0 CCleaner

Ever wished there was a software which would clean your computer from every single obsolete thing in one click? Then CCleaner is the software you are looking for! With one click, CCleaner will clean your computer and make it ready for daily use.

As you can see, the software cleans things like browser cache, Windows Explorer cache, and system cache which we are usually too lazy to clean by ourselves one by one. But of course, there's no reason to waste your computer's performance by not cleaning them since this can't get simpler.

CCleaner also supports cleaning cache of the applications you have such as Skype and such, which makes it a quite good bundle overall. You won't ever have to clean any cache manually anymore after you start using CCleaner.

It also has the option to analyze and tell you what you should clean by giving statistics about the software you are using in the right pane. You can see which cache is taking how much space by looking at the right pane and clean the ones you want, and leave the others.

CCleaner also offers registry cleaning, which is kind of a sweet feature. Registry entries tend to get messed up and stay there for long time even if they aren't used anymore, so it can't hurt to scan for registry issues every now and then and clean it.

Lastly, there are some extra tools in the software such as a built-in uninstaller, a startup manager similar to msconfig, a system restore utility, and a drive wiper. The drive wiper is also quite useful, since it deletes the files that are deleted before, (similar to Revo Uninstaller, which I covered in one of my posts) opening up more space and making them unrecoverable. The drive wiper also gives you the option of deleting the whole drive, also known as formatting. 

My recommendation would be to run CCleaner's Cleaner & Registry tools once per day right before you close your computer, so you can start fresh the next day. That's what I personally do and I can say I'm satisfied with the results.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

0 Revo Uninstaller Pro

Many times when I uninstall something off my computer, the things I uninstall usually leave lots of unneeded files and registry entries. It becomes pretty annoying when all this stuff stack up and take unneeded space or create conflicts. Icing on the cake, sometimes the uninstallers don't even work and you have to manually clean out a whole program...

After being annoyed at stuff like this, I started a research to see if there's any software which would help me to get rid of all these problems, and I found Revo Uninstaller Pro. You can find more information about Revo Uninstaller Pro here.

The main function of the software, as you will appreciate, is to uninstall software. In order to do this, the software follows a 3 step process which consists of making a system restore point, uninstalling with the integrated uninstaller, and cleaning the leftovers by scanning.

This way, if you uninstalled something which will cause a problem, you can just system restore without any problems, (I disabled the feature cause I doubt I need it) and you won't have any leftover files which will annoy you later on.

It also has extra features like cleaning your browsers' caches, cleaning the recent documents history of your Microsoft Office, and cleaning things in Windows such as the clipboard, temporary files and many more which I will be showing in the picture.

The Evidence Remover tool is also a quite nice tool in my opinion. It makes sure that the stuff you delete from your hard drive is totally unrecoverable by recovery softwares which I covered in one of my older posts. Note that this will only works for the deleted files, so you can safely use this to make sure noone digs out information off your hard drive.

Unrecoverable Delete tool is the alternative for Evidence Remover tool, where you can select files on your hard drive which will be deleted completely like the Evidence Remover does to your deleted files. It's better than deleting files by using Windows' own deleting tool since it won't give any room for recovery.

Junk Files Cleaner is a scanning utility which scans for the leftover files from the previous uninstalls you've done without Revo Uninstaller Pro. It is a good idea to run it once in a while just to make sure that every leftover file is cleaned and gone.

Autorun Manager is something that I don't really use since I'm used to using msconfig and it works just good for me, but it's simply a Startup manager where you can add/remove programs to/from your startup.

Lastly, there's the Hunter Mode, which is sort of an interesting feature. When you click Hunter Mode, you will get a crosshair which you can drag on the items on your desktop. After you successfully drag the crosshair on one of the windows (I use chrome for this example), it will give you choices such as uninstalling it, killing it, or removing it from the startup. I can't say I used it, but it looks like a really interesting feature which I might be using later on.

That would be all the features of Revo Uninstaller Pro. It's a really good software to have in your after-format software package, since I'm sure you will need something like this one day or another.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

0 Notepad++

Are you still using the original Notepad in Windows? It's time for a change! Notepad++ is an advanced version of Notepad which comes with many more features, and I promise it will make your life easier. It's especially good for people who are coding, but it's still an amazing upgrade for a home user nonetheless.

Notepad++ comes with great features such as highlighting / folding, opening your notepad documents in tabs instead of windows, making macros, (it records the things you do and you can recall it later) launching the notepad file in different browsers, (good for web programming) auto completion, customizable GUI, document map, plugin support for anything you might possibly need in Notepad, and many more.

