A large proportion of PC users who want to try out Windows 8 have probably done so by now with the Release Preview freely available. It’s certainly split opinion with its radical new start screen, Metro interface and other sizable changes. One of the new features is the addition of a ribbon toolbar to Windows Explorer which users of Office 2010 or previously 2007 will know all about. Microsoft did start introducing the Ribbon UI elements into Windows 7 with the built in Paint and Wordpad utilities sporting a fresh new look, but this is one step further with integration now in the Windows interface itself.

The ribbon can be quite useful as it displays several buttons and options for whatever it’s being used in, but quite a few people are not terribly fond of it. Some users find it can have a rather messy and confusing look with the non uniform buttons and tabbed layout. One thing Microsoft seemed to do in Windows 7 was to go a bit backwards with a rather lacklustre Explorer interface and the usability of a functional toolbar similar to that found in XP was sadly all but missing. Bringing back a number of the most commonly used Explorer functions into an easy to click toolbar could be a welcome addition.

An open source utility called Better Explorer aims to bring a close copy of the Windows 8 ribbon toolbar to Windows 7 users. Another useful function is enabling tabbed windows like most of today’s web browsers, meaning you don’t need several different Explorer windows open cluttering up the desktop. The Quick Access toolbar is also present as is the option to collapse the ribbon if it isn’t needed for a period of time.

A couple of things that need mentioning are; Better Explorer has just moved from an alpha to beta release so is by no means a completely stable product. A few bugs and issues are possible although there have been a number of fixes for the beta. I didn’t really encounter too many issues although it did hang on trying to access a network drive. Do bear this in mind if you decide to try it out. Secondly, it doesn’t replace Explorer but runs as a separate program which is good in this case because any beta issues won’t have an effect on Windows Explorer itself.

Better Explorer needs .NET framework 4 to function and when you install will offer to download .NET if you don’t have it.

Most of the main part of the window is pretty self explanatory and behaves like Explorer would including the breadcrumb bar and search box. A couple of additions though are the Up button next to back/forward and the more interesting tabs bar. If you’re used to using tabs in your browser, you will know how much easier tabs are than separate windows. To create a tab either use the buttons in the ribbon or double click the tab area.

The primary area of interest is the ribbon itself with a number of useful buttons on the ‘Home’ tab you might actually use such as cut, copy and paste, multiple selection options, copy to and move to, new folder, rename, delete and also an open with option. The ‘Share’ tab has options to map a network drive, share the selected items and a ‘Create Archive’ wizard. A number of different viewing options are found in the ‘View’ tab. The ribbon can be closed at any time using the arrow button top right.

There are a few options in the ‘File’ tab allowing the changing of the default starting folder, choosing a different ribbon colour and restoring previously opened tabs.

When you click on certain items such as drives, folders or certain filetypes, an extra tab will appear giving you options specific to what is selected. Clicking a drive for example, will show a drive tab with defrag, format and drive cleanup options or an executable will show an Application tab with run as administrator or pin to taskbar options etc.

As I have said, this is not a final stable release and there are bound to be a few changes or fixes before it is truly ready for permanent use. As it stands, I think Better Explorer looks pretty interesting and could potentially be a viable alternative if you like the idea of a ribbon in Explorer but are in no hurry to use Windows 8.

Compatible with Window 7 32bit and 64bit

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Most people have at some time used the built in search function that Windows provides allowing quick access to your files. And it does have some advantages such as the indexing of the files and retaining the information about them to speed up subsequent searches. Unfortunately the indexing feature itself also has a few disadvantages such as creating a bit more disk activity than it perhaps should while building and maintaining the index. It also appears to consume more system resources than you’d like. You also need to know your search syntax pretty well to get the most out of it. Because of that, quite a few users turn off Windows search completely and simply stop it running in the background, and I’m one of them.

With SSD’s becoming pretty common now, Windows Search with the indexing feature is perhaps only really of use on standard hard drives anyway. But with huge capacity hard drives and the possibility of the number of files in a system running into the millions, it is still a real benefit to have something to be able to quickly and efficiently search through your files. One such utility called Instant File Searcher Professional can perform fast searches but doesn’t consume any unnecessary resources when you don’t need it.

The program is a standalone portable executable of around 600K so can be used only once or placed in a more permanent location for regular use.

Experienced users will probably be quite at home with the interface and the search options available, but it isn’t too difficult for anybody to get their head around. The search process can be a plain and simple one or more complex if you like. A simple search can be performed by typing in the name in the box, selecting a folder from the dropdown list of common locations or browsing for another drive or folder. If you want to also search by extension, either type in your own or select from a number of predefined ones such as audio, video, archives, images etc. Pressing the ‘Go’ button will start the search process.

