Only the pointer to the file is deleted when you opt to delete a file in windows. The whole file still exists on your harddisk and its possible to recover it using the right tools. You probably have some files where you want to make sure that the file is deleted and not recoverable at all.
There are occasions where you probably want to run a different os without really installing it. If you are running windows you probably would like to refresh your linux skills but dislike the idea of installing it on one of your partitions. The guys at wolphination explain an easy way to run on os inside your real os.
A friend of mine moved to a new house and had to change his internet provider as well. The room with the computer and the one with the phone line were not close to each other and he decided to buy a wireless lan router and use it to connect to the internet.
We had to do a scan of the surroundings of course and found lots of unsecured wireless lan networks. I don´t know why people keep these unsecured, maybe its laziness, maybe they simply don´t know the risks involved. Its like leaving your doors open when you leave your house. Lots of things can happen..
Its late at night and I can´t sleep, I thought i try this complete list of all windows xp command line tools and parameters to finally fall asleep but even that is not working tonight.
Those crazy japanese again. I´am not sure why I love them that much but it probably has something to do with the fact that they are always good for a suprise (or two). I never thought they would use different smileys until I found this japanese smileys website.
If you are new to firefox and have been using internet explorer or opera before you might find some of the concepts of firefox confusing at first glance. The Firefox Tweak Guide explains most firefox options in detail and is a great asset for every new (and probably even some older) firefox users.
Now this article over at tomshardware.com comes in handy. I told you yesterday how to encrypt your hard drives with the great true crypt freeware and recommended that everything would be encrypted and the system would be booted from usb.
Only a few days ago I wrote a first small article about true crypt and recommended it. Back then I bought a usb 2.0 hard drive with 300 GB capacity and encrypted its entire partition with true crypt. This was done to test the programs functionality but also to see if it would slow down my main computer (athlon 64 3000+, 1 gb ram).
To my great suprise it did not slow down the pc and I decided to expand the encryption to cover all my hard drives. Let me tell you why and how i did this and why you should also be considering this.
The people over at comcast have written a free troubleshooting guide for windows xp systems. There is of course no 100% fool proof way to fix a windows xp system, the problems that can occur are manifold and no article can ever deal with every possible error.
Astalavista Security Group have a beta page up that lists top freeware software products in various categories including Data Recovery, Anti Virus-Tools, Firewall and IDS and Anti-Spyware. The list contains some of the freeware tools that I already wrote about but also some new ones that might interest you.
I published a large file host list last month and good lots of positive and some negative feedback concerning the list. The list contained a lot of sites that allow users to upload free files to their website and share it with others. A negative aspect was that it only featured a few categories that were not that useful to find a host that suited special needs.
Every know and then I accidentally delete files and later find out that I still need them. I configured my trashcan to hold no files at all, means files that I delete are gone by normal means and can´t be recovered that easily.
You probably wondered why google is giving you two gigabytes of space for your gmail account. The reason could be pretty simply, no one will ever use those two gigs anyway. Even if you recieve lots of emails including attachments you´d need years to fill the space.
Some clever folks came up with an idea on how to use the empty space of your google account. The answer: Use it as online storage..
Taskbar++ is a software that allows you to sort (move) the buttons of the Windows taskbar by Drag & Drop. It´s for the people who care about the buttons' position such as "Mailer is the leftmost!!", "Internet Explorer is next to Explorer", and so on.
It´s been a time that I reviewed a game at ghacks. Mono is a freeware game that deserves to be mentioned here. It has a nice gameplay, great music and the most important part, it is fun to play.
It can be described as a arcade shooter. Your goal is to change the color of the background from white to black / black to white by shooting at colored circles that leave traces of their color on the background and part into two smaller circles of the same color.
I thought about encrypting my hard disks, or at least part of them that contain personal data, for at least one year. I never did it because I thought it would be a lot of work involved. I had to find a good program, one that would offer good encryption algorithms, would be free and easy to use.
Never thought this would be possible but it seems it is. The following site offers movies scenes in ascii format. Movies include Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, the Matrix and lots more. Detail level is amazing and you can select font size as well ranging from 1 to 12. My 1024*768 was not big enough for the large numbers but the movies look great even in a small size like 2.
I do a lot of signups for example on webmaster forums and sites that require you to be registered to view the content. Its a tedious task to enter the information that are required by hand. You often have to add more information but the username and password, name and location for instance.
Auto It is able to help you fill those fields automatically, but not only that. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks. AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting.
Everton Blair over at connectedinternet.co.uk wrote a nice beginners guide on how to increase the speed of your windows xp operating system.
