Even though the size of hard drives these days stretches well into the Terabytes, it still doesn’t take long to start filling them up with all kinds of files which don’t necessarily belong or need to be there. These can come in various forms such as junk files, temporary files, or even those which you just don’t need anymore. Another type of data you probably don’t really want is duplicate files.

It’s easily done that you can copy several files onto your drive and either give them different names that help recognize them easier or forget they are there and then copy them over again into a different folder. This means there are now multiple copies of the files on the drive where a single copy would be enough. The rest are now taking up extra space and making organization more complicated.

Simply searching for a certain file name usually isn’t enough on its own which is why many tools employ advanced methods to try and find identical files, even though they may not look the same on the face of it. Here’s a selection of 10 free utilities that can help you search for and identify these duplicate files and help reclaim some of your hard drive space.
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A while back we wrote a guide on how to include subtitles in downloaded movies by finding and placing the SUB or SRT subtitle file together with the AVI movie file. You must also have DirectVobSub installed, otherwise it won’t read the subtitle file. However, this works only if viewing the video file on your computer. What if you want to burn your favorite weekly TV episode to DVD and watch it on your LCD, LED or plasma screen TV? Where many modern players can simply read an AVI file from a data disc, the problem with older DVD players is they can’t read the AVI format and subtitles as well. They can often only read the DVD VOB format.

You will need to embed the SRT/SUB subtitle file inside the AVI movie file permanently, then convert and burn it to DVD using your favorite disc burning software. There are several ways of doing that and we will show you four different methods. They range from the easiest and most basic way which does the job with the minimum of fuss, to a couple of other easy ways with some more control over the subtitles, to the more advanced method using one of the most popular video editing tools around. Just follow the instructions below on how to burn AVI to AVI or AVI to DVD with subtitles.
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Broken keyboard keys are quite a common occurrence on laptops and netbooks. Although it’s not a terrible problem if the keypress still registers without the key, it is quite difficult if a common key doesn’t work at all. Maybe there’s keys you keep hitting by mistake such as Caps Lock, or would just like a certain key to be in a more convenient location. Or, there might be a key on your keyboard you never seem to use or need.

In all those situations, a simple solution would be to change the keyboard keys to do something else. Whether it’s disabling the key or making it perform another action. More advanced users could turn to software such as a Macro tool which can help you remap keys on a keyboard or even perform more complicated tasks for you, or run a shortcut/hotkey utility.

When you press a key on the keyboard it sends a “scan code” to tell Windows what has been pressed. Scan codes can be edited in the system registry to map one key to another but editing the registry manually is tricky. Here’s a selection of tools that can remap keyboard keys to other keys. Some edit the scan codes in the registry and don’t need to stay running, others need to stay running in the background.
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Discs are one of the best media that can be used for backup purposes because they are relatively cheap today. A CD-R can store up to 700MB of data while a DVD-R contains 6 times more space than a CD-R. Moreover, writing your files to discs as backup does have another advantage where the data are read only. This means that if you insert the disc onto any computer, no one including powerful virus such as Almanahe that infects executable files is able to modify or delete the files that are written to the disc.

The only problem with CD and DVD disc is it don’t last forever and also it’s sensitive. If the disc has your finger print or small scratches because of bad handling, chances are old disc players can’t read the disc properly. As for most modern disc players, it has error correction and can usually read through fingerprints as scratched surface. That is why some players seems to get stuck on some discs while it plays perfectly on another.

However, if your disc player is unable to read your disc and you need to get back your data or photo from there, here are a few tools that you can use to try to get back your data before taking chances in some weird unorthodox methods such as using toothpaste, banana skin, candle wax or even flushing it in toilet bowl that may just damage the disc entirely!
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It’s not unheard of that you might receive a document via email that has been sent to you in an image form or perhaps as a PDF file and you need to be able to edit or have the text in an editable form. Sometimes you might have to scan some documents in via a scanner and need to be able to edit them from your word processor.

