The question that many users will have when using the program is if it is legal to use. The developer website claims it is 100% legal as it only provides downloads from free legal music sources on the Internet. These sources, or at least examples, are not provided though, and the program interface reveals no information about the Internet locations the songs are downloaded from.

All you get are the artist’s name, the song title and the duration of the song. Listing the source could provide users of the program with the reassurance they need to download the music without fearing legal consequences.

A quick check for the top 5 US single charts of this week listed dozens of hits for each song, indicating that the database lists commercial songs and free songs.

A network software reveals that the program taps right into Vkontakte, a popular Russian social networking site. These songs are uploaded by users of the service and not the site operators.

If you take this into account you must come to the conclusion that it is likely not legal in all countries. While I cannot say that it is not legal in Russia for instance, it is fair to assume that it is not legal in the majority of countries.

I personally would advise users not to download music through the program. While it is unlikely that doing so will have legal consequences, it is still possible that it will depending on the local jurisdiction.

Looking for legal alternatives? Try the free music repository Jamendo, the Internet radio recorder Streamripper or our free music download guide.

You might have a specific book that you want to either emulate in some way or beat at its own game.  This is quite normal as it gives you a baseline.  When you submit a formal book proposal to a publisher then they will expect you to properly research your competition and know what it is they do and how your book will do everything in a more effective way.

You might think it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to find out how well your competitors books are selling, but it’s surprisingly easy.  The website Titlez will allow you to search for specific book types on Amazon, and it will show you their ranking among other information.  You can use this information to see which are the best-selling books so you can measure what you’re doing against them (as obviously these titles will be doing something right!)

Looking at the best-selling comparative titles, which will be Windows 7 books, you will be able to see the types of topics they are covering and how they are doing it.  Visiting the Amazon page for a book will probably allow you to view some pages, and usually the table of contents, so you can evaluate their content.  Don’t ape another book however, you’ll get into copyright issues there, but you may want to go in a completely different direction if you think they’re doing something wrong.

Another tip is to read reviews of these books to see how people are either praising or criticising them.  Some books are highly praised but others, including some best-selling titles also receive a great deal of criticism from the public.  You can learn from these comments how the books are failing and how you can improve on them.

If you want to sell your book, rather than give it away there are many services that you can publish it through.  You can do it through the new iBooks author portal, though currently Apple’s terms create a lock-in that mean you can’t also sell your book anywhere else.  You can also use an independent site like Lulu which is has a great reputation and is the service I self-published my Windows 7 Power Users Guide through, or you can publish directly with Amazon which you may think is your best option given that when people think of books they think of Amazon.

Wherever you publish, try and make sure that you choose an option that gives you an ISBN number.  This may incur a small cost but it does mean that you will be allowed to sell your book on many online stores.  Amazon for example now insist on your book having its own ISBN number in order to qualify for sale.

Research is everything if you want to make your book successful.  Never assume though that self-publishing a Windows book will you rich, it won’t.  If you give away a free eBook though the prospect of getting tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of downloads is quite realistic.  Since making my Windows 7 Power Users Guide free the downloads are well into the high six figures.  It is this success that you can shout about to publishers and that will help add weight and credibility to any approaches you make for a full book deal.

Ninite is a website that will let you choose which tools you want to load. It then provides you with a single installer to download. From there, it automatically installs everything you need. There is no need to visit individual websites, sift through them to find the installer, and go through them step-by-step. Ninite does all that for you; the problem is that you cannot control the order in which it loads what could be dozens of applications.

Typically, the first applications to be loaded are web browsers or other productive software. The last programs to load are those that protect your system. In fact, when testing Ninite, the last thing to load was the anti-virus.

The reason for this is fairly obvious. People do not really work with an anti-virus. A user may manually scan a file or make an unscheduled scan, but it largely runs unobtrusively in the background. A web browser is a different story, especially since they can perform so many functions these days. Ironically, web browsers are a part of the problem since they introduce vulnerabilities.

Flash, pdf files, javascripts, and web-mail attachments are all things commonly used on the web that can introduce viruses, trojans, worms, and other forms of malware. If an anti-virus is running, chances are that it will catch infected files and websites before they harm the computer. Some anti-virus programs can even warn a user if a web page has been reported as dangerous. Each time you see your anti-virus tell you it found an infected file ,it has saved you trouble and prevented damage.

Without an anti-virus running, there is nothing to stop malicious programs from doing whatever they want to a system. The potential exists for the computer to be destroyed or personal information stolen. At the least, they cause a system to become unstable. Time will be needed to restore the system to normal operation. Oftentimes these problems could have been avoided if basic precautions were taken. A user would be safer if the anti-virus and other protective software loaded first.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to make this happen even though Ninite does not let you customize the order in which installation occurs. What you can do is create two installers, the first one with critical software and the second with everything else. The critical software should include one anti-virus and at least one anti-malware title. It typically is recommended to use just one anti-virus title at a time. The reason is because one anti-virus program may mistake the database of the other anti-virus for an actual virus. From there, other programs, such as Truecrypt and Keepass, may be considered critical too since they relate to security.

Now, once the first installer is finished, the computer is reasonably protected. It is much safer to browse the web and download files. A user or administrator can even scan systems easily to check for problems and fix them. Make sure you check the anti-virus to make sure it is up to date or let it update itself before using the second Ninite installer. Doing this will ensure that you are using Ninite in the safest way you possible.

“An ounce of prevent is worth a pound of cure.” — Benjamin Franklin

So what do I mean by this and why?  Well times are still hard and for all those people struggling in their jobs, or struggling even to find work after being made redundant employers are increasingly searching Facebook and Twitter for clues as to the types of people that they are hiring or that are already working for them.  Couple this with the fact that Twitter is and has always been completely public, and that Facebook seems to find ever increasing ways to make everything you say and post publicly available, and you could find yourself going into the new year with a problem.

I’ve recently gone through my Facebook account and deleted all the photo libraries I put online this year from holidays and days out.  Let’s face it, each of these were only supposed to have been there for a few days, a couple of weeks at the most, so that my other friends could catch up with what had been going on but nobody would have looked at them since.  I’m extremely careful about what I put on Facebook, for instance I tend to avoid photos where I’ve had too much to drink (though the obligatory Saint Patrick’s day hat photo will always remain a notable exception!) but even so it’s wise to be cautious.