Although the search is pretty quick, it is by no means instant as the name might suggest and searching for executables on my ‘M:’ drive with 240,000 files took around 50 seconds on first run. Any subsequent searches to the same location will obviously be a lot quicker while the program is still open.

Where Instant File Searcher Professional does start to prove its usefulness is with the options available to apply filters to the search such as using the date and time properties and then selecting whether to search for earlier or later than that specified. Creation or modified dates can be chosen.

On the other side of the window are some more options to filter the search like whether to include only files and/or only folders, include hidden and system files, disable the icons from showing in the results which helps performance, and looking only for certain file sizes above, below or equal to a user specified size.

Once the search has completed the results window will be shown. If there are still too many files to your liking, the results can be filtered even further by typing in another search term into the box at the top. The results in the list can be double clicked to be taken to that file’s location and right clicking will produce the standard Explorer context menu. There is also an ‘Export’ button which will save the results in a CSV file.

It would be nice if there was the ability to search several locations or drives at once, as it is, only one at a time is permitted. Also, because there is no function to search the content of files and no form of indexing is used, things like searching for music file tags or EXIF meta data in images is not an option. As it is, Instant File Searcher Professional is a useful addition to the USB toolkit as long as the machine you use it on has .NET v4 installed.

If you want a faster, more basic file search and index of all NTFS drives on the system, have a look at a utility called Everything which has been written about before.

.NET Framework v4.0 is required

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 32bit and 64bit.

Website and Download

The standard Windows file copy and move function does what it’s supposed to and gets the job done, but it isn’t exactly what you would call great at it. As file operations such as copying and moving are something most people will use frequently, you would think over the years Windows would have become as good at it as you could hope to get. Sadly this is not the case and in some copy scenarios, Windows Vista and 7 have actually got slower and lag behind XP.

Some things that would be nice would be the ability to perform functions such as pausing the copy process while you attend to something else temporarily and being able to resume afterwards. Or being able to skip a large file if you change your mind without stopping the whole process and having to start all over again, which is what would normally happen. At least Microsoft has gone some way to rectifying this in Windows 8 with an enhanced copy dialog incorporating pause and skip functions, but for everyone else, it’s either a case of being stuck with what Windows provides or use a third party utility.

If you spend a lot of time doing file operations, and Microsoft says around 50% of the average person’s time in Explorer is taken up copying, moving, renaming, and deleting, it could really save some serious time using something which handles some of those jobs far better than Windows itself. There are quite a few copy utilities around that put the ordinary Windows dialog to shame in both functionality and performance as do many copy functions included inside file managers. Tera Copy, Fast Copy, Extreme Copy or Unstoppable Copier are just a few that are faster and more useful and could provide a real benefit.

Another copy utility to try and make things easier and quicker is LD Move which has a lot of what you would expect from a program of this type. Pause and resume are supported as is the ability to move files or folders individually in the list and also choose separate target folders for each item if required. The program is Freeware and also portable although .NET 3.5 or higher is a requirement.

The program looks very much like another copy utility called QCopy but looks tidy and is easy to work your way around. Simply drag and drop your folders or files to add them to the list. They can be moved up or down the list if you want to change the copy order.

The program does have a few quirks though and they are to do with the selections in the window. Multiple entries in the list are selected only by using shortcuts such as Ctrl+A, Ctrl+click or Shift+click etc. Also the ‘Move’ tick box can only be ticked one entry at a time, you can’t for example select 50 files and choose them all to be moved at once. Not ideal while working with a large number of files. It’s probably a good idea to group the listed files in order of destination as you have to select them first and then choose where they are being sent to. If you don’t select a target folder for everything, the program seems to send those without to the root of the source drive which seems like a rather odd bug.

Simply press ‘Start‘ to begin the process, pause and skip can be used any time. The percentage and progress will be shown down the right hand side. Another slight bug is the copy speed and time seems a bit erratic often telling me I was copying files at 0.3 MB/s when it was around 70 MB/s.

Below is a simple test I ran to see how LD Move performs against some other popular copy utilities. The operation was from one HDD to another using 1068 files in 442 folders ranging from 140 bytes up to 800MB. Total size was 4.35GB and each copy was done twice and an average taken.

LD Move 1.01: 66 secs
Teracopy 2.27: 65 secs
Extreme copy 2.05: 58 secs
Unstoppable Copier 5.2: 66 secs
Directory Opus 10: 63 Secs
Windows 7: 70 Secs
Fast Copy 2.08: 52 secs

LD Move was pretty much average in terms of the copy speed but still faster than the standard Windows copy. Fast Copy and Extreme Copy are the speed kings in this test.

As it stands, LD Move is probably best suited to sending a small amount of large files or folders to different locations quickly and easily as trying to sort out the target folder and move tick box for hundreds of files individually could cause you to waste more time than you save. There are a lot of other good file copy utilities out there and with a few tweaks and fixes, LD Move could be another one.

