PCTips3000

Need More Than Windows Task Manager?

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:46:04 +0000

Ctrl+Shift+Esc is the shortcut used by those who want to be different, while Ctrl+Alt+Del is the path followed by most Windows users to reach Windows Task Manager, but for those who think they need to know more about what’s happening inside their computers, starting up (once installed, of course) System Explorer is the thing to do!

Obviously, System Explorer doesn’t come with Windows and it doesn’t replace Windows Task Manager, either. Sure, you can get Microsoft’s Process Explorer, previously known as Sysinternals’ Process Explorer, but if you want to try something new… here you go – System Explorer is absolutely free, fully compatible with Windows 7, as well as some previous Windows versions, including 64-bit ones.

Why would you need more than Windows Task Manager? Here’s a great feature that System Explorer has – right click a task, process or module, choose File Check, and then send it to VirusTotal or Jotti’s malware scan without having to use a Web browser for that. Sweet!

The last feature that I’ll tell you about now is simply called Memory Cleanup and does what it says – nothing less, nothing more. To use it, open the System Utilities menu and click Processes Memory Usage Cleanup. That’s it!

Sure, we could talk about this program for hours, since there’s much more to System Explorer than meets the eye, but I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’ll stop here. Just remember to go here and grab this awesome utility. Good luck!

O&O Defrag Professional 10, Priced at $0!

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:03:09 +0000

I love freebies, even when we’re talking about outdated software! Who wouldn’t like to get Windows XP licenses for free, even now, for example? Unfortunately, I can’t imagine Microsoft doing that anytime soon, but when it comes to Windows system tools, there’s more than just one software company giving away precious pieces of code for free. Today, the time has come for O&O Software, a notorious German software developer.

The story is very simple – O&O Defrag Professional is, without too many doubts, the best commercial disk defragmenter I have ever used, and there are quite a few names on my list, and even if you’re not going to get the last version for free, we’re still talking about a great deal – after all, O&O Defrag Professional 10 wasn’t released a decade ago… and you can bet this software can get the job done better than most of its competitors, despite its age (this version was released in mid-May, 2007).

Just as a side note, you should be aware that O&O Defrag won quite a few awards until now, and since it was certified by Microsoft for all its current NTFS-based operating systems, including Windows 7, it may be possible to use the version given away for free on Windows 7 systems without problems. After all, Windows 7 is only Vista done right, and when it comes to file system maintenance, there’s nothing really different. Please correct me if I’m wrong, all right?

These being said, here’s how you can get a $50 piece of code for free – go to this page, enter the required data, and that’s it. To make things even more interesting, you may order the last version of the software for a 70% price cut – only $14.95 (not sure if that’s available right away, but some people got this chance – just watch your email, once you sign up for the O&O Software newsletter!). That’s all, folks!

Get EASEUS Partition Master Professional For Free!

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:47:14 +0000

Last week, my Windows 7 laptop finally arrived, and the only reason that kept me away from using EASEUS Partition Master Professional to get it in working condition was the fact that I found some other free program (I can’t remember the name right now, but I’ll give it a nice review on Download3000 later this month) compatible with the 64-bit version of the OS before receiving the email about this awesome new software giveaway from our friends at EASEUS.

These being said, let’s quickly go through a few facts that should make you get EASEUS Partition Master Professional as soon as possible, shall we?

1. EASEUS Partition Master Professional is usually priced at $39.95, but until the end of the month, you will be able to get it for free!!!

2. The last version, 4.1.1 (this is the one you can get for free, of course), offers support for Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Windows 7, including the 64-bit versions of these operating systems, so no problems here, either!

3. Unlike the Home Edition, Partition Master Professional allows you to create a Bootable CD/DVD, so you will be able to partition a hard drive on a computer that doesn’t have any operating system installed yet. Sweet!

4. Unlike some notorious dead & gone utilities from this category (Partition Magic, anyone?), EASEUS Partition Master Professional offers support for up to 32 drives, each with a maximum size of 2 TB.

5. The Copy Partition, Copy Disk and Copy Dynamic Volume Wizard allow you to easily backup your partitions, including dynamic volumes.

Other than the above, this piece of code offers all the features one would expect from a partition manager – create, format, delete, resize partitions, as well as the ability to merge partitions and other operations. Since downloading and installing it shouldn’t be a problem, I will pull back here, but not before showing you the path to follow – just go here, and you know what to do…

Free Online Backup With IDrive

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:22:28 +0000

We talked about backing up our vital data more than once, and we won’t ever stop, because there will always be someone still not doing it right or, even worse, not doing it at all! Unfortunately, most people figure out how important data backup is the hard way, and the ones using excuses usually claim there’s not enough time to do it, or that costs are too high. This time, we’ll talk about a backup solution that can be both automatic and free, so you’ll have no excuse to keep saying “that won’t happen to me,” all right?