Facebook are currently rolling out their new Timeline feature that they dub “a new kind of profile”.

Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual.  The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.  As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

In short Facebook want everybody’s profile to be a complete history of their lives and do you really want all of this information available to everybody, and trust Facebook to keep it secret?  This is why I highly recommend not just removing old photos but modifying your status history as well.  Not that long ago Facebook offered a new feature that can be found in your Privacy settings called Limit the Audience for Past Posts.  Here you can control your privacy better for all the things you have said in the past, some of which you may not be completely proud of.  All of this is in the name of being constantly careful and vigilant about the company’s proclivity to make everything public as often as they can.

With Twitter it’s different because everything is already public.  Deleting old Tweets is a laborious process of removing them one at a time (I have almost 7,000 tweets in my account and don’t want to face that!) but some tools such as TwitWipe are available to plug the gap.  This and similar services will completely wipe your Twitter history, enabling you to start from scratch with a clean bill of health.  That means the next time someone does a search online for your Twitter handle and the word “drunk” nothing will appear in the results.

Personal privacy is something we’re giving up more and more as we get involved with social networks and companies that trade online, but it’s such an important thing to guard.  Making sure that my privacy is maintained online will certainly be one of my resolutions for 2012, will you make it one of yours?

Dan from Canada wrote…

Hi Mike,

I just found your excellent tutorial for setting up a new PC and will be following it to the letter. I have one question though, if you have a moment.  I’m buying a new Acer PC tomorrow morning at a local [removed]. It will be my first new PC in a number of years.

I’ve recently setup a new HP for a friend and it was very easy. It started Windows7 setup right away and I only had to put in the language and time zone and some other simple things.  I wondered if you think this PC will be the same simple setup. The salesman is telling me I should pay almost $100 for it to be setup and that if I do it myself, I need to use Silverlight to download Windows 7 and can have all kinds of problems.

Do you think the Windows 7 operating system and all drivers will be there when I take it out of the box ?  I can’t seem to find the answer anywhere on the net and I couldn’t reach Acer support

It’s not uncommon for sales people in computer stores to try to up sell the fastest processor (because you must have this to edit photos) or their choice of anti-virus software (because all the free ones don’t protect you) and these scenarios get me angry enough.

This particular salesman at a big name store who’s name I have removed as the company don’t have an opportunity currently to respond to this, though I will contact them and feed back to you, is a complete charlatan.

Dan was perfectly correct to expect Windows 7 and all hardware drivers to come pre-installed on a new PC from one of the major manufacturers, and indeed this would always be the case.  Indeed if you want a new PC without a copy of Windows pre-installed it’s actually very difficult to do and can require some arguing with customer service staff at the manufacturer concerned (a problem commonly faced by users of GNU/Linux who don’t want to spend $80 on a Windows licence).

My reply to Dan was swift and pointed out that he should speak with the manager of the store and ask why there would be a charge to install an operating system that should already be pre-installed, and why Silverlight would be required to “download” Windows 7 when Silverlight will only run within Windows?

If you are buying a new computer in the sales please be very wary of these sales tactics.  Have an idea of what you need and preferably seek advice from a technically-minded friend if you can before buying.  Don’t fall for the more expensive machine just because you want to edit your digital photographs, don’t be convinced into buying expensive anti-virus or other software such as Office that you don’t want (the version of Office Starter that ships with almost all new PCs is more than enough for a lot of people) and don’t ever pay for a set-up charge, especially never such a large fee.

If you ever in any doubt ask to speak with the manager or telephone the company’s customer support line (retail outlet or PC manufacturer) to check with them first.  On this occasion I’m very pleased that Dan chose to email me in advance, he’s just avoided wasting $100 on something that’s quick, simple and most importantly fun to do himself.

But surely you don’t keep any sensitive information on your phone unless people really are interested in text messages from a loved one or emails from Groupon?  Here you’d be wrong again.  In this article I want to have a look through the different types of important information you keep on your smartphone, and look at ways you can keep it safe and secure.

So what information do you keep on your handset?

Contacts

You might not keep really sensitive details about yourself on your phones such as your Social Security number or bank details, but you do keep ever growing details about all your contacts.  These include their full names, address, email address and multiple phone numbers and, crucially information such their full date of birth (which is used in faking IDs and gaining access to accounts) and possibly family connections that are possibly giving up details such as their mother’s maiden name.  In short you are being entrusted with a huge amount of information on a huge number of people, all of which can be used for identity theft.

Email

It might not be possible for someone to discover your email password or to change it from your handset, though a good hacker might still find a way, but depending on what emails you store locally in your inbox they might reveal all manner of additional detail about you perhaps including at least partial credit card details if you’ve been shopping online.

Documents

More and more of us are keeping documents on our phones and with the inclusion of support for services such as Windows Live SkyDrive in Windows Phone, it’s becoming far easier to not know what important and sensitive documents you actually can access from your phone, maybe without even knowing the functionality is already there and switched on.  If you use DropBox on your phone for instance what documents are you storing in the cloud that can be easily and instantly accessed by someone who has physical access to your phone?

GPS Locations

As more and more of us use smartphones as GPS devices, what locations have you got stored in your phone?  Do you, for example have “Home” listed as a location?  If you do a thief could be directed straight to your home at the time when they know, if they’ve just stolen the handset, that you’re out.

How can you secure your handset?

Use a Password Lock

The most basic and simple way to lock your phone is to put a passcode on it, be this a physical numerical code or a swipe pattern.  Make it a good one though, definitely not an obvious pattern or the same code as you use for the PIN number on your bank card.  Having a code or pattern that’s a bit harder to do might be a little more inconvenient for you, but it comes with a great deal more peace of mind.

Write down your IMEI number

The phone’s unique identifier code, it’s 15 digit IMEI number can usually be found close to the SIM card slot and battery compartment in a phone.  Write down this IMEI number and keep it in a safe place at home in case you need to cancel the phone, it will make things quicker, or more important to report the phone as lost or stolen to the police.  Having the IMEI number will help make sure the handset can be quickly returned to you if it is found.  You can check the IMEI number on the phone itself by typing *#06# on the keypad.