Requires .NET Framework 3.5

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7

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Some of you might have noticed the articles that was recently published here are written by hal9000 and I have been quite inactive at the forums. I have been very busy for the whole month fixing up some problems on this website and I couldn’t afford to entrust this task to anyone else because of the risk involved as I don’t want to make any mistakes. The good news is the task has finally completed and I should be back researching and posting new articles starting from early next week. Since I managed to finish the job early, I checked the forum and found an interesting thread posted by william_of_palerne where anyone can get a free registration code for PowerArchiver 2011.

If you have not heard of PowerArchiver, it is an archive utility similar to WinZIP, WinRAR and 7-Zip that allows you to open and extract or create compressed files. It has actually been around for a while and it used to be a freeware but turned into a shareware at a later time. If you have been using 7-Zip, you might want to give PowerArchiver 2011 a try since the stable version of 7-Zip 9.20 was released more than a year ago and has that nasty bug where you cannot view images by double clicking from the program.

What I personally like about PowerArchiver:
1. PowerArchiver is easy to use
You won’t get lost when using PowerArchiver because the graphical user interface is simple and easy to use through its explorer view. By default it uses the classic toolbar and you can easily switch to the modern ribbon menu toolbar from the Toolbar Options located at the View menubar. There is also a preview window located at the right hand side of the program allowing you to easily preview images, text, archives and etc that you select when inside an archive. Similarly to any other archiver software, you can easily compress or extract archives by right clicking on the file where PowerArchiver context menu will appear.

2. Support many archive formats
PowerArchiver 2011 is able to open and extract many archive formats from the normal ones such as ZIP and RAR to the ones that you don’t normally see such as CBR and XZ. You are however limited to creating archives in ZIP, 7z, CAB, LHA, BH and Tar formats.

3. Extraction Speed
Modern computers comes with multi core processors and PowerArchiver is programmed to take advantage of this to speed up to 3x faster than WinZip and 4x faster than WinRar. Their engineers has also done some optimizations on the RAR engine to achieve the fastest unrar extraction. Some day I shall come up with a benchmark between the archivers.

Another feature that I really like about PowerArchiver is that the Self-Extractor supports “Current directory” as default unzip to folder when making an .EXE file out of the ZIP file. This feature allows the files to be extracted to the same location as where the self extractor is located. The last time I tested, WinZip Self-Extractor 4.0 supports only hard coded location or the temporary folder but not the current directory.

There are 3 versions of PowerArchiver which is the Standard, Professional and Toolbox. The Standard version that normally cost $22.95 for a single license is free for 24 hours at BitsDuJour. Simply visit the link at the end of this article, click the huge “Get It For Free” button at the top right, enter your first name, last name and email then followed by clicking on the Complete Checkout button. Within minutes you should receive an email from BitsDuJour containing the free registration code for PowerArchiver 2011. I personally think that the Standard version of PowerArchiver is good enough because it doesn’t come with the unnecessary software such as antivirus, FTP client, virtual drive, CD burner, outlook plugin and etc.

Do give PowerArchiver 2011 a try and if for some reason you are more comfortable in sticking with the previous software that you used to open compressed files, you can always uninstall PowerArchiver 2011 and re-associate the archives formats to your previous archiver program. This promotional free copy of PowerArchiver 2011 does not come with free updates for lifetime.

Visit BitsDuJour

When you mention the word ‘security’ to most people, they will immediately think of something like an Antivirus or Firewall. And of course, this is correct and an essential part of keeping you secure while online. There are however, many other forms of security connected with computing that people should be aware of. One of these is making sure important or private files and data on the system is protected. This is usually handled by software that encrypts the files keeping your most valuable data safe. An area that does often get overlooked by lots of users though, is when they delete data and think that’s ok, it’s gone and I’m safe.

A lot of reasonably experienced users will know that when you delete a file, it isn’t actually completely gone from the system and can often be recovered with undelete software like Recuva or Wise Data Recovery. This is especially true if you are giving an old system away or selling it because the new owner could easily recover data you thought was gone, posing a major security risk. The number of people I have seen getting rid of their old system but have not wiped or done anything at all about what’s currently on it, including not even removing their personal files, is quite shocking. Even a quick format and reinstall in that situation doesn’t mean all the old data is completely safe from being recovered by others. The same thing applies to external storage media like USB sticks or memory cards, and these are perhaps more important as they are far more likely to change hands than internal devices.

What you can do is make sure that before a hard drive or USB stick goes to somebody else, or when you are deleting files off your current system that are in any way important, all this invisible but not really gone data is completely erased so it can never be recovered. Hardwipe is one such program that can erase files, folders or whole drives using a variety of techniques in such a way that when the data’s gone, it’s gone for good and therefore increasing security. Hardwipe is freeware and can also be integrated into the Windows Explorer right click context menu as well as being able to sanitize the unused drive space, which is useful to erase the old deleted data but keep all current files in tact.