To make a long story short, I decided that saving my work on an external RAID 1 storage device and on a USB stick is not enough, especially since I don’t keep them connected to my computer 24/7, and – to be honest, I can’t remember how I got to it – finding IDrive was, probably, the best thing that happened to me during 2010, at least so far…

To get started with IDrive, you should have at least one Windows- or Mac-based machine, sign up for your account (free, of course, but you can pay for more backup space – only 2 GB are available for a non-paying user), install the backup software on your machine, choose the locations that you want to back up and then allow the IDrive software to get the job done for you!

TO accomplish all the above, just go to IDrive.com, and I am sure you’ll find your way around it! After all, there’s also a video demo to help you go from zero to hero in no time, and the FAQ section of the IDrive site can help you with those first questions that will probably pop up in your head as you download and start using this program…

Just for those who want a quick round of highlights – IDrive can backup mapped and external hard drives, comes with a built-in Internet connection speed test module, and if you need to enable continuous backup, that can be done easily, but the amount of data available for this will be reduced to only 50 MB. Other than that, I think most people should be happy with 2 GB of storage and automatic daily backups, because I am more than just happy – I am simply delighted!

Free Data Recovery Software Giveaway From EASEUS!

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:41:48 +0000

One of the main reasons for my absence was a catastrophic event, one that we talked about here more than once – my hard drive’s failure. Since I am no hypocrite and I do all the things that I advise you to do, I had a nice backup archive of my vital data on a USB stick. Unfortunately, bad luck comes in large packages, and that backup archive was corrupted beyond any chance of recovery. The happy ending of the whole story should be written in a few days, when I’ll go retrieve my old data from that drive, sent for recovery to a specialized lab…

… but it surely won’t be a happy ending from the financial point of view, since the electronic board was fried, and the firmware corrupted. Anyway, if you happen to go through data losses that don’t involve hardware failures, most chances are you’ll be able to recover everything with low costs or no costs at all, especially since I just got good news from EASEUS – their Data Recovery Wizard software, a very popular data recovery tool worth $69.95, is now freely available for a limited period!!!

After a quick download and installation of the program, I can say that I really love this program. To be honest to the end, I also have to add that I wouldn’t pay almost $70 for it, but since it’s freely available, you should hurry up and get it while you can!

According to the official press release, EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard “Works well under Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista, it supports recovery of lost files from hard drive, USB external hard drive, memory card, memory stick, camera card, SD card, Zip or other storage media.” Speaking for myself, I must say I love the ease of use, the clear interface, and the ability to create a backup image of your entire hard drive. Sweet!

If you’re looking for a free data recovery software for your Windows system, then stop wasting time and get EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard from here! Since the official page claims this software runs under Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista, it would also be nice to hear some thoughts from people who installed it on Windows 7. I would do that for you, but my Windows 7 laptop should arrive next week…

Oh, yeah, one more thing – big thanks fly to Eva Sun from EASEUS for sending us the precious info about this giveaway!

Geocities Pages, Reloaded

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:35:35 +0000

Some say mankind is lost, and if you look around, you may be tempted to agree. Fortunately, there are a lot things worth fighting for, and of them is history. Since we should be talking about computers and Internet here, it’s about the history of these domains, obviously. Founded back in late 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), Geocities became one of the Internet’s icons, having about 38 million user-built pages before its closure, a sad event that took place on the 26th of October, 2009.

Seeing a Web hosting service going down is nothing out of ordinary, but seeing one like Geocities going down, that’s really sad, as I said, since this actually killed a part of the Internet as we know it. Fortunately, not all is lost, because someone came to the rescue. Just one man, some hardware, a great idea, and a lot of work – Reocities!

This site is a great resource for everyone, no matter if they were online during Geocities’ days of glory or not. Speaking for myself, I only had a friend with a Geocities page, but he deleted that one after a while. Anyway, history is history, and we should preserve it, so I say a big THANK YOU to Jacques Mattheij from The Netherlands, the man behind this huge effort to keep as many Geocities pages alive after death!

What you should do? Well, if you checked Reocities‘ main page, I am sure you also got to the other interesting parts, but if you haven’t, I strongly suggest to check at least the Open Letter and the Making Of pages. The rest of it is silence… RIP Geocities and welcome to the virtual world, Reocities!

Silently Autosave Passwords In Firefox

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:05:11 +0000

The problem with a lot of Internet users is lack of any idea about password management, so if they get their computer replaced, they go as far as creating new Yahoo! or Gmail accounts simply because the previous credentials were saved into their browser, and they simply forgot any kind of info related to them. While this time won’t talk about password management itself, this is also a pretty interesting password-related subject: silently autosaving passwords in Firefox.

Obviously, allowing Firefox to save your user names and passwords won’t make any other noise apart from the mouse click needed, and this is exactly what I had in mind – saving passwords without asking a confirmation! Sure, the evil minds reading this could also use this Firefox hack to steal other people’s accounts… without actually stealing their passwords!