I wrote an article about living without the music industry a month ago. In this article I added some good sites that offered free musik downloads. Lots of people replied to this article and added more sites that they used to get free music. Free, meaning free of charges and free to download without breaking the law.
Seems to be the time of the year where not only the nights but also the titles of my blog become longer and longer. I found something useful for all of you. I had the problem that some of my beloved firefox extensions would not work with firefox 1.5 until they were updated by the extensions programmers.
After a lot of people told me that I forgot one of the best anti-virus freeware products out there I decided to take a look at Clam Win to get a better judgement on the claims made. The good thing besides that its free is that it´s also Open Source which makes it more transparent than the rest of the free antivirus programs.
Everyone who has to work with different computers has enountered a problem like this. The bookmarks are different because you have no possiblity to synchronise them. It could be that you have a desktop pc and a laptop and want to use the same bookmarks wether you are using the notebook or the desktop computer.
Pc Magazine wrote a article with such a long title that I had to cut it to make it fit, the article "Maximum Security: 94 Essential Tips for Staying Safe" has some useful tips for everyone that wants to have a secure as possible computer. They divided the article into several categories, system, networking and wireless, e-mail, Web surfing, malware, and mobile.
You´d probably heard this before. Everyone should secure his personal computer. You read stories like this in every other computer mag, your geeky friends probably tell you the same and even name some programs that you should use because they are the best and most secure. I know that you would like to have a secure computer, well a secured computer, there is nothing like 100% security if you are on a network or the internet. Keep that in mind.
Programs can be loaded at startup of your windows machine, this is called autostart. There are unfortunately numerous places in windows that allow programs to be added to the autostart. The tool Autoruns 8.4 from sysinternals.com lists all known autostart places and programs that use this location to autostart.
Did you ever ask yourself if your firewall is secure enough for your internet activities ? The major concern nowadays is related to pieces of software installed in your computer which may contact and exchange information with the outside World without being authorized and noticed by you.
I always was angered at the fact that I had no possibility to watch certain series and movies in my country while they were highly successful in another. I also dislike the fact that I can´t watch big sportevents live on tv but only recieve a minimal report in the news at that day.
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware.
I still remember my first arcade video game, it was xevious, a vertical scrolling shoot em up game with great graphics and playability. I spend most of my money on that game and had some trouble with my parents because of this.
In case you have not heard about it yet, Nmap is quite simply the best network security scanner around. To top it off, it’s free and even open source. While Nmap is designed primarily for use with *NIX systems, there is an excellent Windows version as well, sadly without the graphical interface NmapFE that is available for *NIX users. WiNmap now provides Nmap with a new face for Windows users.
VIEWTCP is a free network monitoring tool by MicroWorld that examines TCP/IP activity on your Windows-based systems. This free utility lists all TCP and UDP endpoints on your PC, including the remote address (along with Domain name of the remote address) and state of TCP connections.
WinHTTrack is an easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide website from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting html, images, and other files from the server to your computer.
This has been around for some time now but its possible that some of you have not heard of it yet. I found a site through digg.com that has a neat list of 40000 entries that you could partially or fully add to your windows host list and prevent ads from those 40000 hosts to be shown on your system, ever again.
HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor and an integrated development environment designed to help HTML, XHTML, XML and script authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Newcomers to web page development can benefit from letting it point out errors and provide suggestions on how to create standards compliant pages.
Its always a good idea to have some web proxies at hand. You can use them to hide your own ip when you navigate to a site that should not have your IP in their logs. You can use them to
bypass web restrictions / censorship from schools, universities and business and also use them if your country is one of those that likes to prevent its people from collection information on their own.
Picmv is a freeware image viewer that also features image management functions. It was specifically designed to work well with digital cameras but also works great as an image viewer with tumbnail display. It features an advanced search function which is helpful if you have a large image archive, its also able to sort the images using lots of parameters like time, color, ratio, how many times it was viewed, pixel number and more. I suggest you take a look at this beauty if you have lots of images or own a digital camera.
I loved playing Quake and Quake II, it was a great game that was lots of fun. I enjoyed playing the game with my friends using serial connections back then. To my great suprise someone is porting Quake II to todays graphics standards, the gfx already look extremely good.
If you are looking for an alternative to the windows xp build in unpacker you might want to take a look at 7-Zip. I was always looking for an unpacker besided the big two Winrar and Winzip who are both not free, after some researching I found 7-Zip which handles the most used file formats like zip and rar without problems.
Finally, after a very long time, Daemon Tools 4 has been released. For those who never heard about this fine piece of freeware, it could be best described as a cd and dvd drive emulation software. It simulates up to four additional cd or dvd drives connected to your pc and uses cd or dvd images on your hard disk that contain the cd or dvd content.