Simply download and install the program, Administrator privileges will be asked for only when required, which is usually when you want to wipe internal drives. Removable media usually doesn’t need to ask.

The interface itself is pretty clean and easy to understand, with the different erase modes down the left. The ‘Throttle’ buttons are a useful feature as choosing the ‘Automatic’ option causes the wipe process to be slowed down if the program detects mouse or keyboard activity or the application is not in the foreground. A good thing to have if you are using this program in the background so it won’t affect other applications in use. Various throttle settings like whether it affects internal disks only and the inactivity timeout can be altered in the options.

Clicking the ‘Wipe files’ function will bring up a requester where you can multi select files and folders using control or shift click. ‘Wipe Drive’ and ‘Clean Space’ will show the same requester but you get to select the drive to be erased. Multiple volumes can be selected.

You can choose which erase method is to be used in the dropdown box. There is a choice of six ranging from a simple one pass zero byte fill right up to the 35 pass Gutmann method. For the most part it is recommended to use either a one pass random byte fill or the two pass ‘GOST R 50739-95’ which uses both a single pass zero fill and then a single pass random fill. There is actually a difference between standard hard drives and SSD’s or USB devices regarding the method to use. HDD’s generally only require the single random fill to make the data unreadable whereas digital storage media needs a bit more sanitizing. The Two pass ‘GOST R 50739-95’ or three pass ‘DOD 5220.22-M’ would provide the best balance between security and speed for an SSD or USB pen stick.

The other options in the main window are a dropdown box to log off or power off the machine when the program has finished, and a log button will show the log window where you can track the erase process and check any errors or warnings. The ‘Verification Pass’ tick box will verify that the erase has been successful.

A couple of other options available include emptying the recycle bin before erasing, turning on or off various warning massages, enabling the context menu and choosing the default erase method.

Right clicking a file in Explorer will show a ‘Wipe Files’ option which will bring up the main window for choosing the wipe options. There’s also quick access to the options window via a sub menu.

When you click on ‘Start Wipe’ there will be a warning if any data is to be erased and then the process will begin. If it is going to take a bit of time, there will be a display of progress, speed and time remaining.

If there was one thing I would like to see, it’s the introduction of a standalone portable version. Would be a great secure erase utility for the USB toolkit without resorting to something like Cameyo or Thinapp.

Compatible with Windows XP SP2+, Vista and Win 7 32bit and 64bit.

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Non CNet Download Link

If you ever find an occasion when you don’t have access to a web browser or the internet itself, having a hard copy of a particular web page could be useful. Whether it’s simply wanting to read an article or piece of information from your favourite websites, or getting a couple of pages of the day’s news, being able to access this while being offline is helpful. The obvious answer is to save the page through the browser but saving as an htm/html file includes all the images etc. in a folder as well, which could be quite a few files depending on the page content.

Another way of getting a copy of a web page is to save it as a single file such as an image or document. This has a few advantages in that you don’t need a browser to view it, just an image viewer will do, and it’s one all encompassing single file. A program called Web Page Saver is able to do this for you. The version that is available for free allows the entering of up to five web pages to download and convert in one session. You can though run the program multiple times to get a larger number of pages if required.

It can also create a report in the shape of an html index file so you can easily browse the pages that have been created if you do have access to a browser. The output files can be in one of four image formats of JPG, PNG, BMP and TIF although I would recommend PNG because it gave the smallest file size during testing. The JPG compression was obviously not very high and cannot be altered. The other and potentially most important output format is to a PDF document, great for longer or high content pages.

The download is only a couple of Megabytes and is a simple install. On first run of the program, it will pop up a window and ask you for a serial number, just choose ‘OK’ to run as an unregistered user with the five page limit.

Web Page Saver has a simple interface and the main window is the progress log when you start the conversion and the three main buttons. To add a page click the ‘Add URL(s)’ button where you can enter the full URL with one entry per line. The addresses can be imported if you have made a text file or CSV file, handy if you want to catch the same pages on a regular basis. Click ‘OK’ when finished.

The ‘Options’ window is where the save format can be chosen and you can also select a logo image for the report and also give it a custom title if you want to make it look more professional.

When you press ‘Start’ a requester will ask for the save location of the images and the report file. The whole process is reasonably quick and once done you can browse the dated folder where it was saved. Opening the WPS Report html file opens up a simple index type page to browse the created pages from. There is also a log file in the folder and the pages are saved in a 0000.PNG, 0001.PNG order.

If you want to create more than five entries in one report file by running the process several times, it is a simple case of adding a couple of lines to the original nav.htm report file for each extra image. On the first line of the two, change the image name and the text to show for the link. The second line is to edit the date and time. Copy and edit the same lines as many times as you like for multiple pages. Those with any html knowledge can edit the report files easily.

