Prevent erased data from being recovered with DriveScrubber
Your PC is home to a wealth of personal and sensitive information, especially if it’s used on a daily basis. You may empty your recycling bin, but this does not completely remove all elements of discarded files and folders. Your computer will still store remnants of removed items, some of which can be recycled and recovered. As your computer is home to so much personal information, such as online passwords and bank details, it’s important that you can permanently erase drive content when needed.
Iolo DriveScrubber enables you to not erase whole drives but you can also use it to remove all traces of previous deleted data, whilst leaving folder and files and, most importantly, your operating system intact. You can also use it to remove malware or infection from spyware, keeping your drive in optimum condition.
Designing your homepage isn't that easy. There are various online tools that will enable you to produce a quick site, but more often than not, these design tools will require you to host the site, rather than enable you to host it on your own server. Move across to a Mac and you'll soon find there are a range of tools that are supplied with a collection of pre-defined templates, so you can get your site online as quickly as possible. You just need to drop in the text, graphics and other components.
If you've never worked as a project manager, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you do not need a management tool to control your projects, schedule tasks or control costs. You probably think you can do it in your head. However, everyone has their own agenda, so it's very easy for your project to spiral out of control, move in the wrong direction, miss initial goals and to end up costing more than you originally expected.
Take your laptop on the road, connect to a wireless network whilst you're waiting for your train and you may be forgiven for browsing your regular sites, accessing your email and writing other personal correspondence. The problem is that the person who owns this wireless network could, in theory, access the traffic from those connected to this network. Unlikely, but it could happen. There's also the chance that people could attempt to sniff traffic accessing wireless networks if they are serious hackers.
At work we often
have routines or perform similar tasks on a daily basis, even when using a
computer we tend to have routines. Some tasks we perform can be incredibly laborious
but they may also be necessary, so is it possible to shorten the time it takes
to complete some repetitive tasks? An automation tool for instance could
benefit you work routine, by helping you copy and paste text or replying to
multiple emails all with a simple key combination. 
Keeping your PC free
of glitches is crucial for preventing problems escalating into potential
disasters. The trouble is we often find something more important to do than
pro-actively check our system for faults, even though most are easily
corrected. A good solution for many would be maintenance and diagnostic suite that
would help to identify current problems, but also protect you from any
potential threats too. 
Although your bookmarks are convenient, if you have a large number of bookmarks, in various sub-folders, finding the correct bookmark isn't always so easy. Opera has a neat feature which enables you to set up a speed dial function, so when you open a new tab, you're presented with a number of your favourite websites, as mini images, which enables you to quickly click on an image an open within your browser.
We've featured 
If, like us, you're a big fan of Dreamweaver and tend to use it daily to produce work for clients or even to edit your own homepage, you were probably quick to upgrade to Dreamweaver CS3, on release. We did, but primarily because it was required after an upgrade to Windows Vista. In hindsight, apart from an 'upgrade' to support Vista, there were few compelling reasons to upgrade. Even fewer reasons if you were a Mac Dreamweaver-based developer.
We've always been big fans of the 'old' Macromedia Fireworks, using it from the late 90s when it was tied to Dreamweaver and was designed as a tool to edit images you placed on your site. It's such a simple package for editing and creating graphics for a web page. We use it daily to produce graphics for both our disc and online work. As it's the same on both the PC and Mac, it means that there's no learning of a new product when we need to make quick online changes.
Defragmenting your hard drive can be frustrating, there’s never a convenient time to do it. Many of us will simply buy or download a defragmentation application, then let it go to work on our machine. We know is ‘cleaning’ our hard disk, but what is it doing with these files, where do they go? 
Managing your audio files should be pretty straight forward, but from time-to-time you can get caught out with file formats. Not all MP3 players play different formats, and some are restricted to particular types of compression. You may need to heavily compress your audio files to fit them on to your player, or you may want to listen to them at the highest quality available. Wouldn’t it be preferable to use a more versatile media player that gives you these options? 
