Before I start telling you about the software, I want to share with you a solution to a problem I am sure we have all had at one time or another. I am sure, like me, you have visited an internet web page and became interested enough in the article to want to print it. Like me, I am sure there were only parts we wished to print but we end up having to print the whole page. That is now a thing of the past. Simply put, go to www.printwhatyoulike.com and enter the URL and press start. The web page will now load. On the left side of the page you will see a box with various options. Also, you will notice that on the web page now you will see red borders around which change when you move the mouse over them. If you know what you just want to print then click on this highlighted box and you will be shown a menu where you can either isolate remove etc. If this box contains exactly what you want to print then choose isolate. The other way would be to click on all the boxes in turn you didn’t want and choose remove each time until you have what you want. Then choose print from the box on the left and that will be that. Why not try it out on this blog page, highlight a picture isolate, and print. If you like this then add it to your bookmark toolbar so then on your webpage click on the printwhatyoulike icon on the toolbar. There is another web page which comes from the same stable and is called pagezipper. This can also be found on the printwhatyoulike home page. This will allow you have one continuous page if the web page you are on has more than one page. This stops you having to keep clicking next page all the time. Again, this can be bookmarked to the bookmark toolbar.
Ok, now onto those helpful programs…..
First up is 360Amigo and is a system speedup program. Lots of tools to sort out your pc problems. This first screenshot is the main page:
From this screen you can see all the various options and in the following screenshots we will go through them.
Under the System Cleaner tab you can see we can either sort out our junk files, clean the registry or do a smart defrag or even a system restore.
Here, under the System Optimizer tab you can again see our various options. Of particular interest is the service manager shown here:
Usually we can not uninstall service items except from the program itself and then not always. With this program we can uninstall a specific service.
This is the tools tab and you can see we have a plethora of tools to assist us in speeding up our computers. Most are self explanatory.
Here, I have selected the empty folder tool and run the analyser. All the folders shown are empty, probably left behind after uninstalling programs. All I would need to do now would be to tick the boxes and click the remove tab.
The next program is BleachBit. This program allows you to clean specific portions of your software like cookies from your browser. This screenshot shows that I have identified Internet Explorer, System and Paint to clean up.
As you can see I have chosen specific items to delete.
Here you can see that after clicking delete it has deleted the clicked items(4764 items) in the previous picture and recovered 11.3GB of disk space.
Everyone needs to be secure when surfing on the internet and it makes sense to have an internet security software running to protect you. There are several paid for programs which do the job and some very good free ones. One of the best free ones I have seen and test is Agnitum. It is a very clean looking and professional program and under testing worked very well. The thing I like about it is that it learns from your actions what should and shouldn’t run. Here are two screenshots:
As you can see it covers everything you might need.
From this screenshot you can see that it is monitoring the programs which are accessing the internet at the moment.
For those who are interested in knowing what is happening with their Hard Disk Drives (HDD), then the following program Hddscan is for you. Here are two screenshots:
Once you have selected which drive you want to look at you will now get the following information.
Here you can see loads of information. You can see that there is quite a lot of information about air flow and temperature which will give you an early warning of possible problems later so that you can rectify these before serious problems with the drive.
There are quite a few free program uninstallers around but this one seems to do what others cannot or do not do. It is called Iobituninstaller. The following screenshots should help to explain more about what is different:
Here you can see how clean the interface is.
In this screenshot you can see what makes this program different, you can select more than one program to uninstall rather than just do one at a time and making it rather tedious. Although you select more than one program at a time it uninstalls them sequentially. That is, one after the other but that is not all as can be seen from the following screenshots.
As you can see from this screenshot, the first thing it does is create a system restore point, just in case something goes wrong. It then runs the built-in uninstaller and finally a powerful scan to find any remaining leftover items.
This is the advanced uninstall and you can see what has been left over from the built-in uninstaller, not only folders but registry entries. All you need to do is tick the boxes and select delete.
One real worry about running a computer with internet access is that there are some really nasty people out there who want to do you harm by either stealing your identity, your bank details or even worse. The real problem is that they install software on your computer deep inside the operating system, far away from where most anti-virus or anti-malware programs can find them. The programs they install are called rootkits, they are nasty little buggers. This program can go search and find these rootkit software and it is called Novirusthanks. Here is a screenshot,
All you need to do is click the scan tab and the program will search your system for stealth malware and rootkits. As you can see my system is clean and at least I know there is no nasty software implanted in my operating system.
In a previous blog you might remember me mentioning a program to defrag your disk drives called MyDefrag. Although it was a good program the interface was a bit clunky and basic. However, some nice person has designed a GUI interface for it and it looks and does so much more. It is called PowerGUI. Here are several screenshots and explanations.
From this screen you can decide what you want to do. Do you want to schedule daily or weekly defrags, do you want to defrag all drives, do you want to wash all drives. When we talk about wash we mean wipe the free space on the disk with a random pattern so that it cannot be read.
In this screen we can defrag all drives by ticking the boxes as shown or wash all of them, shown by the icon beneath the defrag or lastly defrag the recycle bins on all the drives. So we could do all that at one go.
In this advanced settings screen we can do so much more if we so desire. We can decide whether we want to include or exclude certain files or even move some to the end of the drive but not sure why anyone would want to do that.
In this screen you decide what program options you want to do.
This screen is all to do with Windows installation. When you download and install this PowerGUI program it does not install it in the program files directory so you need to run the program and go to this screen and click on install and then you will be able to run this program as you do any other.
In this screen you can set up independent programs to run at scheduled times.
In this screen you can run a system clean-up.
Finally, this screen will allow you to defrag the paging file. This is the virtual memory or additional memory where the system uses disc drive space as extras memory. This can get fragmented and then takes a while to load. Running this defrag of the paging file helps the system to load and run that little bit faster.
This has been a rather long blog and there are some more programs I want to introduce to you but that will have to wait until the next blog. As always in my blogs, any program that I show you can be directly downloaded by simply clicking on the highlighted name. If you find these programs, and indeed these blogs interesting then please drop me a note letting me know what you think. If there are any kind of programs you would like to see in these blogs let me know and I will try and find them so we can share them with others.
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