It’s happened to us all. You’ve spent an age at a website, deep in thought, working on a lengthy forum post or similar wall of text, when the browser window closes unexpectedly -- and you’ve lost everything.

You could get angry, maybe throw things, before calming down and starting again. But it might be better to install Textarea Cache, a free Firefox addon which saves the contents of text fields locally, as you type, and makes them ready for recovery in seconds.

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Preparing your PC for work -- or play -- often requires several steps. You might launch a word processor, a spreadsheet, database, maybe a couple of websites, for instance. Or perhaps you’ll free up system resources by closing all non-essential programs before running a game.

None of this takes very long, but it’s tedious. Especially if you’re repeating the same steps, time and time again, each and every day. And that’s why you might want to simplify the process with Skwire Empire’s latest freeware release, Splat ( Simple Program Launching and Termination).

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You’ve found a mystery executable on your PC. What is it? Could it be malware? You check the file’s Properties dialog, and search for its name online, but can’t find anything useful.

One common next step is to open it in an editor. If the file isn’t packed then you might find it contains meaningful text strings -- company names, URLs, prompts, paths, Registry keys -- which will give you much more information about its origins and purpose.

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If you're starting a web research project then Chrome is an ideal companion: fast, easy to use, and with a capable bookmarking system to record your favorite sites.

There's still plenty of room for improvement, though, and Better Search extends the browser with a host of new search-related features and functionality.

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You might have missed it over the holidays, but just before Christmas the excellent screenshot tool Greenshot was updated to version 1.2 with some major improvements and additions.

The program now supports selecting a capture region with the keyboard: just use the cursor keys to move the cursor (hold down Ctrl to accelerate), and press Enter to define the start and end points.

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Leanify is a file minifier, a lightweight tool which can cut file sizes without affecting the core content (image files are smaller but their quality remains the same, for example).

We’ve discussed similar tools before, in particular FileOptimizer, but Leanify is, well -- a little different.

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DnGrep is a powerful text search and replace tool for Windows. It comes packed with all the functionality you'd expect from anything with the GREP name, but a well-designed interface ensures it's also very easy to use.

Getting started, for example, is as easy as specifying a path to search, a text string to look for, clicking "Search" and waiting for the results. It's much like any other search tool, really, although even here it’s delivering more than you might expect, as the program searches archives, PDFs and Word documents, as well as plain text files.

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DAYU Technology has released DAYU Disk Master 2.5, a major update for its all-in-one hard drive management suite.

The free-for-personal-use build now includes file-based, as well as image backups.

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In theory, it should be easy. A quick drag and drop starts the process of copying a folder tree from one location to another, and all you have to do is watch as Explorer transfers each file.

Normally this works just fine, too -- but there can be problems. In particular, if the destination path plus the file name is longer than 255 characters then you’re likely to see an error message suggesting you "shorten the file name and try again". (And if you think that’s unhelpful, it could be worse: in some situations the copy operation fails without generating any message at all.)

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The Windows command line console is extremely basic, thanks mostly to a horrible interface which hasn't changed significantly in years.

Windows 10 will bring some improvements, but if you don’t plan on upgrading for a while -- or you just can’t wait -- then the open source PyCmd delivers a smarter command prompt right now.

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It’s no secret that Christmas is best when it’s spent with friends and family. That’s not always possible, of course, but at least you can take photos of your favorite moments and share them with others.

You could post your pictures on Facebook, maybe Twitter, or perhaps send them via email. But if they’re really special then you could use PhotoSpills to present them in a professional photo collage.

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Bandisoft has updated its free image viewer HoneyView with support for Fabrice Bellard’s new BPG image format.

BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is an efficient compressed graphics format which can deliver much smaller file sizes than JPG, while also supporting extra features like transparency.

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Utilities developer Icecream Apps has released Icecream PDF Converter 1.3, extending the program with new text extraction tools.

The program can now extract the text from one or more PDFs, saving it in DOC, ODT, RTF and TXT formats.

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If you’ve configured Windows Explorer to display hidden and system folders then you’ve probably noticed various drive-related oddities scattered around your PC.

Like the mysterious C:\ProgramData folder, for instance. It’s packed with vital files and folders for most of your installed programs, yet is also hidden, and most people never notice its existence. What’s going on?

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If you run, download or otherwise access malware, then your regular antivirus software should normally detect the threat, step in and remove it for you, entirely automatically.

Brand new threats might bypass this layer of protection, though, infecting your system. Getting rid of them will then be extremely difficult, but if you’re a Windows expert, and armed with a copy of Ultimate Virus Sniffer, there just might be a chance.

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