What’s This About?

CyberShredder is a very small portable application whose only purpose is to delete files and folders on your hard disk and remove all traces of the file. It does this by overwriting the file with other characters and changing the file entries in the system file  index.

Why Would You Want It?

When Windows deletes files from your hard disk using the standard delete or cut/paste methods it does not erase all the file details, just the index entry. So the file is still there you just can’t see it. There are plenty of free, portable programs available to recover such files ( see Recuva - Easy and Quick Way to Recover Deleted Photos and Files). Over time the “deleted” file may be overwritten by new files but this could be slow and is a random process. If you need to make sure personal details or other sensitive information is erased, for instance if you want to sell a hardrive or your old computer, then you need a program like CyberShredder.  However see the “Cons” and “What Could Make it Better” sections below.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Securely erases single or multiple files
• Securely erase single or multiple folders
• Uses different methods depending on level of security

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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What’s This About?

Windows Control Panel provides a means to customize settings for when various power saving options are triggered following a set period of “inactivity” (no use of keyboard or mouse). For a Desktop PC (rather than a laptop) these include:

1. Turn Off Monitor
2. Turn Off Hard Disks
3. System Standby
4. System Hibernate

There is also an option to select what happens when the PC power button is pressed.

Optimizing these settings to suit you personal use can bring benefits in saving electricity, reducing wear on hard drives and cutting costs.

This article is part of a series on power saving.

Why Would You Want to Use It?

Whether you run your PC 24/7 or just switch it on for occasional use you can still make a difference to your bills by using these settings. Laptop users will probably be more familiar with power saving as this is a way to reduce the drain on the battery when not connected to the charger. Laptop manufacturers often provide more sophisticated power saving utilities that allow more options to conserve battery power. Windows Vista also has more options than XP.

This article is based on XP and is for Desktops only. Vista is very similar, but with  more comprehensive options in a slightly different interface. The Laptop version of Power Options Properties provides additional tabs and options for when the Laptop is running on batteries or on mains power.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Turns off monitor after a predefined period of inactivity
• Turns off hard disks after a predefined period of inactivity
• System goes to Standby after a predefined period of inactivity
• System Hibernates after a predefined period of inactivity
• Set Power Button action to:
  • Do Nothing
  • Ask
  • Standby
  • Hibernate
  • Shutdown
• Enable Hibernation
• Configure UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Part of standard Windows OS

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Popularity: 19% [?]

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What’s This All About?

Laptops are getting every cheaper, a good quality refurbished or secondhand laptop can be purchased over the Internet from eBay or other reliable websites for very reasonable prices. Loaded with Windows Media Center or Vista they provide an ideal platform having all the basic essentials for your “media playback over TV” needs.

In writing this post I checked on eBay and found that a Laptop with HDMI output can be bought for $500 US or £400 (why do we always pay more in the UK than the same product in the USA?). The fact is you don’t need HDMI and a suitable laptop with a Video, S-Video output will do. If you have a TV that will accept VGA or DVI input even better. A quick search shows suitable secondhand laptops with Video/VGA output connectors are available on eBay today for less than £200 or $250 US.

In the picture above the Laptop is sitting just below the top shelf on top of the Hard Drive recorder box, this setup in my lounge includes Logitech surround sound with remote control and a wireless keyboard with touchpad. The laptop connects to my home network and provides access to videos, music and pictures as well as Internet access. It is all connected to a 42” Panasonic Plasma screen.

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What Is It?

Yesterdays post ( Remove Duplicate Emails and Other Items from MS Outlook with ODIR ) detailed some problems with Outlook duplicating emails if there is a timeout on the Internet connection while downloading your emails from the server. One tip that can help with this problem is to increase the timeout interval for the server connection.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Sets the Server Timeout on a per email account basis

Pros: What’s Good?

• Part of Outlook Account Settings

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Popularity: 14% [?]

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What is This all About?

Most users will think of Windows Explorer (Not Internet Explorer the browser application) as the program they use to access their files. In fact Windows Explore is much more than this, in simple terms it provides the graphical user interface(GUI) between the user and the operating system. It gives access to the all the programs including the control panel and various system utilities such as System Information, System Restore and the Management Console. If Windows Explorer freezes or cashes then you no longer have access to the Windows Taskbar and the Desktop icons amongst other important ways that you interact with your PC to make it do what you need. (Windows Explorer is also referred to as the shell which interacts with the core operating system).

Tip 4 may be the most important Tip as this helps to protect against fatal Windows Explorer crashes

Why Do You Care?

For a multitude of different reasons Windows Explorer may freeze or crash at any time. Windows XP is certainly more stable than earlier Windows operating systems but it still happens, particularly if you load lots of programs and give your PC a heavy workload. This is another reason why it pays to reboot your Windows OS fairly frequently, as the longer he system runs in any one session the more likely it is that it may freeze or crash.

Once Windows Explorer is no longer available then how do you access such things as the Shutdown Menu or your open programs that are still running?

What Can You Do?

First of all, except for the most inexperienced of users of a Windows OS will be familiar with CTL-ALT-DEL (or the 3 finger salute) where you press all 3 keyboard buttons at the same time as an emergency “get out of jail” solution.

By the way – if this doesn’t immediately work give it a minute after which you will need to use the powerswitch or restart button with all the possibilities of loosing data or file corruption. So only ever do this as a last resort!!!!

When you use CTL-ALT-DEL from a User Login/Password system you see the following screen:

(Click on Screenshots to enlarge)

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What Is This About?

Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents contain hidden data in the form of collaborative data such as tracked changes and comments as well as metadata such as as the author, company and editing dates/times for the document. There may be times that it is important that the recipient of your file doesn’t see this information particularly in the work environment but sometimes such information may also be in documents you send privately and could be a problem. This post gives you some details on how to remove or change the data.

