It is not uncommon that one day you find a software application just stops working. The most basic way to attempt to solve the problem is by reinstalling the program. Hopefully, the setup will replace any corrupted files or settings that prevent the program from working properly. Sometimes a reinstall won’t work because the setup installer requires you to uninstall the program first before you can perform a new installation.

All is good if you can uninstall and reinstall, but there are times when you cannot repair or uninstall the program, then you’re stuck with installed software that doesn’t run. Depending on the installation process, some easy ones can be removed by manually deleting the program’s folder, shortcut and the obvious registry entries. However, some uninstalls can be far more tricky.

A bigger and more sophisticated application like Microsoft Office has thousands of registry entries and files scattered across the system. It must be properly uninstalled or else it can affect system stability and prevent reinstallation later on. Being such a large piece of software, a partially working or non working install of Office could also have an effect on other software that is relying on Office tools or components to function.

If you need to completely uninstall a version of Microsoft Office such as 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and even 365, here we have a few methods to do it.
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By default, Windows uses a power plan to save try and save power. It can do this by turning off the display when there is no activity for a given period and also do a similar thing to put the computer to sleep. If you don’t move the mouse or touch the keyboard within a specific period of time, Windows thinks you’re away and will perform the selected action to conserve power.

However, this is not always the case and sometimes you might not be at the computer but don’t want it to shut off the display or go into standby for a while. You can of course go to the Power Options in Control Panel and create or edit a power plan that keeps the computer and display on. Or you can go to Settings in Windows 10 and simply change or disable the sleep timers for the current plan.

If you don’t revert the chosen power options back, you’re left with settings you might not want on a permanent basis. Some software has the ability to keep the display or computer on while running such as a video player or video encoder but not all software has this option.

A simple solution so you don’t have to touch any power plans or sleep settings is to use a third party utility that temporarily prevents the computer or screen from going into standby. Here’s a selection of free tools that can help, they were all tested on Windows 10 64-bit.
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Being able to search through the files you have on your computer is an integral part of file management and typing a search term into a box and letting the computer do it will save far more time than manually searching through drives and folders yourself. Windows has had the simple ability to search for a file for the longest time, and in Windows Vista an even faster way was introduced to search your files with the indexing feature which brings up the search results almost instantly.

Search indexing is a simple concept and it collects the names and locations of all the files you have on the computer, and places them all into a database. When you search for something the database is queried instead of Windows manually going through the whole system to see if a file match exists. Before you can make use of indexing in Windows the system first has to create the database. Windows Search is often criticized because it can be resource intensive and make thousands of writes to your hard drive or SSD in the background.

While Windows Search might not be the best, if you have hundreds of thousand or even millions of files stored on your system, indexing is still the way to go for the fastest results. Windows Search isn’t the only indexing search tool available, and there are many others that can index your files quickly by reading the Master File Table on the drive, here are 7 for you to try out.
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The search function in Windows is an important feature although we don’t normally use it everyday. As our hard drive space gets bigger and cheaper, we tend to store even more files and don’t bother deleting them. If your files aren’t arranged in order, chances are you forget where the important files are and here comes the useful search feature to the rescue by locating the misplaced file using a combination of file names, extensions, date modified, and etc.

On an older Windows operating system such as XP, you can launch the search window by pressing WIN+F, or when you’re in Windows Explorer, both F3 or Ctrl+F will also work. Newer versions of Windows such as 7, 8 and 10 are much easier by simply pressing the Start key on your keyboard and you can start typing the words that you want to search for.

Although Microsoft has made efforts to improve the search feature in Windows, there are some users that do not like to use the Windows Search because they claim it does not find the file they’re looking for. It is very likely a user’s problem and they’re not searching with the correct keywords or even looking at the correct path. As for some of the computer savvy users, they’d prefer to disable the indexing service that constantly scans the computer’s index locations, a method which is also found on some third party search tools such as Locate32, Everything, TheSearchMan, etc.

If you’re one of those that does not like to use the Windows Search feature, here are 5 free real time non-indexing search utilities that you can try.
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My uncle recently bought a Sony NEX-5 camera and he was advice to get a Sony memory stick PRO-HG Duo because of the high speed data transfer. At the back of the memory stick PRO-HG Duo plastic cover, it said that the purchaser can use Sony’s own file rescue software that enables users to recover accidentally deleted files. The weird thing is it doesn’t come with a disc that can allow the user to install Sony’s memory card file rescue software. Although there are other free software to recover deleted photos, a Sony made software might have better compatibility with Sony memory cards.