It’s probably just as well the program is so easy to use as the website seems to be a bit lacking in information or documentation.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7

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Not too many years ago, before the USB stick came along, if you wanted to clean install your version of Windows, it had to be done using the CD or DVD and an optical drive. Thankfully time has moved on and a lot of users with sufficient knowhow can get their copy of Windows onto a pen stick and install from it. Apart from being a major benefit for netbooks and the increasing amount of users who are starting to build PC’s that no longer use ROM drives, a reasonable speed USB stick can complete the install a good bit quicker than an optical drive thanks to the much faster access times.

The good news is there are a number of programs out there that can do various things regarding creating a bootable USB Windows. Some of them will even create boot menus for you and Microsoft also has their own basic tool as well. A couple of utilities that are quite good are Rufus and UNetbootin which were mentioned in another article as well as others like Yumi or Universal USB Installer.

Another utility that can take Windows images and create a Windows bootable USB stick is WiNToBootic. This one is a bit different from some of the others in that it uses the NTFS file system and the Windows 7 boot loader, not a Linux GRUB loader. The consequence of this is that Linux ISO’s and Windows versions other than Vista, Win 7, Win 2008 and Win 8 are not supported, so no good for XP. Any utility image, recovery or repair distro that uses the Windows Preinstall Environment version 2 or 3 will work fine. ISO 9660 (Joilet) and ISO 13346 (UDF) images are supported.

WiNToBootic as you might expect, is a small and completely portable standalone executable. Simply run it and you’re ready to go.

The main focus and goal of this program is to be quick and easy to use, and as you can see from the picture, it certainly hits the mark there. Usage is really easy and the ISO is imported into the program by dragging and dropping onto the window. If your pen stick is already inserted, it will automatically be selected as the drive to write to. With more than one stick connected, find the right one with the dropdown box. Choose ‘Quick Format’ to save yourself some time, and then click ‘Do It!’.

The window will then show the process progression as a simple series of steps. If all goes well, after a short period of time, the ISO will have written successfully to the USB stick and will be ready to install from.

For DOS Prompt or batch file users, there is also the possibility to use WiNToBootic directly from the command line using the parameters show in the image below.

For more features like booting from Linux or having a multi boot pen stick, you will have to look at one of the other utilities available. But for an easy for anyone to use no frills way of getting a Windows 6.x based ISO image onto your stick, WiNToBootic is worth a look.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and 8 32bit and 64bit.

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It’s entirely possible these days to populate your PC completely with free software and pretty much cover all the bases for everything you want to do. While some free software might not get updated that often, some has a new release almost every other day it seems. Just like commercial titles, shareware or Windows itself, it’s a good idea to update freeware applications as well, even those programs which are usually hidden away and forgotten about like the Java runtime. New versions often bring security updates, bug fixes, enhancements and new features. Just because it’s free, it doesn’t mean development stands still.

Giving yourself the task of going online and checking to see if all your software is up to date, or opening each program and clicking the ‘check for new version’ option is not what you would call an efficient use of your time. Using a program to offer a list of free applications to download and install or update is not a new idea and there are a few you may know already such as Ninite or Filehippo.com’s Update Checker.

Another interesting tool along the same lines is Soft2Base which can offer a number of free software titles to download and install as well as checking and updating any of those that are currently installed but have a newer version available. The program uses a constantly updated online database to compare against.

Soft2Base has a few things going for it such as being completely portable and is also able to work in an offline mode. This means you can download all the programs needed from the list and place everything onto a USB stick, or even a CD for use on a machine that perhaps does not have an internet connection. There is also a choice of a standard install procedure or a silent one which suppresses user input while installing the application and skips the junk stuff like toolbars or home/search page changers. There are currently 61 titles available and these are checked for updates whenever the program starts. The online catalogue page tells you what applications are supported. As is the way with tools like this, there’s always something you want that isn’t included, but at least it’s a reasonable amount.

Simply download the standalone executable and run it to get started.

The window shows all the titles that are available for download. The blue icons represent applications that are not currently installed, the green are installed and also up to date applications. The purple icons with the down arrow are for something you have installed but an update is available for download, with the currently installed version and the new version numbers shown. Down the left side are ways to filter the list such as only showing anything which has an update, or only non installed programs. Clicking on one of the categories will narrow the list down if you have a certain type of program in mind. Tick everything required to be installed or updated and click ‘Next’.

The options in the next window will let you simply download the program without installing it, useful for using in the offline mode, and also whether to do an overwrite install that won’t check the currently installed version first. The ‘Silent Install’ option is whether you want to see the standard install dialog for the application or completely automate the process and do a default install without any user input being required. Obviously if you need to change the application install folder or alter certain other settings during the installation process, a non silent install will need to be chosen. The language option is to tell the application what language to install in.