As a final addition to the last phrase above, I think it could be possible to retrieve those passwords already save with the help of some additional program, but I will be honest – I simply don’t care about that, and my advice is to stay away from other people’s account, all right? Good!

Now, let’s get to the hack itself, shall we? First of all, I have to thank Raymond for writing about this subject and giving me the idea of going after it, too. All the credits for hacking the .JS file I’ll tell you about next also go to him. Great job, Raymond!

If you really want to get rid of that bar having the Remember, Never for This Site and Not Now buttons, here’s what you should do after closing Firefox…

1. Open a text editor (my favorite is Notepad++, as you can see in the image above)

2. Open the file nsLoginManagerPrompter.js, located in the components folder of your Firefox main directory (for example, default location should be C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\)

3. Go to the _showSaveLoginNotification function and remove everything between lines 642 to 711, or until you find the _removeLoginNotifications funtion, if you’re going to use the Search feature instead of checking the line number…

4. Replace that section with these two lines of code:
var pwmgr = this._pwmgr;
pwmgr.addLogin(aLogin);

5. Save the file and open Firefox.

That’s all, folks! Now, all your user names and passwords will be saved automatically, so be sure to use this feature carefully… and avoid using Firefox on public computers, since someone else could have done this and turned this notorious browser into some kind of keylogger!

YouTube Downloader Video Tutorial

Csaba Kissi — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:45:55 +0000

Hello,
Today we released a video tutorial for our YouTube downloader. Hopefully, this will help you get started with this “little big” software the easy way. Enjoy!

Test My Connection, Please!

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:30 +0000

You probably know how to use the ping command when it comes to testing packet loss on a Windows computer connected to the Internet, but if you don’t, then I have some good news for you – you won’t ever have to learn how to use it, because there’s a Web-based tool that gets the same job done… and does it even better!

First of all, let me tell you what’s the catch with the ping command I mentioned above. According to the official mumbo-jumbo from Microsoft.com, this command “verifies IP-level connectivity to another TCP/IP computer by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo Request messages,” so to test your computer’s connectivity with the Yahoo servers, for example, you’ll have to type in something like ping -n 250 yahoo.com in a command prompt window, and then wait for the command to complete. Now, let’s leave that sad black and white window aside and move to something more interesting!

The name is PingTest, but you can also call it PingTest.net. Even more, PingTest.net Beta, if you’re crazy about names, but the tool behind the name is great! OK, so what’s that special about a site that should determine the quality of your Internet connection? Let’s see…

Coming from the same company that’s behind SpeedTest.net, namely Ookla, PingTest looks and works about the same way as that connection speed test, only that this time, you’ll have to choose a server, then wait for 250 data packets to be sent, received, and then watch the results. These results include packet loss (anything above 0% is something to be worried about), ping value (the lower, the better, since this is the time needed for a packet to go from your computer to the server and back – but don’t expect to see ~20 ms ping if you’re testing with a server located a few thousand miles away…), jitter (the lower, the better – this is the variance in measuring the parameters above in successive tests).

More than the above, you’ll get a line quality rating, and if you get a B rating or worse, don’t worry – it’s all about distance, after all, since you can’t expect for a connection from US to Australia to get the A rating, right? Don’t get me wrong, maybe you have some kind of uber-optical fiber connection to your server, but in my case, testing with a New Zealand-based server gave me 357 ms ping, 1 ms jitter, and 0% packet loss, so I am not really concerned about that D rating – after all, there are over 10k miles to that server…

Need A Web Proxy? Check It First!

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:55:24 +0000

If you’re serious about your privacy, then you must admit that, sometimes, you really need to take advantage of the free Web proxies available online. Unfortunately, no proxy seems to live forever, and this is where Web Proxy Checker steps into the spotlight…

I know it may not be such a great story this one, but I know for sure that some people will be grateful for the info regarding this program here, simply because I know how it feels to try using 20 proxies in a row just to find that they’re all dead. You don’t want to feel that, believe me!

Web Proxy Checker is a small piece of code for the Windows platform that can check SOCKS4/SOCKS5/HTTP/HTTPS proxies, no matter if they’re using authentication or not. Even more, it can check for URL or availability of connections to a specified port.

This free program requires about 2 MB of free space on your drive, and can easily handle redirects and download proxy list from a given URL (during my time with the program, I noticed this feature doesn’t always work as supposed to, but it’s good to have it, nevertheless!). Its interface may not be top-notch, but it gets the job done, it’s free, and that’s what really matters, after all!

If you want to know more about working with the program, here’s the easy way – once you install Web Proxy Checker, you have to load a proxy list you have in a text file, or simply paste URLs pointing to proxy lists right inside the interface (first text input field, you can’t miss it!). Once you do that, you can simply press the green Play button or take some time to mess with the settings available.

Hmm… I guess that’s all, but don’t be fooled by the looks of this program – Web Proxy Checker comes with full Windows 7 support, so there’s no need to worry about compatibility – just worry about those proxies that may refuse to work!