Edit Your Lock Wallpaper to add an ICE number

An ICE (In Case of Emergency) number can quite possibly save your life if you are involved in an accident or incapacitated and the emergency services can’t unlock your phone to call a relative or friend.  Unfortunately modern smartphones still don’t include support for ICE numbers but if you manually edit in a graphics package onto the image you use for your lock screen, it can be a great help in having your phone returned to you if it is found.

Use Anti-Malware Software

Malware and viruses on smartphones are becoming ever more common and regardless of how secure the platform might be, or how much vetting all the apps might go through, there’s no guarantee that malware won’t slip through the net.  Check the reviews online to see if the anti-malware software you’re buying is actually any good and preferably go for one of the big name companies such as AVG or Kaspersky for added peace of mind.

Use a Remote Management Service

Some smartphone platforms, including Windows Phone, come with a remote management service you can access online.  These services can allow you to remotely lock the phone, track it (even when locked) or even wipe it altogether and perform a hard reset if you suspect it is gone for good.  These services are accessed through any web browser and if your smartphone comes with such a service it is well worth signing up for it.

So what are your additional tips for keeping your smartphone, and its sensitive data safe and secure?  Write them in the comments here as we’d love to hear them.

Now SplashData have compiled the list of the top 25 most common passwords.  They have compiled the list by examining the password dumps that have been posted online by hackers.

The list, which unsurprisingly comes with the password “password” as the most common doesn’t come with any great surprises.  The most common threads running through these are that they are all very short and most are common dictionary words or proper names.  These are all things to be avoided when creating a new password.

You will notice though that the password “qazwsx” is in the list and why shouldn’t this be secure.  If you look at your keyboard you will see why, as password cracking software looks at common patterns that can be typed on your keyboard.

The list of the top 25 most common passwords is…

1. password

2. 123456

3. 12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

11. baseball

12. 111111

13. iloveyou

14. master

15. sunshine

16. ashley

17. bailey

18. passw0rd

19. shadow

20. 123123

21. 654321

22. superman

23. qazwsx

24. michael

25. football

It’s not actually difficult to create a strong password and I have put a posted I created below (click to view it full size) that you can print out and put on your wall in your home office or workplace.

A strong password should be absolute minimum of 8 characters in length, preferably a minimum of 10 characters and contain a mixture of numbers, symbols and upper and lower case letters.  You can use numbers and symbols to replace letters they are similar to, for example using an “&” instead of the letter “a” and using the number “1″ instead of an “i” or an “l”.

You can also mix things in a way that makes sense when remembering the code you have used to create the password.  For example, you could have a password made up of two words of different lengths, where the third letter of each word is capitalised and the fifth character in each word is replaced by a symbol.

Finally you can also, for added security, append to the end of the password, or preferably mix into it the first three letters (or a three or four letter identifier) for the website or service the password is for.  For example Amazon could mean the letters AMZ are mixed into your password.

By following these rules it’s very easy to create long, super-secure and above all memorable passwords that will help your data and financial information stay safe online.

There are also other things you can do keep your passwords safe.  One way is to use randomly generated passwords and password storage software on your PC (with it’s own secure password) to auto-fill these in on the websites you use.

Having a super-strong password is so important so I really urge you to tweet, blog and share this post and the poster as far and wide as possible so your friends, family and colleagues can see if their own passwords are in the list.

With smartphone’s and other similar computing devices there are usually tangible benefits to updating.  These commonly include new features, extra functionality for existing hardware such as cameras and most crucially, bug fixes and security patches.  It can be difficult to argue against these types of software updates then, but given the recent update problems with iOS (and it’s far from the only smartphone platform to experience problems) the question still needs to be asked if it’s really necessary to do?

Commonly, smartphones will nag you to update your device’s operating system.  Windows Phone is awful for this with a daily nag  on the handset and another nag whenever you plug the handset into your computer.  Should the smartphone makers back off and allow us to use the device as it was originally programmed?

So what are advantages?  With smartphones it’s a simple case of just having less hassle and less chance that something will go wrong and either ‘bricking’ the handset or losing all your data.  This happening can at its best cause you to lose text messages, files and photographs, but at worst can result in having to send you phone away for reprogramming.  If you’re not being nagged then, security issues aside and I’ll explain why in a minute, you should ask the question does the phone do everything you currently need it to do?  If this is the case then it’s likely you won’t be a prolific downloader of apps or a heavy user of the phone’s features.  If you are a casual user who will use a phone for a year or two and then get a new one why bother with an upgrade that may not change anything for you.

While it’s difficult to avoid operating system upgrades for your smartphone though, it’s much easier to avoid them for other hardware.  I’m a fan of saying that firmware should only be upgraded if it’s really necessary and as the author of Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out I’ve seen many of the problems that firmware updates bring.

If you have a faulty update to your router’s firmware you could bee offline for a fortnight.  If you have a bad update to your NAS drive’s firmware you could lose all access to your files and data for weeks and if you have a bad firmware experience with your PC you could, at the very worst, have to dismantle the entire innards of the machine to send the motherboard back.

So why do I advise so strongly against upgrading the firmware of devices?  Frankly it’s because unlike the updating of smartphones, the upgrading of firmware is still not a user-friendly and user-serviceable task.  Things are getting better, my new NAS drive can download and install firmware automatically, but I’ve learned over the years not to trust the software updaters supplied with PC motherboards.

As I said at the beginning of this article, this is an issue that tends to polarise opinion.  It can easily be argued that the new features and greater stability that firmware updates often bring makes it well worth updating the firmware on a device on at least a semi-regular basis.  My argument though would be not to do so unless it’s strictly necessary, for instance if you have a stability issue or a hardware feature needs an update to switch it on, such as USB3 on a motherboard or a card slot on a tablet.

It would be very interesting to hear how you feel about firmware and embedded OS updating.  Is it something you do regularly or perhaps something that, like me, you leave and forget about unless it becomes necessary?

I would never recommend anybody ever use EFS however and here’s why.  I’m extremely good with backups, I tell people all the time to make sure that they have adequate backups of their files and documents and I practice what I preach.  I use Windows Live Mesh to synchronise my documents, music and pictures between my main desktop and my laptop.  My main desktop then backs everything up to a second internal hard disk and also an external NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive.  I then have a secondary NAS drive which I keep off-site which I bring back every month or so to update the backup on that.  This is the way I recommend everybody does backups; though USB hard disks are just as effective as NAS drives and much cheaper.

