Sarasota PC Monitor
Review Chairman's Industry Comments (12/07)
The Computer Buffet
by Herb Goldstein, Review EditorE-mail comments, suggestions, etc. to Herb Goldstein at: revieweditor@spcug.org
BAD HYPERLINK?? Occasionally for reasons beyond our control, a hyperlink provided here will not work. After carefully checking your typing (needs to be 100% accurate), the only suggestion we can offer is that you go to Google and enter the name of the software. If a more current hyperlink is available, this is the best place to look for it. Please also note: Most of the software mentioned below is freeware. It is gathered through researching usually reliable sources. I do not personally try most references, time being the obvious factor.
DELETING TEMP FILES (by Chris Pirillo, www.lockergnome.com). When you load a program, the operating system puts it into memory, which creates files in your temp folder. You’ll also find data about your recycle bin there, as well as any plugins you may have installed. It is quite safe to delete these files, and there are a couple of ways to easily do so. Temporary files are created when a program on your computer is performing an action. If the program closes cleanly, the temp files should be deleted automatically. However, if you end a task, or the program crashes, those files are left behind. There is also data stored in your temp files pertaining to what is in your recycle bin. Even though the files in the recycle bin have been deleted and aren’t running, they are still actually on your system. Emptying that recycle bin is one way to free up some space in your temporary files folder. One good way to free up disk space and clean your temporary files is to run the Disk Cleanup utility on your Windows computer. You can access this in one of three ways: Click Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup Click Start/ Run and in the Open box type cleanmgr and click OK Go to My Computer; right-click the disk in which you want to free up space, click Properties, click the General tab, and then click Disk Cleanup. There is an excellent free program that was created by one of the friends of our live broadcast and chat room. ATF Cleaner is free, as I mentioned. It doesn’t have to be installed, so it takes up no space on your computer. You can use this to clean and/or manage not only your temp files, but your cookies, cache, and saved passwords. Check out the complete guide for how to use ATF Cleaner. You could also choose to use CCleaner. This is a free program as well, and very powerful. It has a registry cleaner built in, in addition to the other cleaners. I caution you to always back up your registry first, prior to doing any cleaning of it, or making any changes.
ADVANCED WINDOWSCARE PERSONAL. System slowdown, freezing, crashing, and security threats are over. Advanced WindowsCare Personal is a comprehensive PC care utility that takes a one-click approach to help protect, repair, and optimize your computer. It provides an all-in-one and super convenient solution for PC maintenance and protection. All work will be done with one click in one minute. This fantastic program is available free of charge. http://www.iobit.com/ JOT. Kim Komando says, “I don’t like to get tied up on the telephone. There are so many better ways for me to spend my time. But sometimes it is necessary to get a message to a group of people. For example, I may need to reschedule a meeting. Or maybe I’ll need to tell my family I’ll be late for a gathering. In situations like these, I use Jott. This free service lets me send text messages and e-mail messages to a group of people. I just call a toll-free number and leave my message. Then I specify the recipients. It is so easy! And if you have trouble remembering details, Jott is ideal. Send reminders to yourself. You’ll need to register to use the service. But Jott promises not to sell your information.” www.jot.com
NETWORK MAGIC eliminates home networking hassles and helps you do more with your network. It lets you easily print from any of your home computers to any of your printers, and also makes it a snap to share files across all of your computers. Network Magic also helps you troubleshoot and repair broken wireless Internet connections and protect your wireless network from intruders. Additionally, Network Magic gives you an always up-to-date map of your network, lets you manage the security of all your PCs from one centralized dashboard, and enables you to remotely access files on your home network from anywhere using just an Internet browser. www.networkmagic.com
NATIONAL DO NOT CALL REGISTRY. The registry is run by the US government and is designed to stop telemarketing calls. Telemarketers may not call after you’ve been on the registry 31 days. There are exceptions, of course. You can still receive calls from political organizations and charities. You might also receive calls from companies with which you’ve done business. If you haven’t signed up, you may want to do so. www.donotcall.gov
