Here’s a quick description of how you can use “Unlocker“,one of my favorite freeware programs, in order to safely remove a USB or external drive whenever Windows refuses to do it. One of the things that I find most annoying about Windows is when I use the “Safely Remove Hardware” function to disconnect a flash →
Disc Space Reporter
Disc Space Reporter is a small program that can provide insight on the files and folders on your hard drive that are taking up most of the physical space. It features a simple user interface that represents file/folder sizes using little bars in the detail view, as well as an overall top ranking of the →
TrueCrypt
TrueCrypt is a free, open source encryption program. It works by mounting an encrypted file as a virtual hard drive and encrypting/decypting all read/write operations on-the-fly. It can also encrypt entire partitions or storage mediums such as USB drives, memory sticks, and floppy disks. This is how this program works:
Selfimage
Selfimage is an open source hard drive imaging utility that can create, compress and restore an image of a hard drive or partition. This is useful for backing up a hard drive as well as restoring it to an earlier state. This program has some really cool features, as follows: Can create an image file of a →
IOBit SmartDefrag
IOBit SmartDefrag is a hard disk defragmenter that can be used to defragment your hard drive on-demand or it can work in the background, continuously degragmenting your hard drive whenever your computer’s resources are available. Depending on your usage, defragmenting your hard drive can be one of the most significant interventions you can do that →
Gmail Drive Shell Extension
Gmail Drive Shell Extension creates a virtual hard drive on your computer that uses your gmail account to store files and folders Very simply, this program creates a hard drive icon in “My Computer” that you can use to store files and folders that (behind the scenes) are actually uploaded as emails into your gmail →
GParted Live CD
GParted Live CD is a powerful full-featured partition management software that can create, resize, check, copy, merge, and destroy partitions, and supports multiple file systems. This is a really good open source partition management software that is very simple and has a self explanatory interface. It can format and perform operations on a all the major →
JDiskReport
JDiskReport is a program that can perform a scan and generate detailed reports on the sizes of files and folders that exist on your hard drive. If you think you know exactly what files and folders occupy the most space on your hard drive you are probably mistaken. JDiskReport is a program that can tell you →
Undelete Plus
Undelete Plus is an award winning free program that can recover deleted files after they have been deleted. It can also wipe files that remain on your hard drive so they cannot be recovered. You are looking for a file all over your hard drive, when it suddenly dawns on you that you had accidentally →
Auslogics Disk Defrag
Auslogic Disk Defrag is a freeware disk defragmentation tool that seems to be significantly faster than Microsoft’s defrag. The Auslogics claim that this program is a very fast disk defragmenter; however, I have not found any figures as to how much faster than defrag this is supposed to be. What I do know, however, is →
CCleaner
CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) removes all sorts of unused files, temp files, cookies, log files, cached files and other files from your computer. This is something that all computer users should do on a regular basis, not just to free up space on the hard drive but for better performace as well. A hard drive cleaner →