I’ve lost files that I’ve backed up with EFS however, not only on my own computer but also on the NAS drives.  In fact I’ve only used EFS twice in the last ten years on my own computers and on both occasions I’ve lost files and documents.  I therefore cannot recommend you ever encrypt your files with this Windows feature.

The problems occur because EFS will encrypt any file that resides on an NTFS formatted disk, the default formatting option for XP, Vista and Windows 7 and also for the vast majority of USB hard disks and some NAS drives.  Unfortunately, because of incompatibilities with some differing versions of EFS files can end up scrambled and unrecoverable.  This wouldn’t happen on a USB hard disk but I found it occur on my NAS box.  This means that if something goes wrong and you need to recover the backup from the drive, even the appropriate EFS key, that you would clearly have backed up and kept safe, won’t unlock the files.  They will simply be lost and gone forever.

There’s no way to know on what devices the EFS file scrambling will happen either.  With non-EFS supported devices, ie those that aren’t formatted with NTFS, Windows will ask if you “want to copy the files without encryption” and will decrypt them on the fly.  Unlike BitLocker however, which just encrypts the hard disk, EFS encrypted files remain encrypted when copied off the machine to another NTFS formatted disk.

There are other problems with EFS too and these include metadata.  The EFS system, for reasons I’ve never been able to ascertain, is incompatible with the metadata you add to certain file types, pictures and photographs especially.  Not only will it strip out the metadata from these files, it will modify the files in such a way as to prevent you from adding the metadata back in afterwards, effectively making the file useless to you if this is how you like to organise your photos and pictures.

All of this comes from my own personal experience and it shows how even technical experts can be caught out by hardware and software incompatibilities and faults in, seemingly secure Windows features.  I would not recommend you ever use EFS.  If you have a laptop or desktop machine with a TPM chip and a copy of Windows Ultimate or Enterprise, use BitLocker.  If not the excellent TrueCrypt is a free utility that comes highly recommended by security experts worldwide.

There’s no way around this either as your PC’s case has to have vents and air-holes.  If it didn’t the whole thing would overheat and, unless you had a very elaborate heat-pipe system in place, your computer would constantly crash.

The thing is though that with dust clogging up the innards of your PC it’ll crash anyway, or at the very least heat up too much and be automatically shut down by your motherboard’s BIOS to prevent the components melting.  As an example of this, just look at the processor heatsink in the photo below.  This was taken of one of my own computers just this morning.  Underneath the fan the processor heatsink it caked in thick layers of dust.  Under this circumstance the heatsink won’t be able to vent any heat properly and the fan will just be something that spins around uselessly.

You can’t escape dust from entering your PC either.  Some people say you should keep it on a desk or lifted up from the floor by a small stand.  These things, while they may delay the inevitable, can’t prevent the build up of dust.  Other people say don’t keep it on a carpet and instead try and put it on a laminate floor.  Laminate and wood floors are even worse though.  You may not get thick carpet fibres in the PC but at least a carpet can trap a lot of the dust in the room.  With a wooden floor there’s nowhere for it to go except for inside your computer.

So we reach a point, as we all do from time to time, when you need to clean the inside of your computer, as I will have to do today.  I thought I’d share with you then my tips on the best way to do this.

First of all you should make sure that the computer is switched off and unplugged from the mains electricity supply before you take the side off the case.  You should then make sure that wherever you clean the PC, which should be in a place perhaps near an open door as it’ll get messy, it should be well supported on a clean, flat surface.

The best start is with a good strong puff of breath.  You’d be surprised how much dust this will actually clear.  Some people at this point may be inclined to stick a vacuum cleaner in the case, but first I’d recommend a small, unused, paintbrush.  This is a great way to get rid of most of the dust from the components themselves.

This won’t get the dust up from the inside bottom the case though and won’t help with the processor heatsink where you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) remove the fan.  Here you’ll need that afore-mentioned vacuum cleaner.

You should always make sure, when using a vacuum cleaner inside a PC that you observe the following rules.

1. Always use the vacuum on it’s lowest suction setting
2. Have a small, soft brush attachment fitted to the end of the hose

With these two rules in place you’ll be able to gently brush over the components inside the case and remove the dust.  The processor heatsink can be more stubborn but for that I’d recommend the long thin nozzle attachment which you can point inside the fan to get at the dust directly.

You do need to be very careful when cleaning the inside of your PC as the components inside, especially those on the motherboard and plug-in cards are tiny and sometimes very fragile.  Always be very gentle and take your time.

You should normally do this with a PC a couple of times a year or so depending on where you keep the machine and how dusty it gets. Doing this will help prolong the life of your computer, help keep it operating at its maximum speed, help keep it quiet and probably most importantly have the side-effect of reducing your electricity consumption.

There is however one thing that makes me hunt for the software on download sites, and not on the developer website. Some developers like to display surveys or registration forms to users who want to download their applications. While it is their right to do that, I personally dislike this. If I like the software a lot, I’d come back anyway and register an account to keep tabs on the development and closer contact to the developers. Forcing users to fill out forms leads in my opinion to a higher drop rate which in turn means less users that download and install the software.

Whenever I come to a site where I’m forced to fill out a form I’m immediately appalled, and tend to search for the program on portals like Softpedia or Betanews. It is not always possible to find those programs on those sites, but if I do, I download them from there instead.

One example: I recently tried to download the excellent free to use virus scanner Dr. Web CureIt from the developer site. Before I could do so, I was asked to enter my name and email. Thinking this was all, I complied, only to be greeted by a survey on the next page. Even worse, I failed to enter the captcha on that page correctly and was taken back to the start form as a consequence.

Fed up with it, I decided to search on Bing for the download and found it on Softpedia. I downloaded the program there without having to fill out a form or give away my email address. I tend to use temporary email addresses for this anyway whenever possible.

What I would have liked to see on the Dr. Web page is an option to directly download the software, and an optional registration, not the other way round.

Where do you download your software? What’s your experience? Let me know in the comments.

It is really appalling to me that this is still happening.  After all, the focus of your PC has for too long appeared to be Windows itself, but it just isn’t.  The main focus of your PC is your files and documents surely!