GLARY UTILITIES offers numerous powerful and easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. It allows you to clean common system junk files, as well as invalid registry entries and Internet traces. Furthermore, Glary Utilities includes powerful functions such as disk analysis, software uninstaller, startup manager, memory optimizer, duplicate files finder, and secure file deletion. www.glaryutilities.com/
VLC MEDIA PLAYER. If you play a lot of video and use Windows Media Player, you’ve likely come across a number of files that you can’t play—you’re told you need to find a codec to handle them. Good luck finding that codec, or discovering one you don’t have to pay for. Instead, try VLC Media Player. It plays pretty much every media type you can imagine—and no doubt many you haven’t imagined. Not only will it play audio and video formats, but it will also play DVDs, VCDs, and many streaming protocols. www.videolan.org/
TUBEME. If you see a YouTube video, and want to save — and later play it from your hard drive — TubeMe is the tool for you. Just insert one or more links to YouTube videos into TubeMe and the program saves the files to your hard drive. http://ashimonovits.brinkster.net/TubeMe.html
PRINTERANYWHERE. Want to print a document directly on a buddy’s printer, anywhere in the world? If you’re both online, you can do it with PrinterAnywhere. The free utility installs on both PCs and you can choose the PrinterAnywhere printer from any application. An encrypted version shoots through the ‘Net and prints on your buddy’s printer. Turn the idea around and you can share your printer with anyone. It’s ideal for sending confidential docs (the file’s encrypted when sent) and unlike e-mail, it can’t be forwarded. www.printeranywhere.com
AUTORUNS. This free utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP. Autoruns’ Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format, Autorunsc. You’ll probably be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically! Autoruns works on all versions of Windows including 64-bit versions. www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/AutoRuns.mspx
ADVANCED WINDOWSCARE PERSONAL A free comprehensive PC care utility that takes a one-click approach to help protect, repair, and optimize your computer. It provides an all-in-one and super convenient solution for PC maintenance and protection. www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html
101 CLIPS . The simplest of free multi-clipboard programs. Run it minimized and it captures everything you cut or copy from other programs, keeping the last 25. When you want to paste one back, all you have to do is restore it and click on the clip you want. http://101clips.com/
GNUCASH. Personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. www.gnucash.org/
REVO UNINSTALLER. We told you about this one before, but anything this good is worth repeating. If you haven’t gotten it yet, don’t wait any longer. It never ceases to amaze me that anything this good is free. It is an innovative freeware uninstall utility much faster than the Windows Add/Remove applet. With its advanced and fast algorithm, Revo Uninstaller scans before and after you uninstall an application. After the program’s regular uninstaller runs, you can remove additional unnecessary files, folders, and registry keys that are usually left over on your computer. Even if you have a broken installation, Revo Uninstaller scans for an application’s data on your hard disk drives and in the Windows registry and shows all found files, folders, and registry items so you can delete them. www.revouninstaller.com
KEEPASS. Today you need to remember many passwords. You need a password for the Windows network logon, your e-mail account, your homepage’s ftp password, online passwords (like CodeProject member account), etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. Also, you should use different passwords for each account. Because if you use only one password everywhere and someone gets this password you have a problem... A serious problem. The thief would have access to your e-mail account, homepage, etc. Unimaginable. KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. So you only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). For more information, http://keepass.info/
STROKEIT. I suppose most of us, at some time or another, have had a reason to use a computer with only one hand. But for those occasions, there’s StrokeIt. (Perhaps not the name I would have chosen....) StrokeIt allows you to issue commands and execute recorded actions using only mouse gestures. It comes with enough predefined gestures to cover generic commands, such as save, open, and maximize, as well as gestures for particular programs, such as selecting tools in PhotoShop and the playback of music in popular media players. http://tcbmi.com/strokeit/
COOLLECTOR. The movie lover’s Swiss army knife, Coollector blends three types of information into a unique interface: your cinematographical culture and taste, your video collection, and videos that are available at the store. www.coollector.com
