.
(more…)

USB removable devices such as flash drives and portable hard drives are these days a part of everyday life. One problem Windows has had throughout the time removable devices have been around is it’s not the best at handling them when they are attached and removed. While this has improved over the years and it’s better in newer operating systems like Windows 10, handling USB devices is still not as good or efficient as it should be.

The Windows built in Safely Remove Hardware function sometimes doesn’t work the way it should and in some situations the icon can even disappear altogether. It can also be tricky identifying devices if you have several plugged in at once. There are some shareware applications around like USB Safely Remove or Zentimo (by the same developer) that enhance how USB removable devices are handled.

In this article, we’ll look at 5 freeware programs that can help control your portable USB drives and other removable devices, especially while trying to remove or eject. All tools were tested in Windows 7 and 10.
(more…)

Computer is supposed to help make things easier for us. One simple example is to delete lines from a text file that doesn’t contain a specific keyword. This task is a no brainer but very time consuming and tedious. Recently I have spent some time in compiling a list of websites that has copied and published articles taken from this blog to their website. Although Google does a pretty good job in determining the original publisher, it is still a robot based on a bunch of constantly changing algorithm that can and has made mistakes. Searching for websites that has copied the posts from here is very time consuming, so I have used Copyscape Premium to automatically perform a batch scan on all 2000 articles on this website to track down plagiarism of the content from this blog.

Copyscape Premium finished scanning all 2000 posts in just 10 hours and I was able to export the results to a CSV file for further investigation. There are over 20,000 URLs in the list and I want to categorize the websites based on the domain names. Not all websites from the list are copycats but most of the websites hosted in free hosts such as blogspot/blogger/wordpress are either scrapers or copy paster. Once the URLs are categorized, I can concentrate on filing a DMCA complaint to Blogger, then followed by WordPress instead of jumping back and forth.
(more…)

Back in the days when floppy disks were still being commonly used, flashing your motherboard’s BIOS could only be done by booting the computer into DOS. When DOS is booted up on the computer, you’d probably have to switch to the floppy disk that contains the BIOS update file. Unlike today where updating a modern BIOS is far easier and convenient and you can update the BIOS directly from Windows using the software provided by the manufacturer, or simply put the BIOS file onto a USB flash drive and the inbuilt flashing tool inside the BIOS will recognize it.

If for some reason the software provided by the motherboard manufacturer is broken and you’re not able to update the BIOS from Windows, or your BIOS doesn’t actually support flashing from any other medium apart from a floppy drive and DOS, you can still do it from DOS by booting up the computer with a USB flash drive instead of a floppy which is far easier. The most popular and easiest ways are to simply install MS-DOS or FreeDOS onto the USB drive, copy over the required BIOS file and flashing utility from the manufacturer’s website, boot to USB and flash the BIOS from there.

Thankfully, there are tools around that can help you accomplish this with the minimum of effort, and not lead you through a huge multiple step process full of manual commands. Here are 5 such tools that will put either FreeDOS or MS-DOS onto a bootable USB flash drive allowing you to update the BIOS firmware from DOS but without a floppy drive.
(more…)

There are many different sounds that come through your computer’s speakers at varying degrees of volume. Windows itself is good at outputting various sound effects. There are many other ways sound may blast out of your PC or laptop speakers such as gaming, video and audio clips on web pages, messaging or chatting on Skype, or simply listening to audiobooks and music.

Many users would like to hear audio at a certain volume depending on the time of day. For example, you might want to watch a video clip or listen to music at a reasonably high volume level in the daytime or evening, but at night that volume needs to be reduced so as not to wake family members. It’s easy to increase or decrease the volume level in Windows but it’s also easy to forget and have sound blasting out when you least expect it.

A simple solution is using a program to automatically alter the system volume to a level you prefer when you want such as daily at a specific time. If you don’t want sound during working hours, want it louder during the evening, or want it quieter during late hours, it’s easily done. Here are four free tools that can help.
(more…)

Most Windows users would have experienced the User Account Control dialog asking the user to allow a program to make changes to their computer. Some folders like Program Files, Windows, and the root of C don’t automatically grant write permissions to the user in question. For instance, when you try to install Google Chrome or 7-Zip, UAC asks for permission because it’s trying to install in the Program Files folder.