He asked me if I knew anything about it but I never heard about it. After researching on it, I found out that the Sony Memory Card File Rescue software can be downloaded from Sony’s website. Before you can download, you will need to type in the model name and serial number or downloading code as a proof that you actually own Sony’s memory card in order to use their file rescue software. It’s easy getting Sony’s model name as it is displayed on Sony’s official website but as for the serial number, it requires a bit of searching and it is provided by us for your convenience. Here is the step-by-step instructions on how to download Sony Memory Card File Rescue software for free even if you don’t own a Sony Memory Stick.
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Most people would have at least heard of Norton AntiVirus because they have been around for a very long time. The first version of Norton AntiVirus was released on 1991 during the Windows 3.X time and has been in active development till today. There were a few different versions of Norton products offered by Symantec which is the AntiVirus, Internet Security and 360 but they have all been replaced by Norton Security since September 2014.

You will find 3 different versions of Norton Security available at the official website. Norton Security for One Device, also known as the standard edition can only be installed on one device while Norton Security deluxe edition can be installed up to 5 devices. Both of this product replaces the old Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security. A premium edition also known as Norton Security with Backup is a replacement for Norton 360 that comes with slightly more features such as 25GB online cloud storage and allows installation up to 10 devices.
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Apart from getting rid of potentially unwanted files, a junk file cleaner protects your privacy at the same time. This is because other users sharing the same computer wouldn’t be able to track what you’ve previously done on the PC as Windows and most software has a history function that shows recently opened files or tabs. There are literally dozens of junk file cleaners around, CCleaner and BleachBit are two popular ones.

CCleaner and BleachBit come with a sizeable amount of selected rules to find potentially unused and junk files. However, those lists are by no means complete and there will still be thousands of pieces of software that are not supported out of the box. Thankfully, some junk file cleaners allow you to add your own program to clean through an inclusion list or an external Winapp2.ini file.

A Winapp2.ini is a text file that includes a list of files, folders, and registry keys/values that can be removed during a cleaning process. These entries will be in addition to what the cleaning software already has in its default list. You could even create/edit a winapp2.ini yourself with a bit of knowledge or download a ready made list from the winapp2 website. That list currently has nearly 3,000 entries.

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One of the most useful features found in text editing software is the search function. By searching using keywords, you can quickly find information that you are looking for rather than referring to the index at the first page and then read the whole chapter. Another handy feature that most of the time you will find accompanying the search is the replace feature. You can find both search and replace feature even on Notepad, the most basic text editing software included in Windows operating systems.

This search and replace feature is only limited to the text file that is currently opened in Notepad. If you want to automatically replace a word of phrase across multiple text files, there are plenty of third party free software that can do it because it is a very simple operation. For a more sophisticated search and replace that involves multiple lines, it is advisable to use regular expressions to do the job but regex is not easy and something that most people wouldn’t know how to use or even to write a working string.

For a simple replace or removal of multiple text lines, an easy solution that might work for some cases is by using the greedy dot star (.*) to match anything in between. An example is removing the whole HTML head tag from the starting <head> until the closing </head> in HTML files by using the following search syntax:

<head>.*</head>

After testing a bunch of third party search and replace freeware tools, here are 5 that can allow the dot star usage.
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With the combination of the ability to easily create a portable application out of any software and reasonably large size USB flash drives that are getting more affordable, this allows us to store more files such as documents and even applications to the disk. Nowadays a computer technician is only required to bring along their USB flash drive containing their collection of tools such as antivirus rescue disks to repair a computer unlike many years ago when they had to carry a CD wallet.

As time goes by, the accumulated programs on a USB Flash drive can be by the thousands and it may not be that easy to locate and launch the intended program not to mention keeping them up to date. Searching for the program is a waste of time. Alternatively you can store the programs in different folders according to their categories but a more efficient way is to just use a portable application menu software which is designed to manage and to launch portable applications from USB flash drives.

There are easily around 20-30 such application launching programs if you include the start menu replacement software with most of them offering nearly the same features with different eye candy effects. So in this article we will only list the application launchers that have the additional built-in functionality to automatically download and update portable apps on a USB flash drive.
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It’s becoming a growing trend these days that when you download a piece of software, you’re not actually getting the proper full setup installer. Instead you download a small front end executable that will download the real installer in the background when you launch it and proceed with an install. Although this method of supplying the software reduces the load on servers because you’re only downloading the full size installer when it’s required, it’s also frustrating because you need access to the internet when it comes to installation and not everybody has or wants web access all the time.