COMODO FIREWALL PLUS. This free firewall received tops ratings for its stopping unwanted outbound connections. ZoneAlarm may be extremely popular, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best firewall you can find. Many people believe that Comdo Firewall Pro takes that prize, largely because it was rated as the top firewall by the independent testing site Matousec. Matousec found that it offered the highest level of “anti-leak” protection — in essence, a measurement of a firewall’s effectiveness. Comodo offers true two-way firewall protection, is extremely configurable, and unlike most other firewalls, gives you a great view into your system and Internet connection as well. It’s free, as well. Unfortunately, most firewalls leak. But Comodo’s Firewall is unique in that it passes all known leak tests to ensure the integrity of data entering and exiting your system. Comodo has put firewall through all kinds of sophisticated tests to ensure its firewall powerful enough to ward off these attacks with default settings. No other firewall has had to work this hard. Take this test yourself. www.personalfirewall.comodo.com
AVAST. A superb, free antivirus program. Tired of dealing with bloated, overpriced security suites that bog down your system and cost an arm and a leg, when all you want is antivirus software? Then get Avast, a superb antivirus program that’s free for home and personal use. Because it’s a lean piece of software, it imposes a relatively light burden on system resources and RAM. Despite this, it kills viruses in their tracks and has plenty of extras, including live scanning to prevent viruses from infecting your PC in the first place. Avast can scan regular and Web-based e-mail for viruses, too, and it protects against instant messaging viruses, peer-to-peer dangers, and more. www.avast.com
SPYWARE BLASTER. Some of the nastiest kinds of spyware—autodialers, home page hijackers, and others—install themselves as ActiveX controls. Spyware Blaster protects you against them, blocking the installation of ActiveX-based malware and other types of spyware, and eradicating tracking cookies that might otherwise invade your privacy. The program works with Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer, and it prevents your browser from being diverted to dangerous sites. One particularly nice touch is the utility’s System Snapshot, which (as you’d expect) takes a snapshot of your PC; if your computer gets infected later on, you can revert to the clean version. www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html
AVG ANTI-ROOTKIT. One of the most feared types of malware is the rootkit—malicious software that many types of antimalware can’t detect. Not uncommonly, bad guys use rootkits to hide Trojan horses, which can then be used to take over your PC without your knowledge. AVG Anti-Rootkit’s sole purpose is to find and kill rootkits. Run it and it scans your PC, sniffing rootkits out and removing any it finds. Note that this utility doesn’t work with Windows Vista. www.grisoft.com
KRUPTOS 2. Worried that someone may gain access to your most private files? Kruptos 2 uses powerful, 128-bit encryption to scramble files and folders so that only you can read them. It’s particularly useful for USB flash drives and portable storage devices, which you can encrypt in the entirety. Kruptos 2 also lets you create self-extracting, encrypted archives; shred deleted files so that all traces of them vanish from your hard disk; and even disguise the filename when you encrypt a file. www.kruptos2.co.uk
FILE SHREDDER 2. Delete a file and it’s gone from your PC, right? Wrong. Even after you delete a file and flush it from your Recycle Bin, special software can re-create it. Of course, in general, you’d like files to stay deleted when you throw them away. File Shredder 2 overwrites any file or folder with a random string of binary data—multiple times. You have a choice of five different shredding algorithms, and using the program is a breeze: Just choose your files, tell the program to shred them, and they’ll be gone forever. www.fileshredder.org
QUICKLY FIND YOUR DESKTOP IN WINDOWS VISTA. Many people use their desktop as a storage area for their shortcuts, folders, files and so on. If you are a ‘desktop storage’ user, you should probably know how to quickly clear all the open windows without minimizing and closing them individually, to display your desktop. In the far bottom corner of your desktop, beside the Start button is the quick launch toolbar. As the name implies you can use the icons to quickly launch your favorite programs. One of the icons on the quick launch toolbar is called ‘Show Desktop.’ If you want to quickly display your desktop when you have windows open, all you have to do is click the ‘Show Desktop’ icon on the quick launch toolbar. Even better yet, if you want to return the windows the way they were, all you have to do is click the icon again.
