Downloads Archives - Page 25 of 25

Seagate Seatools – Free utility to test your hard drive for problems

Posted on January 10, 2013

seatools Maintaining a healthy hard drive is essential for protecting your valuable photos, documents and other precious data.

While a having a current backup on hand in case of disaster is an absolute must, performing a thorough diagnostic test of your PC’s hard drive on a regular basis is a great way to find out when (not if) the drive is about to bite the dust and take your data with it.

A great way to keep tabs on your hard drive’s health is to periodically run a high quality diagnostic test on it. The one I use and recommend is Seatools, a free program available directly from the hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technologies. [Read more…]

Take complete control over your Startup process with Autoruns

Posted on January 8, 2013

Microsoft was kind enough to provide a utility called MSCONFIG that allows us to determine and control which programs Windows loads at Startup, but it is woefully lacking.

While MSCONFIG does list a handful of the applications that start up automatically, it doesn’t provide anywhere near a full list of all the independent processes that load into memory with every boot-up and consume precious CPU clock cycles.

Luckily, there is a better much better Windows Startup manager and it is available as a free download. It’s called Autoruns, and it lists virtually every process that loads automatically upon Windows Startup. It also gives a brief description and extra details about many of them, including the exact path to their location on the hard drive. If you see a program or process listed that you don’t want to load with every Windows boot, simply uncheck the box beside it. You’ll find a screenshot below. [Read more…]

Bitdefender Antivirus is now available for free

Posted on January 4, 2013

Bitdefender consistently ranks (and tests) as one of the best antivirus programs on the market. Now, for the first time ever the company has released a free version of their award winning software.

The antivirus software universe is always expanding and a number of the big-name players have offered free versions for quite some time. I guess Bitdefender finally decided the time was right to offer one of their own.

If you want to download Bitdefender and give it a try you’ll find it at www.bitdefender.com/solutions/free.html.

Ditto – a great Windows Clipboard replacement

Posted on December 31, 2012

ditto For me, one of the biggest annoyances of Microsoft Windows has always been the Clipboard utility. Well, it has for me at least.

Why? Because it can only remember the contents of the last “Copy” or “Cut” and if the computer crashes or gets shut down for any reason, whatever is on the Clipboard at the time is lost forever. If you do a lot of Copying, Cutting and Pasting like I do that gets really old in a hurry.

There are a number of good Clipboard replacement programs out there, but the one I like the best is called Ditto. This little gem runs as a stand alone program. It runs in the background, waiting patiently for you to call it up by clicking on its icon in the System Tray. I’m pretty picky about which programs I allow to load automatically every time Windows boots up, and this is one of them. [Read more…]

Explore the universe in 3D with Celestia

Posted on December 27, 2012

Do you enjoy learning about the universe and exploring the wonders of space? How about visiting a planetarium for an up close and personal tour of the night sky? If so, you’ll love a free program called Celestia!

Celestia brings the known universe right to your computer screen with amazing animations and “tours” that will keep you spellbound for hours.

You can also choose to go directly to the heavenly body of your choice or “travel” from the solar system to over 100,000 stars and even beyond the Milky Way!

After downloading and installing Celestia, I recommend starting your journey by running the Demo (Simply click “Help” followed by “Run Demo”).

You’ll find links to Celestia’s documentation and the download page right here.