The plugins include various things such as spell checking, exporting your file, quick translation, automatic saving, and the list goes on. There are too much plugins for me to actually talk about one by one here!

There are a few popular Notepad++ plugins which everyone using Notepad++ should have in my opinion. My recommendations in this case would be having Compare, Explorer, Multi-Clipboard, CharM, TopMost, AutoSave, and SpellChecker. Let's see what these plugins do one by one.

Compare : Shows you the changes between the saved document and the one you are working on at that moment.

Explorer : Think of it as an integrated Windows Explorer. It allows you to open any files on your system via Notepad++.

Multi-Clipboard : This one is pretty straight forward. It gives you more than one clipboard where you can see all your copies stored.

CharM : A special character map for the things you can't insert via your keyboard.

TopMost : Allows Notepad++ to be always on top.

AutoSave : Saves your document every X seconds where you choose the value for X.

SpellChecker : It's a spelilng checker!

You can find more information about Notepad++ here. I doubt you will look back to the original Notepad after using Notepad++, with all these great features.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

1 Recuva - Free File Recovery

Ever regretted deleting a file and wanted it back? I sure did! Infact, it happened many times to me and I just let it go until one day I lost a really important file which made me get to work. I'm sure this has happened to many of you as well, and I'm glad to say that today I will be writing about a software which will help you out!

When I was browsing the internet to find a way to get my file back, I tested many programs and I decided to stick with a file recovery software called Recuva. If you're interested, you can find more information about Recuva here.

With this piece of software, you will most likely be able to return the files that you have deleted, unless a long time has passed until you deleted them, or you filled the clusters of the hard drive which contained those files before with something else. In that case, you will end up getting corrupt or wrong files.

Using Recuva is quite simple. All you have to do is to scan the drive where you want to return the files from to start with.

After the scanning part is done, find the file(s)/folder(s) you want to recover and check them.

After you checked the files you want to recover, click the recover button at the bottom right corner. It will ask you to choose the destination folder. Note the important part here is that you should not choose the hard drive you're recovering files from as the destination, since it will reduce the chance your files will be recovered.

If all goes well, you will succesfully recover your files within moments depending their size. This worked 90% of the time for me, except for a few instances where I tried to recover files which I deleted months ago. Then again, it's a great example of file recovery and that deleting a file isn't the end of everything.

This software is the one I had most success with, but feel free to try other softwares since they all work in a different way and you might have luck with an another one if you didn't have luck with this one.

I hope you enjoyed the read, and I hope this helps you out!

0 Network Monitoring For Home Users

Network monitoring is the technique which is used to see what's happening in a computer network. In business, a network monitoring system monitors many things such as incoming threats to the network, components which slow the network down, data transfer, crashed servers and many things.

For a home user though, network monitoring simply means monitoring the download and upload rates of the computers in a network, usually in order to see what's taking up too much bandwidth. Today, I will be talking about network monitoring for home users.

It's rather easy to monitor your network lately, thanks to the variety of network monitoring software around the internet. With the help of a software, you can dynamically see the data transfer in your network, you can prioritize or limit the things you want to, you can balance the traffic for different computers in the network if you are sharing the connection, (You can split the connection equally between two computers for instance in order to prevent one person's downloads interfering with the other's internet experience) you can set rules such as assigning different volumes of traffic to different applications for different times of a day, week, or month. It's totally up to you how you want to customize your network.

If you are interested in this, I would recommend using NetBalancer, since it's a fairly easy and effective network monitoring software to use. You can find more information about NetBalancer here. Note that there are many alternatives to NetBalancer, but you can trust me on this one! After downloading and setting the software up, you will see a screen similar to this.

This is the main window, which you will be spending most of your time in. You can see all the processes which are running on your computer in this window. It shows you the download & upload rates for the specific processes here. You can simply right click a process, and change priority, block, or limit the download/upload speed of this particular process. As a real life example, let's assume I'm playing an online game and downloading something at the time. Apparently, it makes my game lag so that I can't play. In this scenario, I can just push my game's priority to high, and the software will make sure that the download isn't interfering with my gameplay.

There are also two graphs at left and right bottom, total internet usage and connections of the process you selected respectively. You can see which IPs a process is connected to, which can sometimes help you see if something dodgy is happening.

On the picture above, I just pushed Heroes of Newerth to high, and let BitComet at normal, so I can play my game without any problems! Let's take a quick look at the traffic rule setting as well.

I right clicked BitComet on the main window and added a rule for it. You can see on the picture that I chose the days Saturday and Sunday, and changed the Upload setting to Blocked. With this rule, BitComet won't be able to do any uploading at weekends. I'm sure many people will find use for this great feature, since if some time is put into it, it can make it a lot easier to use your internet connection effectively. Next up is the level severity option.