Windows is designed to be installed on single disk systems, it’s always been that way.  You install Windows onto your C: drive and a folder will be created for your files.  Your ‘personal’ folders will automatically be stored there (Documents, Pictures, Music and the like) and any new files you copy over to your PC will be put there.

The problem is that as and when something goes wrong with Windows, which is inevitable eventually, you risk losing all your files and data if you don’t keep regular backups.  I get emails from people all the time asking for help with this and how they can get their data back, or at least not lose it to begin with.

Now you’re probably saying at this point that people should always keep regular backups of their data, and you won’t get any argument from me.  It’s not always that simple though, especially if you have a lot of critical files that change regularly.  There are also personal, financial or other circumstances that mean people won’t have regular backups or backups at all.  Let’s not forget that while Windows 7 might nag you to back up your files, millions of people are still using Windows XP and Vista which don’t, and most of those people and the people using Windows 7 aren’t technically minded and may not even know what this means.

This should therefore mean that Microsoft need to guide people and help them to keep their files and data safe.  They’ve made precious little progress here in the last decade though, having only added the ability with Windows Vista to cut and paste your ‘user folders’ to another location easily.  There’s no indication you can actually do this however, no help on the matter and no nagging from the Windows 7 Action Centre to remind you to do so.

With Windows 8 I’m beginning to feel the gloom setting in that nothing more will change.  What we desperately need is one of the following two scenarios but I’m doubtful somehow that either will happen.

Scenario 1 : Separation at Installation- It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Windows installer to ask you, when times comes to install Windows.  “Do you want to install Windows and your user files onto this 1Tb hard disk in your computer or would you like to separate them”, before going onto explain why seperating them is a good idea.

The installer could then do one of the following, ask what you want to use your computer for (light use, music and photos, work, gaming) and create two partitions of recommended size.  Alternatively it could split the hard drive by proportion, 50/50, 30/70 and so on or finally it could ask you what size you want the two partitions to be and make recommendations to you.

All of these options would be simple enough for people to understand and it would be easy and simple for the Windows installer, on a clean install anyway, to do this for you.

Scenario 2 : Separation after Installation – Windows already has the ability to grow and shrink partitions.  Why doesn’t it suggest to you after you install it through an Action Centre message that “You can greatly decrease the chances of losing files and data by moving them away from Windows, would you like to do this now?”

Here there would again be several options.  It could shrink the current Windows Partition and then move the user folders for you.  Alternatively, if you have a separate hard disk it could simply move the user files there.  It’s easy for Windows to determine what is internal and external storage so this wouldn’t be at all difficult.  This would also mean that if you’re reinstalling and have already moved the folders in the past, the pointers will be updated in Windows to where you’ve put them.

Are either of these scenarios likely to happen though?  Moving your files and folders away from your Windows installation is something I feel very strongly about and it’s something I write about at some length in my book Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out. 

There are ways to make sure you don’t ever lose your files and data (unsurprisingly I write about those as well, and will write additional articles on the subject here in the coming weeks) but in the mean time keep the emails coming to mike@MVPs.org.

The majority of users does not really know about this. Most think for instance that deleting files will delete them completely, which is not the case. Here is a collection of five different locations and ways to find out more about a previous computer user. You can use the information on your own computer, to see if a third party could grab those information from yours as well.

1. Display Deleted Files

Deleted files are not directly deleted by the operating system. Even if you delete them directly or make sure to delete the trashcan as well. Why? Because it is faster to simply delete information about the file, than the file itself. While you won’t see the file anymore in your OS, it may still be fully accessible on the hard drive of the computer. Someone with the right set of tools could recover the files to get access to what you have been deleting.

Tools for the job:

• Disk Digger
• Glary Undelete
• Panda Recovery
• Recuva
• Undelete Plus

How to protect yourself:

Wipe the free disk space regularly. This overwrites the free space on the hard drive which makes standard file recovery impossible.

• Blank and Secure
• CCleaner
• Eraser

2. The Web Browser History

Web browsers are configured to record the web browsing history. This is done in databases in the program directory most of the time as well a cache that contains pages, images, cookies and other elements of visited websites. It is quite easy to use the cached information to see what sites a user has been visiting in the past and what has been downloaded to the computer.

Tools for the job

• Built-in web browser tools to access the history and cache
• The standard system file browser, e.g. Windows Explorer
• Firefox Cache Viewer
• Google Chrome Cache View
• Video Cache View

How to protect yourself:

You can configure web browsers to delete the cache regularly, for instance at every exit or every five days. Here is how you would do that in Firefox. Open the Firefox web browser and click on Firefox > Options, or select Tools > Options from the menu. Switch to the Privacy tab

You can either configure Firefox to never remember the browsing history, or use custom settings for the history. This way you could disable the browsing and download history, but keep cookies for your logins.

3. Recent Items

Another area where you might get a lot of information about computer usage is the recent items list. The operating system and multiple third party tools keep tabs on programs or files that have been opened recently. If you have not done anything with the OS or application yet, you may find previously opened files and programs by the system’s last user.

Tools for the job

You can access the information right in the application or the operating system. For Windows 7, you could for instance click on the start button and select Recent Items from the Start menu, or right-click an item in the taskbar to see its jumplist entries.

How to protect yourself:

You need to disable recent items either in a control panel of the operating system or in the third party application. For Windows 7, you would simply right-click the start orb and select Properties from the context menu.

Locate Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar to disable that feature.

Closing Words

The three method above are common options to analyze a computer system. Have other suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

Friday the hacking community Lulz Security (LulzSec) posted a file which it claimed contained the username and password information of 62,000 random individuals using popular websites like Facebook and PayPal. While it is doubtful that Lulz itself plans to use that information to do anything but embarrass those websites, other people who now have access to that data may be less playful.

It is unknown how this information was acquired or from what source. However, if you find yourself in a situation in which your Facebook or PayPal accounts have been compromised in a similar hacking campaign, there are important steps that you must take to secure your information and retake control of that loose data.

Mark Ward, a financial IT professional from Colorado, warns anyone who has been compromised to ask the two big questions of information loss: how did it happen and why.

“Anyone who has lost login information of any kind should immediately check the computers they use to access accounts for malware, keyloggers or rootkits. Otherwise, no matter how often you change your information thieves will retain access to the information.”

If you were foolish enough to use that login information in multiple places, change it everywhere – or you might find those accounts compromises as well. Next, identify why you were targeted.