Editing an image or directly scanned in file is not possible by itself, and unless you have time to spare, won’t want to type everything in yourself. What you need is something that has been around a while called Optical character recognition (OCR) which translates text in images into text you can edit. Some of the best OCR software packages are Omnipage and FineReader but they cost big money. Here’s a selection of mostly free ways to get your text converted into an editable form.
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Looking around the web, it doesn’t take long for you to find free domain names, free hosting and free software such as Blogger or WordPress etc to create your own website. However, if you run or are involved in a website or have some of your own some server space, one of the things you might need to do quite often is use the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to upload files to the server.

Uploading can be done pretty easily and there are some nice FTP programs around such as the open source FileZilla. The programs are good, but if you just want to quickly upload a file or image it can be a bit of a pain going through FTP software just to do it. An obvious solution is to use a the right click context menu in Windows to do the work for you. Just right click on a file and click the send option in the menu, easy. Here’s a selection of ways you can achieve it.
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Most of the wireless routers today comes with some security feature such as security encryption (WEP/WPA), MAC address filtering, lowering transmission power, disabling DHCP & use static IP, and hiding of SSID to help keep your wireless network safe from intruders. Each wireless security mechanism helps to increase the difficulty of unauthorized users from hacking in to your wireless networks but surely does not prevent the determined ones. In this article we will be focusing on one of the option “Broadcast SSID” found in most wireless routers.

Basically when the broadcast SSID option is enabled, all wireless capable devices can see your router listed together with a bunch of other wireless networks. This option provides a convenience for you to easily connect to it by clicking on your SSID and entering the security key. However, this also allows the nearby hackers to find your network and also see the signal strength with the security type being used directly from Windows without even the need to run a network scanning tool. Non broadcasting wireless networks are not totally invisible as well because they can be detected by any of the 8 tools mentioned below.
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The Registry is very important in Windows because it stores information and settings for just about everything used by the system. One of the problems with the registry is it can become fragmented over time because of the amount of data constantly being added to, changed or deleted from it. Over time these constant changes leave gaps and spaces inside the registry which can degrade its performance, although in all but the most severe cases, this degradation is going to be very small.

A process known either as compacting, optimizing or defragging your registry aims to eliminate these gaps and improve overall performance when accessing data from it. Programs that optimize the registry in this way don’t make any changes to the contents of the data itself or physically defrag the files themselves, they simply read the registry, remove all the slack spaces and then write the compacted registry files back to the system. Here’s a selection of 7 tools that can remove these useless spaces and help restore a bit more performance, however small, back to the system registry.
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There are few things more frustrating in the world of digital photography than losing photos on which you place a great deal of importance. Finding your holiday snaps have been accidentally deleted from the memory card, or pictures of a special occasion ruined because the USB flash drive’s file system has become corrupted can be quite upsetting. They’re one of a kind and nearly always something you can’t duplicate. Thankfully, all is not lost and it’s still entirely possible to get some or maybe even all of the images back, although there’s never a 100% guarantee.

Searching Google for a phrase like “recover photos from memory card” will display a huge amount of software that claims to recover lost images and sadly most of it is shareware. We know photos can be very precious which is why software developers realise that people are more willing to pay a fee for software that can help them recover their deleted photos. Don’t worry though as we’ve put together a list of six free programs that can help recover your valuable photos. In addition to these programs, we also have a similar list of 10 more general tools that can recover data from most storage devices.

Note: It’s always good practice to take out the memory card from your digital camera so there’s no chance of taking any more photos which will ruin your chances of recovering the photo. Likewise, not using any device which contains the pictures again until after you’ve attempted recovery is the best solution. If the files are overwritten by newer files, they’re gone forever and irretrievable.
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With the size of the photo some digital cameras and smartphones can produce, it’s entirely possible for you to have images with a file size of several Megabytes each. Having files like this is great when you want to view them in high quality or print them out. When it comes to distributing them to others, uploading to online photo albums, or just storing them on your phone, keeping huge files is a waste of time and bandwidth.

Shrinking your images to a lower resolution or converting them to a more size efficient format before emailing or uploading is a sensible solution. It’s far easier to shrink a 10MB JPEG file down to 1MB and send or store that while only noticing a small drop in quality or not even seeing a difference at all.