Remember the priorities we set earlier for our processes? This is the tool where you can choose how low your "low"s, and how high your "high"s will be. You can optimize this according to how fast your download and update rates are.

This would be network monitoring for home users in a nutshell. It's simple, isn't it? No more fighting with your girlfriend cause she's downloading and slowing your game down, no more problems with loading pictures while downloading and many more examples you can think of!

0 File Management Software

File management software are surely the biggest part of our computer lives. I'm sure everyone is familiar with Windows Explorer, the implemented file manager of Windows OS. Whenever you open a folder on your computer, it is Windows Explorer which makes you able to see your files and such.

That being said, Windows Explorer isn't the only one which you can use on your computer. Infact, there are many file management software which are far more advanced than Windows Explorer, or perhaps, more suitable for different users. Today, I will be talking about different types of these software and recommend you my personal favorites.

If we are to categorize, the categories would be:

• Orthodox
• Navigational
• Spatial

Let's start with Orthodox!

Orthodox file managers are the oldest ones between these three categories. They were used to make it easier to manage files back in the DOS days when there was no Windows where you can assign your files easily. An orthodox file manager consists of three panels. One of the panels is called the active panel, where you can navigate through your folders and files in the current working directory. The second panel is the passive panel, and it is used to see the content of an another directory at will. Lastly the third panel is a shell/command line where you can input commands as if you are in DOS. In the time of DOS, these were really popular since it made everything so much easier. Instead of inputting hours of commands, you could copy,paste,read,modify files and many more things with the help of shortcuts. The most famous orthodox file management software is surely Norton Commander. Even though these aren't used anymore (for obvious reasons), if you want to take a look at it, I'd suggest using Norton Commander.

The second type is, which everyone must be familiar with, is Navigational.

Navigational file managers are the ones we use every day. The greatest example to these would be Windows Explorer for Windows and Finder(has spatial mode too) for Mac. A navigational file manager consists of two panes, where one pane shows the system tree, and the other pane shows the active working directory. What seperates navigational from orthodox is the fact that navigational file managers have a graphical user interface, and orthodox file managers don't.  That being said, the GUI brings lots of advantages such as being able to go back & forward with a click of a mouse, and expanding folders without going into them (The arrows to the left of folders in Windows Explorer), drag & drop, and clipboard. WinSCP is a great alternative to Windows Explorer if you are willing to try something different.

Our last type file managers is Spatial.

Spatial file managers are completely different from the ones I have listed above. In a spatial file manager, every window represents a different folder. Basically, every time you double click a folder, a new window will be opened to show the contents of it. It's totally a different concept compared to the other two, and in my opinion, it's really hard and time consuming to use. That being said, some people prefer spatial over navigational because they like to know what is where instead of going around folders all the time. It's totally a matter of choice, but navigational is a lot more popular compared to spatial. Konqueror is a good spatial file management software (it has a navigational mode too) which you can try and see.

These three would be all the file management software types, all with their advantages and disadvantages.. Choose the one you feel comfortable with and stick to that one. You don't have to be forced to using Windows Explorer / Finder if you don't like it. We are living in a world of alternatives and technology :) If you asked my opinion though, I would say get used to navigational as it will make your life a lot easier.

I hope you enjoyed this, see you next time!

1 Virtual Machines & How to set one up with Virtualbox

Virtual Machines are guest operating systems which are installed in a host operating system. Think of it as a secondary operating system in your computer, and you can run it at the same time with your operating system. The biggest function of virtual machines is the fact that they're isolated from the host (primary OS), which means they are in no means related.

The reason why everyone uses virtual machines is simply because you can have different operating systems on your computer without changing your preferred operating system. This comes handy for people who have programs which aren't compatible with Windows 7, people who need to use Linux for programming, people who want to test software/settings without altering their original operating system and many more things that I can't think of right now.

The only disadvantage of using virtual machines is that it runs slower compared to a host operating system. Since it accesses the hardware indirectly, the performance will be poorer compared to the main system. It might also end up slowing down your host operating system if you don't have enough resources to run them.

Setting virtual machines up are fairly easy. First things first, let's list the things you need to set your own virtual machine.

- VirtualBox for Windows (Note that there are alternatives to VirtualBox, but in all honesty, it's the easiest one to use and it covers everything you need.)
- ISO file of the Operating System you wish to use (Backtrack 5 in my example)

That's pretty much all we need! Start with downloading and installing VirtualBox. After that, we'll see the main window of VirtualBox. To create our Virtual Machine, we simply click the "New" button, give it a name, and select its version.