Adobe Flash full installer downloads in the background

Thankfully, most of the time the web installer is only downloading the full setup executable file that’s usually hidden away or not immediately obvious on the developer’s website. Although you can’t normally view the full path and direct link of the application URL when the computer is downloading files in the background, there are ways to get around this problem with the help of a small piece of software. This will allow you to download the full setup file and install it on any computer at a later date.

Packet sniffing tools capture the incoming and outgoing packets on your network and are able to view the data which will usually include the direct URL to other installer files, executable’s or even media files. There are many network tools around that can do this type of task like Wireshark or Fiddler, but they are more powerful and advanced. Here we list 5 free tools that can capture network packets and are very easy to use only really requiring a few mouse clicks to discover the hidden URL you’re looking for.
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BitTorrent has been around for so many years and it’s still widely being used today. You can find a lot of things including the latest movies and TV series to download on a popular Torrent tracker websites like “The Pirate Bay” which the authorities can’t seem to permanently shut down. Downloading files using BitTorrent is usually done with client software such as uTorrent, Vuze, qBitTorrent or Tixati.

Every torrent client has its own distinct advantages and one very useful feature that is not commonly found is the ability to “stream” which is to start the playback without waiting for the whole file to complete downloading. Just like viewing online videos on YouTube, you get to start watching right away and that saves you a lot of time.

If you’d like to stream a video or movie file from a torrent without waiting for it to download first, here we have 10 options that allow you to do that for free.
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There are times when you are able to have both a wired and wireless adapter connected to different networks at the same time. A simple example is when you’re connected to your home router using the wired Ethernet adapter while an unencrypted Wi-Fi network is also available to connect using your wireless adapter. With both wired and wireless adapters connected to different networks at the same time, Windows does not give you the advantage of binding both of the adapters to give you a faster connection speed.

Which network adapter is being used for Internet purposes will depend on the metric being automatically assigned to the network adapter by Windows. Although it is possible to disable the automatic metric feature and override it with a custom value, this will only route all but not specific Internet applications to a network adapter.

The ability to configure which IP address or network adapter to use for an application is commonly found in a BitTorrent client software such as uTorrent, Vuze, Tixati and Deluge. If your program does not support IP or network adapter binding, fortunately there is a very unique free and small program called ForceBindIP that allows you to control which network adapter or IP address to use on an application.
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Ever since Google started using HTTPS as a ranking signal in the hopes of making the Internet safer, you can find more and more websites and online services starting to use HTTPS. HTTPS is safe in the sense that when you visit a website that uses the secure HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP, anyone such as your Internet Service Provider or network administrator that runs a packet sniffer on the network level cannot see what exactly you are doing.

Visiting a website that uses HTTPS on all pages is definitely good but there is a small problem whereby you won’t be able to obtain the direct download links from a web installer that downloads from a HTTPS URL. An example is 2 years ago you were able to use URLSnooper, HTTPNetworkSniffer, Free HTTP Sniffer, Socket Sniffer or PacketViewer to display the hidden remote URL for Adobe Flash Player Installer but these tools no longer work because the installer downloads from an encrypted HTTPS source, rather than HTTP.

As you can see from the screenshot above, NetLimiter shows that the Adobe Download Manager connects to port 443 which is used for the encrypted HTTPS protocol (HTTP uses port 80). In this article we’ll show you some tools that can decrypt the encrypted HTTPS traffic so that you get the same level of details as HTTP.
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Over the years whenever someone wanted to write a CD or DVD disc the name Nero wasn’t very far away. It used to and still does come with a reduced function express version in many hardware burner packages, but over the years it’s grown in price and added functions that most people don’t really want. The last 3 or 4 major releases have become quite bloated and so many things get installed in the background it becomes quite resource hungry to go with it, which isn’t great if you just want to burn a few data or audio CD’s.

You don’t need several hundred Megabytes of program to enable you to perform any disc burning task which is why a lot of users are not overly fond of many of these all-in-one suites because they are completely unnecessary for the most part. One of the most resource friendly ways of burning a disc is to do it with a piece of portable burning software, they don’t install hundreds of Megabytes of files, background monitors and a ton of registry entries, just a program that loads when you need it.

Here’s a selection of 10 free and portable disc burning programs that can handle a large range of different tasks. This means they can all go onto a USB flash drive or be used as your main burning program if you don’t like installing too much software. If you just want a portable program to burn disc images such as ISO’s, we have a another article dedicated to that.
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