The applications will then be downloaded if needed and installed as per the chosen instructions with a progress status on each line to give an idea where the process has got to.

There is a ‘Profiles’ menu option that can be set up to batch install applications from the list if you want to install them on more than one machine or update the same machine regularly. A couple like all Piriform or Google products are provided as examples.

As mentioned, Soft2Base can be used in offline mode meaning it doesn’t rely on the internet for the software if it is already downloaded. Please read ‘How do I prepare a USB drive ?‘ and ‘Download and Install options’ sections in the online help as the process is a little involved and needs to be followed accurately for it to work properly.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7 32bit and 64 bit.

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Whenever you use your computer, there are probably times when you are doing things on it that really aren’t very productive. Whether it’s surfing the web, wiling away the time playing Windows card games or sitting there chatting online with friends, it could possibly shock you how many hours a week or even a day are perhaps wasted and could be put to better use.

You could probably find it rather interesting to actually have a look after a period of time and see which applications or games you have been using the most and how long you have been using them. A free open source utility called Personal Activity Monitor can assist in helping you find out where all your time goes and is designed to give users help in identifying which applications are possibly eating up too much of their time.

What Personal Activity Monitor actually does is simple, monitor each program that you run and use, then log the total time that the program is being used and is active. Anything that is not in the foreground is ignored and the timer for it paused until it becomes active again.

The program is under a 1MB download and does require the .NET Framework 4 to function which is not a problem unless you are one of those users that chooses not to have it on their system. It’s also worth noting that the latest version I am testing is a beta version. This is the first update for over a year but introduces an important feature of allowing the automatic exporting of the activity logs to an XML file at specific intervals. Simply install Personal Activity Monitor and launch it to begin the monitoring process.

The program will begin logging as soon as it’s started and the list of all applications that have been used while it is running will be visible in the window along with the time they have been active as both clock and a percentage. At the top of the window is the currently active application process along with it’s location on the disk and the total time it has been active during the session.

Obviously, you aren’t going to get representative results until the program has been running for a while, so it’s best to minimize it to the tray and continue your computer activities as usual. After several hours there will be a better indication of what programs you have logged the most time using.

Right clicking on the tray icon will give you access to the settings window. There are only really three options in there, and one of them is whether the program is to be started with Windows. The ‘Auto idle’ option can be set from 1 second to 5 minutes and is the time the foreground process can be inactive before it considered idle. When this happens the timer for it will be paused and is restarted when activity is detected again. ‘Auto Export’ is the feature introduced in the beta version and when enabled will save an XML file to your chosen location at the specified interval of 1 second to 1 hour. The file will be output with the current date as a filename.

The tray menu can also be used to export the logs instantly although the name supplied is not valid (contains right slashes!) so will need to be changed.

Although it can tell you when a browser is being used, it can’t show what websites the browser is going to during that time which would have been a big plus. The majority of the time spent in your browser could have been productive so an indication of how long the browser was used overall is the best you can get. Something I noticed during testing was the CPU usage and memory footprint did fluctuate a bit and sometimes was using around 20% of a single core while in the background. Something to be aware of on older machines.

Personal Activity Monitor could also be used as a crude monitoring tool to check the activity of perhaps whether your kids are using an instant messaging program or the web when they should be writing an essay in a word processor. Useful for people who perhaps think keylogging tools or more thorough monitoring software is a bit too much.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7

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Although most of the features and functions included in Windows 7 are at least some sort of improvement of previous Windows versions, one of the areas where this is sadly not the case is the Windows Explorer toolbar. Sure, you get a small text based toolbar with a few different functions, which is not so bad in itself, but it’s not what you would call particularly useful most of the time. For instance, ‘Include in Library’, ‘Share with’ and ‘Burn’ are not really buttons many people will use often or perhaps even at all. That’s why a lot of experienced users really miss the toolbar that is available in XP because it is useful AND can be customized to a reasonable degree, something which is sadly completely lacking in Windows 7.

It’s a bit of an oddity then, that simple but functional buttons like Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Delete etc. are nowhere to be found in Windows 7 by default, the commands you are likely to use the most often. There are a few tools around to give you back some sort of toolbar, but for the most part they don’t look quite right to me. The great Start menu and Explorer enhancer utility Classic Shell can give you a toolbar, but I think it looks a bit odd and out of place. This is actually one of the very few things I quite like about the upcoming Windows 8 with the inclusion of the Explorer Ribbon toolbar.

One of the freeware utilities over at Nirsoft can help you at least get some of these missing buttons back giving the default toolbar a bit more functionality. CustomExplorerToolbar is a small and portable program that can add or remove buttons for when a file or folder is selected or when nothing is selected, because there is a difference. You don’t really need things like cut and paste buttons when there is nothing selected in the window to cut or paste, so they can be left out of that toolbar. The program does require administrator privileges so make sure you right click and ‘Run as Administrator’ if needed.