Tracked Changes in Word and Excel Documents

2 or 3 years ago there was some headline news where such hidden data had revealed embarrassing or confidential information for companies. Tracked changes and comments may contain commercially sensitive information and metadata may reveal that the document did not originate with the company or author claiming ownership. Even information such as editing time, last edited by and the created/accessed/modified dates may reveal unwanted details. While this may sound a little paranoid I have found information in many documents that clearly the sender would not have wanted me to have.

Metadata in a Word Document (Excel and PowerPoint are Similar)

This post refers mainly to Office XP (2002) and Office 2003 suites. Office 2007 is similar but has a built in tool for removing some of the data.

What Can You Do?

There are 3 simple solutions to the problem.

1. Manually Remove the data from the document

2. Use a utility to remove the data

3. Convert the document to another format such as PDF

1. Manually Remove Data

Open the document in the appropriate program (Word, Excel or PowerPoint). The exact layout of menus, toolbars and options varies with the different programs but the principals are the same.

Properties Metadata

The Properties Metadata can be accessed from the File dropdown and then click on Properties, some of the data can now be manually deleted or edited. To “reset” the editing data create a new file using the Save As option (make sure you save the original first or you may have loose any edited/deleted metadata)

The following screenshot shows how the statistics change when the new file is saved:

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What Is It?

If your Outlook email files become corrupted you may not be able to start Outlook, the program may load slowly or unexpected behaviour or error messages may appear when carrying out operations like moving or deleting emails. What you may not know is that Microsoft provide tools to repair your .pst files (and .ost files for “corporate” Exchange Server setups.

Why Would You Want It?

Quite simply (and obviously ) to repair your email file if they have become corrupted. So if you think your Outlook email has become very slow to startup or is behaving strangely it may be worthwhile trying this solution.

Quite interestingly my Outlook 2003 has been very slow starting up for some time. I thought it was all part of the general slowing down of my XP system which needs to be reinstalled as I reported a short while ago (My Current XP OS is Dying (and Holiday Weekend in the UK)). However yesterday I went to empty the “Deleted Items” folder and got an error message saying

“The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, start Outlook again.”

I duly restarted Outlook but the same error message appeared when I tried to empty the “Deleted Items” folder again. Now, as you may know Outlook has problems if the .pst file becomes too large, there are also problems with deleting large numbers of files, so I first tried reducing the size of the main folder by archiving emails older than 1 Jan 2008. The archive routine duly produced the folder structure in the new archive.pst I created but wouldn’t move the emails. I could manually move the emails by dragging and dropping but couldn’t empty the deleted items folder. At this point Outlook locked up and I had to terminate it in the Task Manager. On restarting it went through the

“The data file ‘Personal Folders’ was not closed properly. The file is being checked for problems.” checking procedure. However this did not fix the problem (another Microsoft annoyance - why doesn’t it check the file properly ), so at this point I decided to use the pst file repair utility .

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Repairs the Outlook email data storage files

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• MS Utility provided with Outlook

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Popularity: 19% [?]

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Or

A Cautionary Tale With a Happy Ending when You Don’t Backup Regularly

The real point of this post is that to not backup your essential and important personal data is often likely to end in disappointment and loss of perhaps your most precious memories in the form of photos and documents. This is one instance where the bullet was dodged.

So What Happened?

I spent this UK bank holiday weekend with my daughter, granddaughter and new grandson. As usual I was asked to do a few DIY jobs and to sort out a couple of things on her computer:)

It all started with trying to fix a simple wireless networking connection issue. The main problem she was having with her PC was connecting the wireless router and had resorted to trailing wires across the living room to connect the router by the network cable. At least this gave the necessary access to the router and to the Internet if needed. Sorting out the router was basically down to setting the router name and password using the web based settings utility rather than the provide GUI based utility on the broadband providers setup CD. Not that the CD utility didn’t work but it was just more difficult than using the web based setup screens. A triumph of creating complication when trying to simplify things for a less knowledgeable user. Reference was made to the web based utility at the end of the instruction book “For Mac Users” so the average windows user would never realise it was there.

So setting up the user access to the router and connecting to the PC all went relatively easily. We had been out earlier that day and my daughter decided to transfer the pictures she had taken to her PC. Apparently at some point this froze and she turned the PC off with the power button. If only she had said something to me first! We could have at least looked at the options of invoking the task manager with Ctl-Alt-Del before going for the doomsday solution. As to whether anything done in setting up the wireless router caused the crash I don’t know, my personal feeling is that so many things get changed by installation of programs, windows updates, etc. that any OS is often only one or two changes away from “meltdown”

Disaster

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What Is This All About?

Yesterday I wrote about the basic things you can do with the Windows Toolbar functionality in the taskbar. Today will tell you about some clever little tips and tricks that allows you to use toolbars to help you get more productive and generally make your computing life a little easie

Today will show you how you can go from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

and a lot more!

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What Is This All About?

Going from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

(OK ignore the wallpaper in terms of this post)

I am sure everyone is familiar with the Windows Quick Launch Toolbar as part of the Taskbar. Dragging and dropping new shortcuts to it, or having them automatically installed as part of setting up a new program. Perhaps even dragging and dropping the icons in the Quick Launch area to get them into some sort of practical order. If you are like me it’s soon full of icons and you can’t remember what program they start so you rely on hovering the mouse cursor to get the tooltip. My own experience is that the tooltips don’t always work or take for ever to appear and it all becomes very frustrating. You want to show text and you can but then there isn’t enough space to get everything in!

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