“LulzSec rarely goes after individuals – if your information comes up in their attacks you were probably just caught in the crossfire.”

If you are someone who they may take personal interest in, however, take care to protect all other information and let those connected to you know you have been targeted. They may be approached for further information.

The loss of PayPal login information is typically more pressing than the loss of Facebook data, and as such requires forceful and immediate action. Begin by reporting the breach to PayPal and closing the account immediately. This stops that account from being used for any illegal purposes that you might otherwise wind up being liable for. Next, contact the financial institutions connected to the PayPal account and have them monitor your funds. It may be necessary to close those accounts in time, but it typically is not necessary to do so immediately.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, contact any individuals with whom you regularly do business through that account and let them know that you have been compromised. Your past actions will be visible to any digital thieves, and it is very possible that they may be contacted by email or phone by people claiming to be you. Consider setting up a secure passphrase with PayPal business partners so that they can know that it really is you they are talking to.

Facebook contains mostly social information and is not connected to your finances and as such it is less crucial to contact connections to such an account as quickly. Again, notify Facebook, telling them of the breach, and close the account. This severs your connections to any photos that may be linked to your account. Let your friends know that you have been hacked, and advice them to be weary of anyone claiming to be you.

As skirmishes online increase in frequency, more and more people will likely get caught in attacks on groups they have no significant connections to. By following these simple steps, the damage of a breach can be minimized and you can return to your usual online activities without delay.

Martin’s Words of Wisdom

If you had an account at one of the hacked company sites, and used the same account login, email, password combination at other sites, your first step needs to be to change your passwords at all those sites. Before you do anything else, change your account passwords.

PayPal users can improve security with identity protection devices. It costs little money and adds two factor authentication to PayPal. Attackers who get your username and password, cannot access the PayPal account because they do not have the code that gets generated on the fly when you use the device locally.

I probably would not go as far as to close down the account. I’d change the account password, get the security device and monitor my PayPal funds closely to react immediately when I’d spot an unauthorized transfer. You may however want to cut the link to your debit and credit cards in PayPal to avoid that they are charged automatically whenever a payment is made that exceeds the account balance.

It quickly turned out however that the message was a scam, a phishing attack to steal my PayPal login credentials. Why would attackers want those information? To transfer all the money from the account, and maybe even more if a Credit Card is linked to the account.

They may use PayPal to make purchases on the Internet, or use the account as a temporary haven for illegal transactions.

Whatever it is, it is certainly not in the interest of the account owner. Lets take a closer look at one of the emails to see what it is all about, and learn how to identify if it is a phishing email.

The email reads:

Dear PayPal account holder,

PayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We have recently determined that different computers have tried logging into your PayPal account,and multiple password failures were present before the logons.

Until we can collect secure information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Download and fill out the form to resolve
the problem and then log into your account.

Thanks ,
PayPal

The sender is PayPal updates-int@paypal.net, the subject: Your account has been temporarily limited. There is an attachment, a HTML page with the name Restore_your_account_PayPal.html.

When you look at the email you will notice several indicators that it is a phishing email. You do not really need to look at email headers for that.

• 1. No customer name – Phishing emails usually do not have access to customer names, which means that they will address the recipient in general terms. Dear xxx.
• 2. No contact – Companies do usually include contact information in their emails. This can be a company’s street address, support phone numbers or links to web properties.
• Attachment – While it is possible that companies send attachments with their emails, it is unlikely that a company will do it in this case.

When you look at email headers you notice that the return-path and received headers do not mention PayPal but another domain (powerski.net), which more or less proves that the email at hand is a phishing email.

But what about the HTML email attachment? The easiest way to find out is to save it locally to open it in a text editor.

I do not really need to see the site in action, analyzing the code is all that is needed to get the information that I want.

If you double-click the HTML file in the email you will load it in your default browser locally. You will see a form and a page that resembles the PayPal site.

If you look at the source, you notice that the form action points to http://networkpp.comlu.com/tmp/w.php and not a PayPal domain. Form action means that your input is send to that address when you click the submit button.

The form asks for all kinds of personal and security related information, including your social security number, credit card or debit card number, expiration date, security code, mother’s maiden name and email.

What can you do if you receive an email that you suspect to be a phishing email?

• Ask a tech savvy user to look at it. You can forward the email to the user for instance if necessary.
• Go to the company website manually, look for contact information and call or email support there.
• Analyze the email the way I did. All information you need can be found in the email itself.
• When in doubt do not open. Move the email to a folder for safe-keeping, or delete it outright.

The following list contains tips that help me stay awake in those situations. Remember that I work at home and that some may not be suitable for your situation.

Lets start with the things to do when you are tired and need to overcome that tiredness.

Take a nap

This sounds counter-productive at first, especially if you do not wake up after 20 minutes of power napping. I often lay down on the couch, close my eyes and try to relax. I’m pretty good at waking up at the time that I want to wake up, no need for setting the alarm. If you are a heavy sleeper you may need an alarm, or someone else waking you.

Sometimes I put on my headphones and listen to music, with eyes closed. The music gives me an understanding of the time that has passed since starting the nap.

Drink Coffee, Black Tea, Caffeine, Water

I do not drink coffee or other caffeine containing drinks after five in the afternoon though as I do not sleep well if I overdo it. If you do not care, you could get the much needed boost with a cup of hot coffee.

You may also feel tired because you are dehydrated. Try to drink enough water throughout the day to avoid this from happening.

Chewing Gum

I do not know why, but chewing gum helps me stay awake. Maybe it is because it stimulates face muscles, maybe it is because of something else. If you do not have caffeine around, you may want to try chewing gum instead.

Walk, preferably outside

A short walk, preferably outside, helps me stay awake as well. Sometimes I walk to the nearest market to buy chewing gum (haha). Walking in combination with fresh air and sunlight seems to push away the feeling of tiredness.

If you cannot leave, try tapping your feet or moving your body on the chair. Take a short break to go to the toilet. While there, get some cold water on your hands and face. You can also open a window and stick your head outside for a while to get some fresh air.

Eat something light

Light eating may also revive your body up to a point where you can get through the day without dozing off. Do not eat something with to much sugar though. Nuts, Vegetables like carrots, a wholemeal sandwich with cheese are all things that you can eat.

