Articles about Know Your PC

If you’re looking for a faster way to access your Windows applications then you could pin the appropriate shortcuts to your taskbar, but that gets cluttered fairly easily. And while the Start menu offers more customization options, it’s also more bulky, and about to disappear in Windows 8 anyway.

Still, no problem, Gomigo is a more lightweight launcher that could be just what you need.

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Windows 7 has some great games (by Microsoft’s standards, anyway), with a lot of interesting options. But the standard programs display only a fraction of what’s available, and enabling a hidden “Debug” menu can give you access to a variety of new cheats, interface tweaks and other settings.

If you’re a chess novice, for instance, you can set Chess Titans to play itself while you watch and try to anticipate each move. Interface options allow you to rotate the board, display different views, and more. Hearts also has a built-in “autoplay” option, and the new settings mean you can play the game yourself but use the “Show Hands” option to cheat by peeking at your opponents cards.

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LA software developer iolo Technologies has released a brand new version of its PC optimization and tuning suite, iolo System Mechanic 11. The tool is available in a range of editions, from a cut-down Free version to both Professional and Premium.

Version 11 introduces a number of new and enhanced features. New additions to the suite include AcceleWrite real-time optimization technology, expanded startup optimization and resource boosting tools, Windows 8 integration and a new unlimited home license covering all PCs in a single household.

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Whether you’re concerned about security, system performance, or just wondering exactly why your PC’s hard drive has been constantly active for the last half hour, being able to see exactly which files are being created, modified or deleted right now can be very useful. And that’s why last month we told you about FolderChangesView, an excellent new NirSoft tool, which made it easy to track just that type of file system activity.

The program was a little short on configuration options, though. That’s hardly a great surprise -- at a tiny 65KB we’re lucky it does anything at all -- but if you need a little more folder-watching power then you may like to try the free Directory Monitor, instead.

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Whether you love or hate Metro (and BetaNews readers certainly seem to be divided on the topic), it’s an integral part of Windows 8 and something we’re all going to have to learn to get along with. Although I personally find using the interface with a keyboard and mouse a rather clumsy experience, I do appreciate Metro’s aesthetics and think it's a bit annoying (not to mention odd) that Microsoft hasn’t extended its design to Windows Explorer.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not alone in this viewpoint but while I’m happy to just complain about it Julien Manici decided to do something and has come up with a very early, but brilliant application called Immersive Explorer.

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There are no operating systems that are free from irritations and, despite its largely warm receptions, Apple’s latest OS X release, Mountain Lion is no exception. When Lion released Lion Tweaks was on hand to allow users to tweak and customize the OS and there is now an updated version available in the form of Mountain Tweaks. This is a free tool that enables you to change numerous settings to tailor OS X to suite your needs.

Tweaking tools have always been incredibly popular, but it is usually Windows users that reap the benefits of utilities designed to allow for easy changes to regular and hidden changes to the operating system. Lion Tweaks was an impressive tweaker made available for OS X Lion, and this latest release sees the app updates to add support for Mountain Lion. Mountain Tweaks can in fact be used under both Lion and Mountain Lion, but there are some settings specific to the latter.

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Another day, another tech product launch, and all those numbers that go with it. We just love numbers, don’t we? And generally the bigger the better. (Except in cases where they’re supposed to be small, obviously.)

The numbers in hardware and software specs are useful tools, and it’s true that bigger numbers are often better. But those same numbers carry hidden dangers, too, and, like a burger that’s too big to be good for you,  that extra dollop of cream on your cake -- or the Italian town of San Gimignano, where each family just had to build a tower taller than all the others -  we can become addicted to the figures without thinking about what they all really means.  So let’s not blindly give every latest marketing prophet his profit, but consider our own health first.

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It’s the end of another month and the end of another busy week of software releases. If you’ve been too caught up with other things to keep an eye on the titles that have been hitting the download servers over the past seven days, this roundup will bring you up to speed.

Tomahawk 0.5.5 is a social media player that enables you to play your local music collection as well as tracks from the web, and also enables you to browse through the collections of your friends. If you’re keen to share your musical taste with your friends, look no further than ON AIR 4.0.0.834, which will automatically update your Skype status with the track you are currently listening to.

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Every PC owner will occasionally need to find out more about their system hardware, and Basic Hardware Inventory is a simple tool that will quickly display just about everything you might want.

This starts with the core ingredients that are essential to any system information tool: CPU model and speed, total RAM, hard drives and capacities, graphics card, monitor, network interfaces, motherboard model, BIOS type and date, and more.

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A quick tweak of the power options and you can soon have your PC set up to shut down automatically if it’s left unattended for a while. But Windows isn’t exactly smart about how this happens, and you may sometimes find your system is closed even if it’s busy downloading something, or running some lengthy CPU-intensive task.

Install SmartPower, however, and it’s a different story. The program allows you to create far more flexible rules about when your PC should sleep, and when it needs to wake up, which can be a great way to save you time, energy and money.

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If you regularly help to fix issues with other people’s PCs then you’ll know that trying to understand those problems is the first major hurdle. They may have told you that their system is slow, for instance, but could this be malware? Resource-hungry software? Hardware issues? It could take a while to find out.

But that’s where Webroot’s System Analyzer comes in. The program is a small (669KB) portable executable which scans your target system at a click, and within a minute or two will display a report highlighting any issues which need your attention.

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When was your PC being used yesterday? Whether you want to fill in a time sheet, or you think someone’s accessing your system without permission and would like to know for sure, it could be very interesting to find out.

And KeyCounter is very lightweight tool which could help you to reveal all.

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Nir Sofer has released his latest creation, MultiMonitorTool, and the name tells you everything: it’s a one-stop tool to handle all your multiple monitor needs. As usual with NirSoft utilities, there’s no installation required, no adware, no unwanted extras at all. Just download and unzip the implausibly small MultiMonitorTool file (under 200KB) and you’re ready to go.

On launch the program displays a two-paned interface. All the monitors it recognises are at the top, and if you click on any one of these then you’ll see the application windows it contains in the lower pane.

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Paragon Software Group has released Partition Manager 12, the latest edition of its flagship partitioning tool. The program didn’t get much of a fanfare, perhaps because it’s mostly a maintenance release. Still, there are some worthwhile improvements, particularly if you have one of the commercial builds.

A new Split Partition Wizard allows you to split a single partition into two partitions of the same type, for instance, and choose exactly which files and folders you’d like on each. Which could be ideal if, say, you want to place your operating system and data on different partitions.

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When it comes to subtly, Mission Control / Expose Clone will win no prizes for its name -- however, it may well impress in its ability to bring a great feature of OS X to Windows users. Ordinarily, Windows allows you to navigate between open windows and program using the task bar or by pressing the Win + Tab or Alt + Tab keyboard shortcuts. With Mission Control / Expose Clone installed, you can add Ctrl + Tab to your shortcut collection to access this great utility.

The program brings you some of the features of Exposé and Mission Control, enabling you to quickly access and overview of all running programs and open windows on a single desktop. Just as well your Alt + Tab between programs you can see a live preview of open windows, but things are kept beautifully neat thanks to the way the screen is arranged. Just like Mission Control, the program will automatically create stacks of windows from the same program -- so all of your Word documents are grouped together.

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