FREE GOOGLE PROGRAM BRINGS HEAVENS TO EARTH. Imagine cruising the heavens from your desktop and seeing all the spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Exploding stars and faraway galaxies are now just a mouse click away with a new pro-gram, Sky in Google Earth. It’s “like having the heavens at your fingertips, or your own planetarium,” said Carol Christian, an astronomer at the Space Tele-scope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. and co-developer of the project. The program is part of the newest version of the popular Google Earth pro-gram, downloadable for free at http://earth.google.com. Users can travel across the night sky, making tour stops at 125 of the most popular Hubble images. Travelers can begin the tour by picking “Switch to Sky” from the “view” dropdown menu in Google Earth. From here, an object, such as the Eagle Nebula—the so-called pillars of creation—or even a category, such as colliding galaxies, can be chosen. The user then sees a view showing the constellations around the selected object. As viewers zoom in, the constellations disappear and the object emerges from the background. The Hubble images are set within a background of real stars and galaxies taken by two powerful visible-light surveys of the skies, the Digitized Sky Sur-vey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
MYSPEED PC accurately measures your Internet connection to speed test servers in the US or UK. Get an easy-to-understand analysis of your connection bandwidth including download and upload speeds; easily email your test results to your ISP or help desk technician. MySpeed PC also reports your connection quality, or the consistency of your download capacity, which is a critical measure for time-sensitive applications such as VoIP and multimedia. Max Pause, the longest pause recorded during the data download, and the Round Trip Time are also reported. www.myspeed.com
SKREEMR. If it’s online, then SkreemR wants to help you find it. Type in whatever the name of the audio you’re looking for is and see if the engine can track it down. I tried it out a number of times, and each time I found what I was looking for. The results are linked to directly, but instead of downloading the audio, you can just listen to it through the integrated Flash player. Links are provided for more information, and you can also rate the results. It doesn’t take much effort to see how something like this could be used to find and download copyrighted material, but SkreemR insists that the service is legal because they don’t host any of the files and instead link to content that’s already out there on a variety of sites. http://skreemr.com/
YCOPY. You have to copy a few hundred gigs worth of files from one place to another. Because this will take a few hours, you decide to take a long lunch while the files migrate. Three hours and four banana margaritas later, you return to find the copy operation choked on the tenth file because the file was open on another screen, or had an error, or was read-only. All your computer has been doing while you were gone is display a message asking you what to do about it. This is when we know computers are not like people. Even the dumbest human would put aside copying that one file until you returned. So will Ycopy. When Ycopy finds a file it can’t handle, it makes a note about it, and moves on to the next file. When you get back from lunch, you still have to do something with the recalcitrant files manually, but at least all the other files are taken care of. www.ruahine.com/
AUSLOGICS DISK DEFRAG. Designed for fast optimization of today’s modern hard disks. Get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investments. www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php
REVO UNINSTALLER. A superb freeware uninstall utility much faster than the Windows Add/Remove applet. Don’t fail to get this gem! www.revouninstaller.com/
COOLLECTOR. The movie lover’s Swiss army knife—blends three types of information into a unique interface: your cinematographical culture and taste, your video collection, and videos that are available at the store. www.coollector.com/
MOJO DESKTOP SIDEKICK. A simple little app that provides mouse gesture support for Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Mojo Sidekick has a floating click-through character or clock, which uses an interaction technology called Watermark. Gesture interaction avoids wrist and hand tension when repetitively selecting small buttons and controls. www.cityzen451.co.uk/
MYSPEED PC LITE. Accurately measures your Internet connection to speed test servers in the US or UK. Get an easy-to-understand analysis of your connection bandwidth including download and upload speeds; easily email your test results to your ISP or help desk technician. www.myspeed.com/pe/lite.html
GREETING CARD SCAM. Think about this...if you receive an email that is designed to infect your computer with a virus, the worst thing you can do is to follow the instructions in the email. Sometimes that is easier said than done, because the creators of these virus emails can be very clever. One method that they use is to pretend that the email is from a friend who has sent you an “e-card” - an electronic greeting card. Of course it all sounds very innocent - just click on the link in the email to get your e-card. However, what you don’t realize is that clicking on that link is actually taking you to a malicious website, or downloading a virus or spyware to your computer. If you really want to see what it is, open your web browser and type in the address of the e-card website manually, then find the area on the site where you can “retrieve” your card. Then, enter the retrieval code manually. If the email was legitimate, you will get your card that way. If it was a malicious email, the worst that will happen is that the code won’t work.