Talk to someone

If you have someone nearby, start talking to them for a couple minutes. If possible, get up and walk with them while doing the talking.

Turn up the lights, if light is dim

Working in half-darkness or full darkness is not only not good for the eyes, but it can make you sleepy as well. Make sure you work under excellent lighting conditions.

Open a window, change room temperature

You may want to open a window to get fresh air into the room. This can help if the room temperature appears to be to warm, especially if you do not have access to the heating system to adjust the temperature.

I know that this is not the usual article you find here at Ghacks, but please bear with me on this one. To make it better, let me know how you overcome tiredness!

That said, it’s done now and a massive 77 million people have had their personal information exposed.  We still don’t know how much information this includes and what it could be used for.  One thing is for certain, people such as the ‘security expert’ who went on the BBC this week and said if you haven’t seen fraudulent transactions on your credit card yet you’re probably safe, are just idiots.  How quickly do these people think criminals can get through 77 million records?

I thought I’d write up some strategies here to help keep you and your personal information safe online.  Some of these you will be able to implement and some you won’t, but in conjunction they ought to make you safer.

Keep your email and online files password safest

This isn’t just to do with Spam, it’s something I wrote about here a few days ago.  Create yourself a super-strong password (see below for advice on how to do this) that you use only for your email, contacts and anywhere that you store documents online, such as SkyDrive or DropBox.  It’s essential to keep this information safe.  You are being trusted by others with valuable contact information attached to your email account for, sometimes, several hundred other people including their full addresses, mobile phone numbers, dates of birth and more.  This isn’t to mention any personal financial or other sensitive data you’re storing in your online files.

Use different passwords in different places

This isn’t always easy to do as people have trouble remembering passwords so tend to have just one or two.  There’s nothing to stop you writing down a list of passwords in a file on your phone (if you have a code lock on the handset) or at home if you have them in code.  For instance you could have the letter s appended to the beginning of the password.  To any glancing eye it just looks like an extra letter on the code.  You will know that is the password you use for shopping websites.  A g could signify gaming websites and so on.  While remembering passwords might be a pain when away from home and on new computers, your own computer equipment will usually remember the passwords for you.

Create a strong password

The strongest and most secure password follow the same rules…

• Make it at least 10 characters in length
• Use a mixture of Lower and Upper-case letters
• Use numbers (you can substitute some for letters too, 0/o, 1/i/l, 5/s and so on)
• Use symbols (which you can also substitute for letters, $/s, _/L, #/o for instance)
• Do not ever use the following (common words, names, date of birth, the word password)

One thing to note with this is that many websites still won’t allow you to use certain characters (usually *) in passwords.

Never use your banking passwords or PIN

Your banking password and card PIN number are for your banking ONLY.  Do not ever use them on any other service or website!

Minimise the information you share

This can be difficult.  On websites such as social networking it’s easier to do and you should never share…

• Address
• Phone numbers
• Date of Birth

But sometimes, especially in the case of a website you’ll have financial dealings with this is unavoidable as they need your date of birth and address for security.  Go back to my previous rule about different passwords for different websites for this situation then.

If a web service is hacked though any and all information that you share is vulnerable.  If you must give away this information to validate yourself on a website can you remove or change it afterwards?  Will the website’s service still work for you if you later log into your account and either remove the information completely or change it, perhaps by changing the phone number to 12345?

Be careful with usernames and email addresses

You can inadvertantly share useful information in your email address and usernames.  It’s common for someone to append their date or year of birth to these.  Always avoid doing so!

Use online banking

If you use online banking you can keep a much closer eye on transactions on your accounts.  Rather than have to wait up to 30 days for your statement to arrive, online banking will usually show you the most recent transactions whenever you log in.  This is an excellent way to see if someone is fraudulently using your credit or debit cards so that you can inform the bank promptly and have those cards cancelled, minimising the economic effect on you.  Remember it can take the banks a while to refund money to you.

Reduce the surface area for attack

Again this is something I wrote about at the beginning of the week.  Try not to sign up for every website and web service going.  Don’t spread yourself out on the web so far that you’ll never remember where you have accounts.  Keep and eye on your email and junk folder.  Occasionally these websites will send you an email and you can use this as a reminder to go back there and either remove or replace any personal and sensitive information, or preferably, just close the account completely.

Be vigilant

To be honest there’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent a hacking attack such as the one that recently hit Sony.  It could happen to any company at any time, no matter how big or small they are.  The trick is to not have the information that can be exploited avillable to begin with but this is rarely easy in today’s Internet age.  The best advice I can give is simply to be vigilant and aware of what’s going on with your banking and your accounts.  With these simple rules you won’t be completely protected, but you can at least minimise the damage if something does go wrong.

I also thought I’d share with you a couple of photos from my most recent seminar, at the University of York, where we had a charity raffle and raised £165 ($265) for people affected by the terrible tsunami in Japan.  My thanks go out to Microsoft UK for providing such fantastic prizes which included a jacket, mugs, three books and two full copies of Windows 7 Ultimate.

Troubleshooting Windows 7

This first webcast, made for O’Reilly and Microsoft Press is aimed at users of Windows 7 of any ability, right from beginners to intermediate users.

You really don’t have to have any technical knowledge to troubleshoot and repair many problems with Windows 7, and in this webcast, which is 55 minutes long including a ten minute Q&A at the end, I talk you through the tools available, the process of repairing Windows 7, and I also talk about how you can avoid problems occuring in the first instance.

In this video I talk about the tools available in Windows 7 to help you prevent, diagnose and recover from problems quickly and simply. These tools are easy for everyone to use regardless of your technical skill and can save many hours of frustration and wasted money on technical support.

You can view this webcast in full here, but I’ve also broken it down into four smaller parts which you can find on these links. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Advanced Windows 7 Troubleshooting

This second webcast is for intermediate to advanced users and people who use Windows 7 in an enterprise environment.  It deals with many more in-depth troubleshooting tools and utilities including command scripting, powershell and how to export all manner of logs and information from Windows to aid with diagnosing and repairing problems with the operating system.

Despite Windows 7 being the most stable and reliable operating system ever to be released by Microsoft, Windows 7 contains a great many features and tools to help advanced users troubleshoot and repair problems from the common to the complex. In this webcast, Mike Halsey MVP, the author of “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” from Microsoft Press, will talk about these advanced tools, and how you can use them to save time, money and frustration.