Some applications like the Command Prompt can run with or without the UAC elevation with the difference in the permissions it receives. If the non-elevated command prompt is trying to do something such as creating a file or deleting a file from the root of the C drive which it doesn’t have rights for, Windows will simply deny the action.

Microsoft has never included a simple tool to trigger a UAC elevation from the command line. You have to already be in an administrator Command Prompt to run elevated commands or run a batch script as administrator manually. If you need to trigger UAC elevation from the command prompt or in a batch file that doesn’t already have administrator privileges, here are six different ways to do it.
(more…)

Even though the world of computing is becoming more portable and internet based, there’s still times when you need a hard copy of something whether it’s a photo or a document, and a printer is the hardware you turn to. Unfortunately, even printers have their own issues while you’re trying to use them and one of the most common issues is when one of the printing jobs gets stuck in print queue.

Quite often you can’t delete the offending job and it won’t let you print off anything else waiting there behind it. Most people will either disconnect or turn off their printer or reboot the PC to get it to work, but it’s not exactly an ideal solution. The more techie minded people will know there is a solution to the problem by using the Command Prompt to stop the print spooler service, or by creating a batch file, but what’s wrong with having a nice little GUI to save you the trouble?
(more…)

Most ordinary Windows users never use the Command Prompt and have no idea what sort of things you can do from the command line. More experienced users will know that running command line commands can be very useful for a range of tasks and grouping everything into a single batch file to process it all together can be very powerful.

One inconvenience with running batch files is that they always open a console window which shows the output of the commands being executed. This can be important if you want to interact or see what is happening while the batch file is running but a bit annoying if you want to run the batch script quietly in the background or while starting windows.

For short batch files, the console window may appear and disappear in a flash or stay open for longer if more commands are being executed. There is no standard built in way to completely hide the console window from showing so if you want to do that another solution is required. Here we show you some different ways to make your batch script run silently without a console window showing.
(more…)

When you have a nice and clean install of Windows, everything should work properly and it will be no problem to use. Unfortunately after installing and uninstalling third-party software and drivers etc, the potential for minor or even major issues to appear quickly starts to increase. This is often caused by third-party software or even malware leaving traces behind and not reverting back the changes they may have made to the system.

Not every Windows user knows how to analyze the problem in order to logically figure out a solution, so the best option is to look for possible fixes on the Internet. It shouldn’t take too long to come across a utility that will claim to fix your problems with the click of a button, sometimes even for a fee. In the situations when your computer system is misbehaving, it just makes sense to have a utility on hand that can fix a number of the most common issues most users have when things go wrong.

Here’s a selection of 4 applications that each have a number of repairs and fixes available to help eliminate various problems in windows. They range from the most common or simple to those that sometimes would normally require the help a professional technician.
(more…)

Many different types of image or graphic formats are available that you can use on a computer, such as JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF and BMP. The type used by icons in Windows is the .ICO format. What makes ICO files different to those formats is the ability to embed several different image sizes directly into the file along with differing color depths. This allows a 256 pixel icon image to look as clear and sharp as a 32 pixel icon image and not need artificially resizing if both resolutions are included inside the icon file.

There are many reasons why you might want to extract an icon from inside another file such as a program executable or DLL library. For example, we use thumbnail size images on the blog and if we want to write about a specific program we might decide to use one of its icons as the related thumbnail. For that, extracting an icon from the program’s EXE or DLL is an option. Windows itself also has thousands of icons which you might want to make use of spread across dozens of system files.

One option would be to extract the icon image to an individual ICO file and there are many tools around that can do it, but that requires an extra step after of converting the icon file to an image format such as PNG. An easier way requiring fewer steps is using a program to extract the icon from the binary file and save it out directly as an image file, here are 5 free tools to try out.
(more…)

Many users will come into contact with text files in Windows on a daily basis. Whether it’s reading a Readme file, viewing system or application logs, editing configuration files or writing your own files. Text files can easily be viewed, created and edited using the built in Windows Notepad or more advanced programs like Notepad++. Making your own text file is simple and requires no coding or programming knowledge.

If you have a number of text files spread across your computer it can become a bit inconvenient to keep opening different files to read or edit specific text. What would make things easier is being able to merge a number of text files into one single file. This makes the text faster to read and search through. It’s especially useful for multiple logs or report files that could be spread across dozens or even hundreds of files.