When we are done with that, the software will ask how much memory we want to allocate to our Virtual Machine. (this can be changed later, so don't worry about misconfiguring it) I have 6 gigabytes of RAM installed in my computer, so I will just give 2 gigabytes of RAM to it. This is totally optional and you should configure it according to your needs.

The next step is making a "hard disk". Select the Create new hard disk option, and check the Start-up Disk option to proceed. Leave the file type at default. (VDI - VirtualBox Disk Image)

It's going to ask you if you want to have a fixed or dynamic hard drive. Dynamically allocated is usually a better choice since it will save you from using unneeded space on your hard drive. I'll select dynamically allocated for this example. After that's done, we are supposed to allocate a starting space for our hard drive (it ll expand after you fill this space up, that's how dynamic works)

Now, we have an empty Virtual Machine in our hands. It's time to load our Operating System in it! But first things first, click Settings in the main window, and assign more Video Memory and Cores to it, so it runs optimally. (You can do this by going to System-> Processor / Display -> Video)

To install the OS, we need to import the ISO file we wish to use into Virtualbox. This can by starting the VM up, going to Devices -> CD/DVD -> IDE/SATA (doesn't really matter) -> Choose a Virtual CD/DVD file. After the DVD is loaded, you will see the installation screen of your Operating System. (In a Windows 7 example, you will see the screen as if you re installing a fresh Windows 7 copy on your computer.)

After the installing part is done, your virtual machine will restart, and you will be seeing a fresh installed operating system of your choice! You might want to install Guest Additions as it's needed to fix some driver issues. (This can be done in the Devices menu again) Congratulations! You just successfully created your own virtual machine.

Now you can tweak it the way you want to and make use of it. You can also share things like your folders, your network, or your clipboard between your host and guest system, which makes it quite versatile to use.

I hope you liked this tutorial! I'm glad if I could have been any help :)

1 Spyware Protection

I guess everyone knows what a spyware is more or less, but for those who don't; spywares are malicious software which monitor your computer without your will. This monitoring process can be something simple such as checking which websites you've been surfing, or something critical such as your personal or bank information. Spywares can also slow your computer down, change your computer settings, create unwanted pop-ups to appear and such things which will harm your computer experience. Spywares, unlike viruses are a lot more likely to infect your computer due to their nature, and they are a lot more common than viruses. Therefore, even though virus protection isn't crucial in my eyes, spyware protection surely is.

Nowadays, spyware protection is fairly easy. There are many software from different companies which offer spyware protection. All you have to do is to download one of the software, let it scan your computer, and it will most likely remove every piece of spyware it can find. I will now, share the software that I've been using for spyware protection.

I use two different spyware protection software to keep my computer clean from spyware. You can safely use both of them at the same time as they won't cause any conflicts in your operating system.

First software is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, which you can get more information about (and download a free trial) here. It's fairly easy to use and user friendly as all the other spyware protection software. All you have to do is install it, let it update, and then run it.

The software lets you choose one of the three options to scan your computer. I recommend using full scan once in a while (a monthly-two monthly basis would be fine), and quick scan every week or two weeks depending how cautious you want to be about spyware protection.

The software also offers a real-time protection (which will delete spyware as soon as you're infected with it while you're wandering around the internet) if you wish to use. I've never been a big fan of real-time protection, (anti-viruses/firewalls use this) so personally I just keep it off.

Our second recommended software for today is SUPERAntiSpyware, which can be found here. It works the same way with MBAM pretty much. All you need to do is install it and update, and then you're ready to roll.

SuperAntiSpyware offers a more extended variety tools compared to MBAM as you can see. I suggest quick scanning every one or two weeks with this one as well, and complete scan once in a while like we talked before. Critical Point Scan, for those who wonder, is a faster Quick Scan, (it's not so thorough - not recommended) and Rescue Scan is an option which you should use when you can't run a normal scan because of infections. SuperAntiSpyware also offers custom scan, where you can tweak everything about the scan you will be running. This is only recommended for advanced users, so if you don't know what you are doing, stay away from it!

The software also offers real-time protection similar to MBAM, and you can use both of them at the same time if you want to without any problems.

The reason I use two different spyware protection software at once is because that they both have different databases and one of them might catch something the other didn't. With two of them, we simply increase the chance to find the spyware and successfully remove it.

All being said, even though we have powerful  tools in our computers to protect us from spywares, it doesn't hurt to be cautious. Stay away from dodgy links and don't go into websites that you don't trust without researching them.

Stay on the safe side folks, I'm out!