Install an Windows-based operating system and it won't be optimised for your PC. For instance, the various network settings won't recognise the type of Internet connection, nor will the graphic drivers be tweaked for your graphics card. Of course, you can manually tweak and optimise your drivers, OS and other settings. For instance, it's relatively easy to download an application to manage your network connection or optimise your hard drive.
If you own an iPod and wonder what you could do with it, apart from storing and playing back your music, you could easily turn it in to an external hard drive and use it as a portable device for your applications. A couple of years ago, the guys over at PortableApps produced a suite of portable applications, so you could install a suite on to your removable drive and then take the app collection on the road. Better still, any data or preferences written to the drive, remains on the drive and not the host computer.
The Internet can be overwhelming when researching a particular subject and you may come across hundreds of websites, pages or blogs on a particular subject matter. Ok it’s great for referring to, but how many of us have the time to sift through that amount of information? Another problem is remembering links and web addresses of numerous sites, it’s almost impossible unless you jot them down. It would be much easier to grab links, build up a database and browse them at a later date. 
Before email the standard form of business communication was via fax, and sending them was often convoluted and time consuming. Transferring documents has since become easier however, because there are numerous file formats depending on your word processor, compatibility can still be an issue. Now PDF files have become the universal file format for viewing business documents and other information. 
It is not
uncommon to forget passwords and other online information, let’s face it; many
of us have a number of passwords for different sites such as eBay, Hotmail or
Facebook. The trouble is, it’s not safe to write them down or even save the
information on you’re computer and if someone has access to your computer they
then have all your personal information. It would be far easier if your
information could be securely stored, but still accessible for online forms
when you browse the web. 
Instant messaging,
apart from actually speaking to someone directly or on the phone, is one of the
easiest ways of communicating with friends, family or work colleagues. Some IM
clients are aimed at younger audiences, but there are more business orientated
applications available, which are extremely useful for communicating with
colleagues within a workplace. It’s an easy to use system and almost
instantaneous, so there’s no need to wait on undelivered emails. 
Backing up data to CD or DVD isn't a task many of us enjoy. What's the point? The disc is soon out of date, so you'd probably back to burn data to a disc once a week, or more, to make backing up your data, worthwhile. Most of us do not realise that we're given free web space when we sign up to broadband, so there's no reason we can't use this to backup our most important files and other data.
Working for a large organisation means you'll also have to abide by their rules and regulations. These often stipulate that you can't use your work email for personal matters, such as trying to organise a vacation. The problem is, you can't install another email client and you can't keep opening your browser to check whether you have received new email.
Those of us who
use the Internet have used portals such as YouTube, whether to find humorous video
clips, music videos or reminisce over old television programs. Many of us that
have used online portals often use them for particular footage and we tend to
have favourite clips. So, rather than searching through numerous sites for
similar videos, wouldn’t an application that does this for you save time? 
Look through our most popular downloaded software and it's dominated by security software. For a good reason: these titles have proved to be the most successful within their field, over a period of time. It's been a long time coming, but the major update to Ad-Aware has been made available and it's finally available to download.
If you use an Apple Mac for serious work, you'll know that Expose is one of the better new technologies that was recently added to the operating system. It enables you to quickly show open applications and windows, then select the window you want to bring to the front by simply pointing to the open window. Windows Vista enables you to scroll through open applications, but if you have a fair few windows on screen, it takes longer to find the open window than using the Mac Expose.
Like anyone else, you'll spend time installing and testing new software. That's fine, as we all want to see if there's better software than our current installed application. However, if you install and remove over a period of time, we'll soon find our system slows, takes longer to boot, applications are more sluggish and we wonder what we can do to make our system perform like it did when we first bought our PC. It's not a hardware issue, it's simply our Registry cluttered with irrelevant information which means our PC takes longer to find the relevant information.
If you want to share media with other users, the wisest solution would be to archive the files and then provide them for download on your homepage. However, ZIP up large JPEG photos and you'll soon realise your free 50MB homepage isn't that extensive, after all. The problem isn't your archive, it's the compression chosen to compress your media files. ZIP is antiquated technology and wasn't designed to get the most from modern media files. You can compress modern files more effectively with a more recent compression format.