This webcast is 48 minutes long and you can view it here.   Again I’ve split it into four smaller parts which you can find on these links.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

I received an email this weekend from someone who was running Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 in a multi-boot system. You might be surprised but this system actually makes it relatively easy to rescue a multi-boot system. But what if you’re running Windows XP or Linux and how would you rescue that?

Identifying the Boot files

On all new Windows systems you’ll find that in order to be able to install an operating system such as Windows XP or Linux, you’ll have to install that before Windows Vista or Windows 7. This is because of the new secure windows boot system. If you right-click on Computer in the Start Menu and select Manage from the context menu that appears you will bring up the Computer Management Console. Here you can click on Disk Management in the left-hand panel to see the hard disks and partitions in your computer.

You should have a 100Mb partition called System Reserved. This is where Windows keeps all its boot information. If you do not have this partition and are running Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server then that boot information will be store on the Windows partition itself (whichever one of these three you installed first). Do note though that this partition might even be on a separate drive to your copy of Windows.

Backing up the Boot files

The best thing to do when everything is working is to create a full backup of this System Reserved partition. If you use the System Image Backup feature in Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 to create a full backup of your copy of Windows then this partition will automatically be backed up and will be restored when you restore that image of Windows (any of them in fact if you have more than one).

You could also use a third-party disk imaging tool such as Symantec Ghost to back up just the System Reserved partition and even though these can be expensive, a search of computer magazine cover disks or a trip to downloads.com should reveal one you can use for free. You should create an image of this boot partition and keep it somewhere safe on your computer.

With this backup should your computer’s boot files become corrupt, simply restoring the System Image backup will reset everything and get your computer operating again.

Manually Backing up and Rebuilding the BCD boot file

I have another video which explains how to manually rebuild the boot files in Windows which you can see here. You could run through this and find that it successfully repairs the boot files. If you follow the instructions to get as far as making a backup copy of the BCD boot file, you can then copy this file out to another safe place on your computer when it’s all working. This means that you can copy it back should it become corrupt.

This method offers no guarantee of repair success but in conjunction with the other BDCEDIT commands I talk about in the video, offers you a fair chance of success at getting your system working again.

Repairing a Multi-Boot Startup

Okay, so let’s assume now that you don’t have one of these backups and your boot files are corrupt, how can you repair them? The only way to do this now is to repair them in order of ageso far as the boot systems go. This means that you should start first with Windows XP or Linux and then do Windows Vista or Windows Server 2003 and Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 last of all.

If you are just using Windows XP and Linux then the XP recovery console will be able to help you rescue your system, but this won’t work if you have Windows Vista or later installed as this introduced a new boot system that’s incompatible with XP and Linux.

You’ll need to reinstall the older OSes (XP or Linux, Yes I know Linux isn’t old, only its boot system!) as these operating systems don’t come with a startup repair system like newer versions of Windows. You can perform a fresh install over the top of your existing copy but do not format the partition. This will copy all your files in XP into a Windows.old folder from which you will be able to recover files and data.

With the newer copies of Windows you can then start by trying Startup repair again though at this point it’s probably not going to work. When time comes to reinstall try formatting the System Reserved partition ONCE and only on the first install. Windows XP and Linux won’t have used it so you can clean it out to start afresh. Then reinstall in the same way as with XP by performing a fresh install over the top of your existing copy without formatting the drive. This will put your old copy of Windows into a Windows.old folder from which you can rescue files.

The first time you install Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 this boot partition will be rebuilt and it will include the relevant information for XP and Linux if you have them installed as well. NOTE this time Windows may put the system reserved partition in a different place and has even been known to put it on other hard drives containing files or data. If this is the case you can move it, and I’ll write this up in a separate article this week.

If you do keep your files and data on a separate hard disk or partition then you can feel free to format the drives or partitions before reinstalling your copies of Windows as this will create nice clean installation for you and should repair any problems with the partition itself.

Conclusions

This isn’t an easy or quick process by any stretch of the imagination, however in the case of dual-boot systems that are either simple or complex, it ought to get you up and running again. Good luck.

Why would you want to do this?  You can commonly find that drivers, services or software in Windows can crash without you even being aware of it.  The only time you find out is later on when you want to perform an action such as print a document, attach to a corporate network or run a piece of bespoke software.  These events can very often be triggered by something the user is doing at the time, perhaps running another piece of software or performing a specific action.

This is where attaching an action to an event becomes useful.  In the Event Viewer in Windows you can launch a program, send an email (if the user has a desktop email client installed) or alert the user to the fact that something has occurred.

It’s very easy to do this to.  Once you’re in the Event Viewer (either through the Computer Management console, the Control Panel or by typing Event into the Start Menu search box) keep double clicking on the event type and the error itself until you get to the screen you see here.

In the right hand panel (highlighted) is an option to attach a task to the event.  It’s here that we’ll find all of our options.  This will pop up a window in which we can define the task.  We can specify whether we want to run a program (more on this in a bit), send an email (for which we’ll need email software installed on the PC) or display a pop-up alert.

When you’re finished you will see an option to display further properties for this task.  You can tick this box for even more control and options.

It’s here that we can specify additional tasks to run and in what order we want things to happen.

I talked a little while ago about running a program.  There are a couple of very useful Command Line and PowerShell utilities that can come in very handy here.  I won’t go into detail on them in this article but they are both well documented on the Microsoft website.

You can run the program CMD.EXE with either the /c switch to carry out a command string and then stop, or the /k switch to continue afterwards (see here for more details on command line switches).  It’s here you can use the WEVTUTIL command to automatically poll the event viewer for data and perform an action such as saving it to the user’s desktop.  This can then immediately be sent to a support person for review.  You can get full information on WEVTUTIL here.

You can also run POWERSHELL.EXE or involve the PowerShell command from the Command Line to automatically generate a System Health Report.  The command you would use here is Get-RmsSystemHealthReport -Path <drive>:\Report [-StartTime <start_time>] [-EndTime <end_time>] -ReportType <report_type>.  Full details of this command can be found here.

Any tasks you add can be viewed and edited in the Windows Task Scheduler and all in all, being able to add actions to events can be a real time-saver when it comes to diagnosing problems in Windows… especially those annoying intermittent ones.