The one and only window has all the options needed to add and remove the buttons. The ‘Action’ dropdown simply selects whether you want to add the ticked options to the toolbar or remove them. ‘Toolbar Mode’ is for the two different types of toolbar you can configure. If you click on at least one item in the Explorer window, one type of toolbar will be displayed. If nothing is selected in the window, you will get a second different toolbar. Both can be configured separately. The ‘Folder Types’ option means you can also configure for just standard folders or library folders like Pictures or Music. Useful if you want something like ‘Slideshow’ in Pictures or ‘Send email’ in Documents and not ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’.

To add some buttons, select the ‘Add…’ action, tick what’s required in the ‘Button List’, and select which folder types you want to affect. Then click ‘Do IT!’. Open an Explorer window to see the result. If you have a problem, make sure all Explorer windows are closed.

To remove the buttons, select the ‘Remove…’ action, tick only what you want to remove, and ‘Do It!’. A remove all or reset option would have been a handy option in the program. Do be aware that the default buttons provided by Windows cannot be removed, only what you add through CustomExplorerToolbar itself. It is certainly much easier using this program to get extra buttons than ploughing through the registry to do it yourself.

Compatible with Windows 7 32bit and 64bit

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It’s not uncommon for someone who knows of or visits a website to want to find out a little bit more about it. This could be out of simple curiosity or might possibly be something more serious like checking the validity of a website and its location and who the owner is. Finding out the background information for a site you’re not sure about could help the decision of whether to visit it or find out more beforehand. Looking to see where a site is coming from or who hosts it could also help if you are having issues accessing sites in certain countries or particular hosting services.

A domain name is a simple identifier label that makes a website unique on the internet and it is easily possible to gather other details about it such as who it is registered with, when it was registered or the date it is due to expire. There are a number of different websites online that can provide you with domain Whois database information as well its related DNS records.

A tiny utility called DomainHostingview from NirSoft can help if you want detailed information about a website domain. The program generates a sizeable report by querying a number Whois and DNS services bringing you a comprehensive amount of information to study. DomainHostingview can pull in details for things like who hosts the web server and mail server, domain name server (DNS) details and records, created/expiry dates, IP address information, domain owner and who registered it. Being Unicode it can also handle displaying non-English characters in the report.

The program is only around 200K which is actually quite large for a NirSoft program, and is obviously a standalone portable executable. The latest version now allows you to generate the report as an html file without opening the main window, which is good if you want to check a few websites without too much interruption or from a batch file. Use the ‘/GenerateReport Domainname Filename’ command line option. As an example:
DomainHostingView.exe /GenerateReport Raymond.cc ‘d:\downloads\Report1.html’

DomainHostingview is so easy to use you really can’t get it wrong. Just type in the domain to check into the box and hit the ‘Go’ button or press F9 to start the lookup. The program doesn’t want the ‘www.’ prefix entered into the name box, so remember not to enter it. After a small wait of up to 15 seconds or so, the report will be completed. There should be enough information there for you to chew over. As with most NirSoft tools, you can copy the data to the clipboard or use the ‘File’ menu or floppy disk icon to save the report into an html file. If it is required, there is an advanced option (F8 or through the ‘File’ menu) to enter a custom DNS server.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 32 and 64bit

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There are literally hundreds of different types of files that have the possibility of being opened in Windows. With that in mind, the chances are pretty good that at some point in time, you will receive a file that can’t be opened in Windows by default because there is no associated program installed to handle it. If you happen to know that you have a program already installed to be able to open the file, there is the feature to right click on it and select the ‘Open With’ option where you can either choose to use a program from the list or manually pick a suitable program on your PC to take care of it. You can then decide to make it the default in future.

The problem with the standard open with feature is it’s not particularly helpful if it doesn’t know what the type of file you’re trying to open is. Sure, the search the web to find a program window might be able to point you in the general direction, but the whole process could be a lot more user friendly.

A handy freeware utility called OpenWith Enhanced makes several improvements and additions to the standard Windows ‘Open With’ dialog making it much more helpful in finding the right software to open those unknown file types, or better alternatives to what you already have.

The basic premise of the program is that when you open the ‘Open with’ window to select a temporary or default program to open an unrecognised file, OpenWith Enhanced will suggest a number of software titles which you don’t have installed, that can be downloaded and used to open or edit the file. A simple but useful idea that saves you the bother of searching for the correct software yourself. This is achieved by checking a constantly updated online database to see what has been used by other users to open the file type. Among other features are; the ability to remove the extension or file type association, edit the ‘Open With’ context menu entries, get more detailed online information about the extension and the option to change the default icon for the specified file type.