We’ve previously listed 10 online services where you can upload and resize images from your web browser without installing any software but they are not meant for multiple images. Here are 10 free options to help you convert and resize multiple images locally on your own computer.
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Although many Internet Service Providers offer a nearly or fully unlimited amount of traffic or bandwidth, many do not. One of the common ways to restrict traffic is to throttle the entire connection or specifically reduce Peer2Peer traffic speed until a certain time when the network will be quieter. Others might reduce your connection speed if you exceed a specified quota during peak hours.

Some ISP’s sometimes don’t monitor or count what you download when the network is at its quietest, which is mainly overnight. If you’re a heavy torrent user that downloads or uploads torrents nearly every day, you either have to physically be there at the best time to start transfers, or start the torrents going when you can. Even if it means running them during peak hours and possibly risking restrictions.

Luckily there are ways to automatically start or stop downloading and seeding your torrents. Most of the popular torrent clients have this feature built in or easily available. Here’s a selection of popular Torrent clients and how to schedule BitTorrent downloads in each one. This saves you the trouble of starting and stopping torrents yourself.
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Over time your Windows installation gets cluttered up with more and more data. While many of the files are important for the running of the system, some are useless and get left behind by software that has been uninstalled. The files and folders are therefore redundant but still on the system. As more and more is added to the operating system, it begins to slow down which is partly why an old install runs slower than a newer install.

Although folders by themselves don’t really cause any performance issues or take up any space, having thousands of folders spread across your system that don’t contain any files can become a bit of a pain. For the most part, they are of no practical use and just get in the way, especially while using Windows File Explorer. It’s frustrating to drill down through folders to find what’s in them only to discover they are completely empty and are serving no purpose.

Here we list 7 Windows based tools that can find and delete empty folders from your system. While many empty folders are of no use and can be safely deleted, others are required by software or Windows itself. It is never recommended to just mass delete all empty folders from your system drive and some experience is required to determine what is safe to remove and what isn’t. Don’t panic if you’ve made the wrong decision in deleting an important folder because there are free recovery software that you can use to restore back the deleted folder.
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If you don’t know what it is, the right click context menu in Windows is simply the menu that pops up whenever you right click your mouse or touch pad button. This menu contains a number of important and convenient Windows functions such as deleting or renaming a folder / file, creating shortcuts, creating a new empty file, running a program as administrator and much more. This menu is also used by software applications to allow quick access to options such as (un)archiving files, running virus scans, editing files etc.

Although it can be a great source for performing actions quickly, the context menu can also become a source of frustration because sometimes programs will install themselves onto the menu when you don’t really want them there. It’s not uncommon either for some software to leave behind a context menu entry after it’s been uninstalled. If left unattended, the menu can become quite long and look rather messy with many useless entries doing nothing but taking up space.

Some applications will help you out a bit by offering to cascade multiple entries into a sub menu which can help, but some software simply doesn’t give you an option to not have an item in the context menu. The good news is you can remove the items that you don’t want or use from the right click context menu by using a third party tool to remove or temporarily disable them from appearing.

Here’s a selection of 7 free tools to help you clean up you context menus and bring a bit of order to your right clicks.
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When Windows 8 was released it divided opinion with its new look and the new features like the Start Screen that other Windows users really were not used to. One new Windows 8 feature already available as standard in other operating systems like Mac OS X or Linux is the idea of using the corners of the screen to trigger various actions when you place your mouse pointer there. This is traditionally called hot corners and it’s been around for a number of years.

A hot corner is basically quick access to a normal function you might find in the Start menu or with a keyboard shortcut. In Windows 8 both right corners are to show the Charms bar while the top left switches between apps and the desktop. The bottom left shows the Start button from within apps. Hot Corners were very limited in Windows 8 and removed again in Windows 10, but there is much more you can do with the idea.

Besides simply switching between programs, you can also do things like run a program, start the screen saver, open folders or Control Panel items, switch or hide windows, simulate keyboard shortcuts, put the computer in standby and much more. With the right software, you can do this in Windows 10, 7 or ever replace the default actions in Windows 8. Here are 5 free programs to try.
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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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