Earlier today we discussed designing your own artwork, if you're a software developer. We mentioned that you could use Quark to do this, but it's rather expensive and not suited to a novice designer. However, we completely forgot to mention that we have a full commercial download that will enable you to design your own artwork, newsletters, invitations, documents and more.
If you're like me, you'll love to download and test the latest software. However, whilst 99.9% of commercial software is problem free, security developers would have us think that any potential software - even from commercial brands - has a potential trojan, virus or other issue that could affect your PC. Of course they're going to make you worried. They want to sell you security software.
Backup applications are fine if you can find and select the files you want to backup. The problem is, most users have no idea how applications such as Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird store their preferences. Where are the bookmarks located, for example? The problem is that we spend ages configuring applications such as our browser and email client and we won't want to lose this information.
We've been blogging about 
As an ex-software developer, designing covers for software wasn't always easy. The printer will send through the spec of how you need to design your artwork and you'd need to master Quark or InDesign to layout the document. If you then needed to switch between different commercial printers, you'd have to make tweaks to the master document. For most developers, this isn't their specialist area, so they'd have to pay for an artist or layout designer to produce their artwork.
I'm generally fairly wary of applications that claim they can synchronise files across your computers or via the Internet. Frankly, they rarely work as they should. Throw in different operating systems in to the mix and you'll find it's difficult to synchronise your PC documents to your Mac and vice-versa.
Chat with friends and family via an instant messenger or other video-based client and it's the same old video chat that can make you look rather formal, boring and unexciting. There are times when you might want to spice up the chat and add a bit of fun to the video call. For instance, if your nephew is on the other side of the world, celebrating his 10th birthday, it would be ideal if you could set up a video call with a birthday theme, which will appear as if you're holding a party on his behalf, at home.
Many people have
programs or utilities they prefer to use, especially if they work with
computers on daily basis. Some small utilities make certain tasks far easier if
you are used to doing things within certain applications. The trouble is, there
may be the odd occasion where you may have to use a different computer, and working
from a machine without your favourite apps could hamper your work rate. Unless
of course, you keep portable versions of your favourite applications on a portable
drive so you can take them with you. 
There are various
applications available to help you create websites, but many of them still
require you to have a basic knowledge of building web sites or pages. However,
if you have no understanding of how websites are put together, but you want to
create your own site, is there a solution? Luckily, some website builders
enable you to create sites by dragging and dropping text and images into pre
defined templates, providing numerous options for colour and layout so the
finished article could look completely different to the initial template. 
Even with a fast
broadband connection, downloads can sometimes seem painfully slow. However,
with the right download manager, it’s possible to increase download speeds
without changing your broadband connection. Multi-threaded download managers split
files into several parts, or sometimes download from multiple sources simultaneously.
Using such an application will also enable you to schedule, monitor and resume
broken downloads, amongst other helpful features. 
Importing audio
files and adding them to your audio library isn’t always straightforward,
especially if you’re extracting from an analogue source. Rare or original recordings
over a certain age would not have been recorded digitally, and some recordings
may still only be available in analogue formats. If you do have original, live
or rare recording, how do you add them to your library and make them more accessible?
Most of us are
familiar with, or have used an online chat service such as Live Messenger. It
seems we cannot get enough of communicating with our friends and family,
especially if it’s free. Even the social networking community Facebook has now incorporated
the facility to chat amongst online friends. The trouble is, communicating in
this way can often be tedious, and it’s difficult to communicate with
more multiple users simultaneously. 
When moving
folders and files, it’s frustrating when you come across a ‘locked’ file which
cannot be deleted or moved. You may be required to shutdown or restart your
computer, the file then becomes free again, but restarting your machine time and
again just to organise files can be extremely laborious. It
would be handy if these files could remain free or unlocked at all times, after
all, moving files shouldn’t be that difficult. 
People have very
different ideas of what a good game is, but most of us recognise good graphics
when we see them. It seems though that’s all alot of modern games have to offer, so how
did computer games in the past become so successful and are still recognised
today? Classic games such as Tetris were not reliant on graphics, but game play, and
like many other games from the past it was the original idea and addictive game
play that made it a huge success. 