The program is under 500K to download and the installed size is pretty similar. Although you won’t notice anything different at first, the interesting things start to happen when you click on ‘Open with’ in the right click context menu or double click an unrecognised type of file. When the usual window opens, you will be presented with something like this:

I have done this with an ordinary text .txt file, and as you can see, the standard Windows default programs of Notepad and Wordpad are displayed in black, as will any installed recommended software. The difference here is there are a number of other programs listed in red not currently installed that can also open text files if you want to use something different. These are what have been found in the database that other people are using to open txt files. The titles with bold text are identified by the database as freeware. Each entry has a couple of overlaid icons; the bars on the left represent how popular the program is at opening the type of file, and a green or red icon on the right simply shows if the program is already installed or not.

Double clicking an installed program will simply open the file with that program, where double clicking one of the red entries will pop up a box to ask if you want to go to the software developer’s website to download the title or browse the computer to locate the executable. This is in case you have the software already installed to a non standard install folder.

The icon in the top left of the main window can be clicked on to allow the icon to be changed for the file type. The ‘More Details’ or ‘Look for the appropriate program on the web’ links will take you to the OpenWith Enhanced website where more information can be found about the selected extension.

If the file type is recognised and has a program already associated with it, there will be a couple of extra option links in the main window. The first is an option to remove the current file association. Just the extension can be removed, or the complete file type can be selected for removal as well which could remove a number of extensions not just the affected one, so use it with care.

The second option is to manage the ‘Open with’ context menu entries. When you open a file with a chosen program, the context menu will add that program to the list so when you right click there could be several programs to choose from. If you wish to remove one or add your own, it can be done using this window.

The settings window has options for things like changing various text and background colours, marking freeware titles, handling partial extensions and reporting the user’s extension preferences. OpenWith Enhanced does state it reports only the registered extensions and programs used to open them back to the developer and nothing else, which is obviously needed for the database that suggests the software. If you are not comfortable with this, the tick box is there to disable it.

Compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7 32-bit and 64-bit

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It’s always a little frustrating when there are features built into other operating systems that sound like a good idea, but they’re not available as standard in Windows, no matter how big or small. One of these is a small but useful feature Mac users and also users of some Linux distro’s have, is the simple but useful ability to have a shortcut icon automatically appear on the desktop when a removable drive or CD/DVD is inserted into the machine. It’s pretty logical to assume that at some point you are going to want open the drive up and having an icon there for you to quickly and conveniently do so is a simple thing but can be quite useful.

Like most useful functions, if it’s not built in to Windows, there is third party software around that can do it for you. The situation is no different in this case, and a freeware utility by the people at Tweaknow can help. Driveshortcut is a simple to use but effective tool that performs the task of putting the shortcuts for a number devices on the desktop when they are inserted. And when the said devices are removed or ejected, the shortcut icons disappear again.

The program is a little over a 2MB download and once installed, consumes around 1.4MB of memory so can comfortably sit in the tray without causing any problems.

There is only the configuration window which needs to be set up to your liking to get things going. There are five different types of drive that you can select to appear, these are; CD-Rom drive, Removable drive (pen sticks, portable hdd’s, cameras, phones etc.), fixed drive (internal hdd’s), network drive and a RAM drive if you have one.

The other two options available are whether you want to let the program start with windows or not, and if you want the program to remember the position of the drive icons that appear. Useful if you want to keep the drive shortcuts on a different area of your desktop away from the program shortcuts. Make sure to click ‘Save’ to register the changes.

It will then sit and wait for one of the drives it is watching for to be inserted, and display the related icons when required.

Tweaknow Driveshortcut is a useful little utility that does exactly what you would expect it to do. It does have a problem though, and that is there are already similar utilities around that can already do what Driveshortcut does and more besides.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Win 7 and Win 8

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Desk Drive is one alternative to Tweaknow Driveshortcut and has a number of differences. Firstly, the program is distributed in separate 32bit and 64bit installers but each is only around 500K. Once installed and settled it was using around 800K of memory. Do be aware it does require .NET 2.0 or higher to function and make sure to select the ‘Advanced’ installation so the opt-out toolbar can be disabled.

This program can also handle CD-Rom, removable, fixed, network and RAM drives, but has a few extra features of interest. A small animation zoom effect can be displayed over a drive icon that has been inserted so you can easily spot it on the desktop, and an Explorer window can be set to open whenever a drive is inserted. There is also a box where you can exclude specific drive letters from being monitored meaning they won’t be affected by the program. Note the comma to separate drive letters in the box. The ‘Minimize all windows’ option will do just that when a new icon appears on the desktop, an option that’s a bit frustrating when you forget about it and a window you are using suddenly disappears because a new drive has been inserted!

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7 32bit and 64bit

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