All PC Tips

For those who have been working on a desktop computer for a long time and switched to laptops, the major problem is getting adjusted with the smaller keyboard. Another problem is when typing on the laptop keyboard, the thumb sometimes touches the keypad and the cursor moves to another space.

This problem usually goes away with experience. More experienced laptop users do not face this issue, as they get adjusted to the new keyboard layout over time.

However, TouchFreeze is a free utility that can be used to freeze and activate touch pad automatically. If TouchFreeze is installed, it automatically freezes the touchpad and when you stop typing, it will automatically enable the touch pad again. To download TouchFreeze goto  http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/downloads/list

Have you ever wondered how to cut and and extract a portion of the video from a large video file, CD, DVD and other video formats. Video Cutter software allows you to do just that.

Free Video Cutter is a free video utility to help you to cut and split your video files into small size you can use it as a "video cutter", "video splitter" or "video clipper". Program can work with most video formats, such as MPEG 1/2, MPEG4, DivX, Xvid, AVI, WMV, Quicktime MOV, Flash video and more, the output video can have a good video quality.

You dont have to have any professional IT stills, knowledge about all kinds of video formats, it is so easy to use.

Media files both audio and video files are available in the internet. The problem with these files is that there are many different file formats. VLC is a program that can convert video and audio files that are suitable for your IPod and IPod Touch and IPhone. VLC can also convert and split CD and DVDs into smaller files. You can download from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.

VLC is capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac …) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Ninite is an all in one installer. Imagine you just installed a new OS in your computer. You will then need to install all the applications one by one. You can either do it one by one or use Ninite to pick all the software you want to install and let Ninite handle the installation. It will just run in the background and install all the selected applications with default settings. Even if your computer is not new you can still find a few applications from the list and install with ease.

Yes it is that easy. It is available at http://ninite.com/

AdAware is one of the popular anti spyware programs. Recently it launched version 8.1.1. IT works on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 2000. It only needs 98198 Kb space to function. Harddisk space of 100MN and processor speed higher than 600 MHz. Last week its website announced that so far there has been more than 400 million downloads. It is provided by http://www.lavasoft.com/.  You can download the free version from http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

Many companies provide freeware and open source applications that can be downloaded freely on the internet. We find them from other friends or while browsing the internet. Then we download and install in our computers. But usually we forget about them after one or two months and stop using them.

After a few years, our computers are full of such ‘so called useful’ programs which we use very rarely. Sometimes when we uninstall them, they leave a few registries and files which are no longer useful. Therefore we need a special program to remove them and also to review other installed programs and uninstall those that we no longer use.

Doing this will increase the performance of the computer and increase the speed. ‘Absolute Uninstaller’ does just that. Even though this does similar job of ‘Add/Remove’ programs, it is more effective in uninstalling. Such as removing related registries, related desktop icons, start menu entries etc. It also searches for related files that belong to the application and removes them.  You can find the ‘Absolute Uninstaller’ at http://www.glarysoft.com 

You may also find other freeware applications there that might be of help.

Recuva is a free file recovery software that can be downloaded from http://www.piriform.com/recuva.

Has your computer crashed? Have you lost some files? Have you by mistake deleted some important files. Have you emptied the recycle bin accidentally and lost some important files? Then Recuva can be of help to you. If on the other hand you want to safely delete the file permanently that should not be recovered anymore, Recuva can be of help again.

Features of Recuva are as follows:

• Undelete files on your computer
• Recovery from damaged or formatted disks
• Recover deleted emails
• Recover deleted iPod music
• Restore unsaved Word documents
• Deep Scan
• Securely delete files you want to erase forever
• Portable version
• Full Windows OS support and many languages

Super Anti Spyware Online Safe Scan helps to remove Spyware, Adware, Malware, Trojans, KeyLoggers, Dialers, Hi-Jackers, and Worms from your computer. It is a free application that can be downloaded from http://www.superantispyware.com/onlinescan.html. You can just copy it to your flash drive and carry it with you if you need to scan many computers. This software is free for personal use and there is a licensed version for corporate use.

Malware programs and spyware programs that spy on your computer can be easily scanned and removed using this software. One of the advantages of this software is that it provides automatic update of the spyware definition updates. So when there is a new spyware program detected it is added to the scan list.

Easiclean is another registry cleaner software. This utility has the following features.

• Finds invalid registry entries —-> deleting them speeds up your computer!
• Finds duplicate files —-> deleting them will free disk space!
• Finds all unnecessary files like backups, temps etc. —-> deleting them will free disk space!
• Finds all invalid shortcuts —-> deleting them will free disk space and increase usability!
• Manage programs starting at Windows startup! —-> who knows, you might even catch a virus before it gets serious!
• Manage Windows add/remove software listing!
• Easily remove Internet Explorer’s temporary Internet files, history and cookies!

You can download this free program at http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm.