Choice is good, most of the time at least but to much choice can also lead to confusion. I’m talking about five applications that practically perform the same operation or a tool that can delete files securely using one of fourteen different algorithms. It’s not really that easy for inexperienced users - and probably even most of the experienced computer users - to find the best algorithm for a task.

Wipe Disk and Wipe Files (via Download Squad) are two applications that can delete disks and partitions or files securely so that they cannot be recovered by normal means. Normal means are those typical file recovery applications like Recuva.

Both applications are available in different languages which can be changed in the Extras > Language menu. The default language of both applications is German. Both are pretty straightforward. A disk, file or directory is added to the queue and one of the fourteen algorithms is selected that delete the data securely.

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The Zip format is probably still the most used and known format to pack files. Corrupt zip files cannot be extracted usually displaying the message that the file is not a valid archive. Most corrupt files can be repaired if the corruption was caused by an interrupted download or incomplete upload. Those are probably the most likely cases for zip file corruption with hard disk errors as a third possibility.

Zip Repair is an easy to use software that tries to repair corrupt zip files. The user needs to provide the location of the corrupt zip file and may select a new name for the recovered version or keep the automatic suggestion.

A list of repaired files will be shown in the next step which are the files that can be extracted from the new zip archive that gets created. The last step lists the amount of files that have been repaired. The last step would be to extract the files from the newly created zip archive.

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One of the first settings that I change after installing Windows on a new computer is the creation of those thumbs.db files that get automatically created by Windows. The thumbs.db file contains small thumbs of many popular image formats in the directory which is both a privacy risk and a performance drain. The files are created for the thumbnail view in Windows Explorer and a file will be created if the thumbnail view is picked from the available views.

Each image is represented as a jpg image in the thumbs.db file which makes it relatively easy to extract those images again. The thumbnails are stored in a centralized location in Windows Vista with the name thumbcache_xxx.db where xxx is a number between 1 and 999. That folder is located at %sysroot%\Users\Owner\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer.

A flexible small tool that can extract all images from thumbs.db files is Thumbs Extract. It’s a command line utility and the command is ThumbsExtract.exe path to thumbs.db, for example ThumbsExtract.exe c:\thumbs.db if the file is located on the c:\ drive.

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Open Office recently pushed 3.0 as a beta release.

It’s a bit slower the 2.4, it’s got a nice new start centre, an icon refresh, a zoom control on the status bar and is now capable of supporting extensions to increase functionality.

To be honest I can’t say there are a great many useful downloads available at the moment, but some of them would be pretty handy if you use Open Office on a regular basis:

Professional Template Pack
A collection of elements to create your own professional style templates for documents, forms and presentations

Sun Web Blog Publisher
Microsoft Word 2007 comes with some impressive blogging capabilities, but now Writer can too. This extension supports “many popular blog services’”, so having not used it I can’t guarantee it’ll work for yours, but give it a try and see.

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Password protecting the Bios is considered a weak protection, something that professionals can find out or reset in no time. Besides the obvious possibilities to set a jumper or remove the bios battery to reset the bios password it is also possible to reveal or reset the bios password by using a software like CmosPwd which is available for Windows, DOS and Linux.

Most users will probably run the application in Windows. To do that they need to access the command line and install a driver that gives “direct port I/O access for specified ports to user-mode process (ring 3) using Ke386SetIoAccessMap and Ke386IoSetAccessProcess kernel functions.” The driver is located in the Windows directory of the software package after unzipping it to the computer.

The command ioperm.exe -i is used to install the driver which can be uninstalled with ioperm.exe -u after the bios password has been revealed. Once the driver is installed the bios password can be revealed with the command Cmospwd_win.exe which displays a list similar to the one below.

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