Human nature is by design addicted to free stuff but who would blame us. Is there anyone in the world who hasn’t wished at least once a day to be able to get something without having to pay for it? It is no wonder Gmail, Youtube and the like have become so popular and a significant part of our daily lives. However, these major players are not the only...

It’s a fact of life that the more you use your PC the more bloated and inefficient it becomes until eventually it gets to the point where you just can’t put up with it any longer. Sure there are lots of things you can do to hold back the eventual slowing up and general sluggishness of your trusty PC. Obviously you should have a good anti-virus program...

Having taken batch scripting about as far as I think I can,  have recently started playing around with Windows PowerShell which allows you to write scripts to do just about any OS level task. While tutorials are helpful, I have found simply creating scripts via old fashioned trial and error works best for me. A tool I have found incredibly helpful is the...

Whenever you install a new drive (hard disk,optical, etc.) or plug in a removable device such as a flash drive or camera, Windows assigns the device a drive letter. If you have previously used the removable device, for the most part, you should get the same drive letter. If you have the need to change drive letters you can do this through Disk Management in your...

If one of the performance metrics you keep your eye on is your overall system boot time, rather than keeping a count in your head or whipping out a stopwatch, take a look at the freeware utility BootRacer. This tool takes the simplistic approach of doing "one thing well" and features:Automatically calculates your Windows boot time. BootRacer uses...

I am a huge fan of using hibernation over a system shutdown when I am done using the computer for the very simple reason that I can immediately pick up the next day right where I left off. When you do a system shutdown, not only does your system take longer to start up, all of your open programs and files have to be re-opened. On the other hand, resuming from...

If you have multiple monitors and have ever tried to watch a Flash video in full screen on one while working on the other, you quickly find that it doesn’t work. As soon as you shift the focus to something other than the video, it reverts back to window mode. To prevent this from happening and keeping Flash in full screen mode, check out FlashHacker. This...

Is there any application you wish was portable, but is not available a the "zero footprint" package? If so, give Cameyo a try. Cameyo essentially allows you to convert any application to a portable one. It works by monitoring an installation and capturing system changes performed and then packing these changes into a standalone executable. This...

We have covered numerous utilities which add functionality to the Windows Explorer file navigation system, but if you are looking for a complete alternative to the way you manage files, try a different file manager such as FreeCommander. FreeCommander offers many features not natively available in Windows Explorer, including:Dual-panel technology –...

As is, the Windows Explorer File menu is pretty mundane with only the most basic options which you probably don’t even notice (open, copy, paste, etc.). So to make this menu a bit more relevant and add some features you may find useful, check out the freeware utility FileMenu Tools: FileMenu Tools allows you to customise the context menu of Windows...

Some programs implement an option to automatically keep itself on top of other windows. For certain applications this can definitely be handy as you can avoid having to resize multiple windows to see everything you need at once. Unfortunately, unless the application supports this feature there is not a native way in Windows to keep it on top. To resolve this...

If you have ever done a reload of a system and didn’t have the original driver disk, inevitably you come across the "unknown device" with the yellow mark in Device Manager. A tool which can help you identify that unknown device is the appropriately named utility UnknownDevices. This portable tool essentially scans your computer for any...

Have you ever copied something to your clipboard and before you pasted it, you copied over it? This can obviously be frustrating, especially if you cannot easily go back and grab the data you lost. To help with this problem, try the Nirsoft utility Clipboardic. Clipboardic is a small utility that listen to the clipboard activity, and each time that you copy...

Odds are whenever you unload your camera you have loads of picture files in high quality. While high quality is ideal for keeping on your system or printing, their large size makes for a long upload time to online services. So to quickly get your files pushed to your online photo album you can resize them to a more "web friendly" size. A tool which can...

I asked for this app review because I have a really hard time staying organized. This isn’t a great trait for someone who wants to write professionally – or for anyone else with deadlines, multi-step tasks, projects, ingredient lists, or any other number of things integral to GTD – Getting Things Done. My friends have often said it’s...

As you may know, program icons can be embedded directly into application resource files. For example, an EXE or DLL file can contain an entire library of icon files that programs can utilize. To easily view and extract embedded icons in these type files, check out IconViewer. IconViewer is a shell extension, a plugin for Windows Explorer. When you open the...

If you like to keep an eye on historical content of certain websites to note any design changes (such as on sites you develop or monitor), then it can be a good idea to occasionally take a screenshot of the home page every so often. Doing this allows you to have a timeline of how a site has evolved its look over time. A utility which can make this a "set it...

My wife has a Mac laptop and the ability to use 2 fingers to perform scrolling is pretty convenient and nifty. So if you would like to enable this on your PC laptop, then take a look at this guide on how to potentially add this functionality to your machine. From reading the article, it appears to work if you have a Synaptics touchpad and can be configured...

Whenever you are troubleshooting issues within Windows, the Event Viewer is an incredibly helpful resource as it contains system level information of events and errors on the system. When working with the Event Viewer, however, you have to constantly refresh it in order to see the most recent entries which can be annoying when you are actively troubleshooting an...

Zip files are one of those "all or nothing" type of files. If there is any "hiccup" in the compressed file, none of the data can be read or recovered. However, a tool which can help you recover data from corrupted zip files is the freeware utility, DiskInternals ZIP Repair. After you locate an archive that needs repairing, the program will...