BLIP.TV. Like YouTube, it’s all about video. If you are into video, try this one to see some interesting stuff. www.blip.tv/
ALSHOW. If ALShow can’t play that video clip, you’re really sunk—this media player claims to handle every codec out there, and that appears to be true. In addition to the dozens of codecs included with the file (everything from AVI and MOV to Ogg Vorbis and beyond), the program automatically seeks out missing codecs and downloads them on the fly if needed. www.altools.net/ALTools/ALShow/tabid/57/Default.aspx
STARTUP INSPECTOR FOR WINDOWS is free Windows platform software that helps Windows user to manage Windows startup applications. On www.windowsstartup.com, there are more than 4,100 known programs in the database. Startup Inspector for Windows can thus provide a consultative information on the programs that are running at your Windows startup process. Whether a program is necessary to the system, or is the program a spyware. Here’s what it does: — Scans all programs that are in the Windows Startup Folder, Registry and provide you with a background information of the program. — Remove harmful programs like spyware, virus, dialers, make your system healthier. — Remove unnecessary programs like reminders, monitors, improve your systems performance.
PEAZIP allows you to browse archives (with multiple inclusion and exclusion filters), extract multiple archives at once, save an archive’s layout, save job definition (to be inspected, or used in scripts), and save job logs. PeaZip can be used also to split/merge files in multiple volumes, to compress executables with split/UPX, and to generate random passwords and keyfiles. http://peazip.sourceforge.net
NONBREAKING HYPHENS. Word lets you insert nonbreaking hyphens. This prevents hyphenated words, such as a phone number, from breaking when the word falls at the end of a line. For example, if the number 555-5555 falls at the end of the line, Word may move part of the number to the next line. To prevent this from happening, you can insert a nonbreaking hyphen. This way Word will move the entire word to the beginning of the next line. To add a nonbreaking hyphen in Word: Click where you want to insert a nonbreaking hyphen. Press CTRL+SHIFT +HYPHEN.
WINDOWS PREFETCH FILES. Is it safe to delete your Windows Prefetch files? However, there is just no need to. Doing so can actually slow down your next startup, instead of speeding it up as you’re hoping. The Prefetch is a feature of Windows that actually speeds up the boot process. When Windows starts up, certain processes and programs must load. The files needed to start these are stored in the Prefetch folder. Windows automatically looks there for those files. If you clean out your Prefetch, it won’t hurt anything. But your next boot up will take longer, as those files are put back. My best advice is to just forget the Prefetch, and leave that folder alone.
AVI/MPEG/RM/WMV JOINER. Multimedia mavens, rejoice: if you’ve been spending long hours with your video editing software, this program can help you regain the rest of your life. It lets you stitch together video clips of different formats (AVI, MPEG, Real Media, ASF/WMV) into one seamless, non-stop movie file. The program supports all major formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Divx. You can join as many video files as you wish. And the program makes it a cinch to take apart and rearrange the clips into any sequence. Price: Shareware; $20. www.boilsoft.com
FREE IPOD VIDEO CONVERTER. This tool does exactly what it says: It converts videos from a variety of formats so that you can watch them on your iPod. www.jodix.com/ :
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Copyright 2007. This article is from the December 2007 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
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