Here we list 6 different tools and methods for you to be able to merge or combine multiple text based files into a single file to hopefully make things a little easier.
(more…)

USB storage devices have been one of the best technology inventions in recent years. These days, it is possible to carry around a flash drive or memory card with hundreds of Gigabytes of capacity in your pocket. Unfortunately, the rise in portable USB drives has made it easier for malicious files to spread from computer to computer. Before opening a USB drive with unverified content, it’s always wise to scan it first for malware to be safe.

Windows has a few hidden away settings that allow a bit more control over access and writing to USB storage devices. For instance, a drive can be write protected meaning no data can be written to it. Normally you would need a small switch on the device itself to do that. You can also deny access to USB drives completely so they don’t show in Windows at all. This could be a useful security measure if you have careless users that constantly insert drives with malicious files.

The related settings are mostly stored in the registry so you have to either use Regedit or a third party utility that can do it for you. Here we show you some ways to write protect or deny access to your USB storage devices.

Note: These settings only affect the local system. While your computer might have the write protect option set, other systems will still have full read and write access. Apart from one solution below, all USB storage devices will be affected with the same setting so you cannot selectively choose which drives have write access and which don’t.
(more…)

Other than PPTP and L2TP, OpenVPN is another protocol used by most VPN companies to connect to the VPN servers. OpenVPN is an open source program that uses the OpenSSL library to provide encryption and it is extremely secure if compared to PPTP. However you will need to install the OpenVPN software in order to connect to a VPN that uses the OpenVPN protocol. During installation of OpenVPN software, the installer will prompt the user to install some drivers which may cause some users to panic. OpenVPN will have to first install a virtual network driver called TAP-Win32/64 or else it will also fail to connect to OpenVPN servers.

If you are always on the move and would only want to use OpenVPN rather than PPTP or L2TP because of secure encryption, then you can use OpenVPN Portable which simplifies the whole process of downloading, installing and configuring the OpenVPN.
(more…)

Whether you are a general computer user, a professional or just a hobbyist, something that gets created a lot in Windows is log files or text files that report what a particular application or built in operation has been doing. A log file could be anything from a progress report by a small utility, to a connection activity log for your server to Windows Event log files or even Windows update logs.

Sometimes you might need to monitor a text or log file to see if it is creating any error reports or failure notices while the software is running. Loading the file into Windows Notepad will show you the content of the file but it will not refresh the contents in real time to show new entries while the file is open. With just using Notepad the file would constantly need manually closing and reopening.

A solution is to use another method that can automatically show the contents of a text or log file in real time, much like the Tail command included in Linux and Unix. There’s a few ways to accomplish this task in Windows, here we show you how.
(more…)

The Nero disc burning software has come a long way since its initial release back in 1997. While it had a few competitors like Roxio, Nero was more popular. This was probably due to the “lite” version of the software being bundled together with disc burners making it more well known. If you’ve been keeping up with Nero’s progress, you’d have noticed that the software is now more bloated. It has a lot of additional features rather than just a simple and reliable disc burning software.

Nero has evolved from being solid disc burning software into a complete and powerful media management application that can burn, copy, create, edit, rip, convert, protect, play and stream media files. Most of the Nero software is shareware but they’ve always provided a free cut down version with basic burning features. Many years ago it was called BurnLite and then was renamed to Kwik Media. Not long after that, Kwik Media was again renamed to Nero MediaHome.

Even though Nero provides a free version of MediaHome, they seem intent on hiding it from the public. The official download at CNET was removed on Nero’s request and if you manage to find the official MediaHome free stub installer, it will simply download the latest trial version of Nero instead. The MediaHome full version is available to purchase from Nero’s online store, priced $29.95. There isn’t a trial version of MediaHome for you to test before deciding whether to purchase.

We hope that this article will offer some information about MediaHome and its free edition. You will also find links to download the official MediaHome Free Edition setup installer at the end of this article.

Photo and Video Management

Nero MediaHome aims to be the primary media manager on your computer that catalogues all your photos, videos, and music. By default, there are 4 library categories for photos and videos which is by timeline, faces, places and search using tags.
(more…)