Articles about Know Your PC

Already one of our favorite free disk imaging tools, Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 Free has today been improved further via a maintenance upgrade.

The headline addition this time around is support for Windows 8. There is a wrinkle in the small print, where Paragon say “Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 Free edition has been tested on Windows 8 Developer Preview and Consumer Preview” -- so presumably if you’ve moved on to the latest Release Preview then there’s still the possibility of issues. (Although, to be fair, if you want guaranteed data security then you probably shouldn’t be using the buggy and unfinished Windows 8 in the first place.)

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Is your hard drive a little messy, cluttered with files that aren’t where you’d like them to be? You’re not alone, and a part of the problem is that Windows really doesn’t make it very easy to clear up. No matter how many times you drag and drop a ZIP file into your Archives folder, say, Explorer never learns that’s where they’re kept, and so you have to move them there manually. Every. Single. Time.

Don’t give up just yet, though – help is at hand in the shape of QuickMove, a simple free tool which aims to speed up your file management. Teach the program where you’d like to keep particular files or file types and you’ll be able to move them all to their destination, in just a couple of clicks.

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We’ve made it to June -- the year just seems to be flying by! -- and with each passing month there are more and more great offers in the Downloadcrew Software Store. In fact, there are so many great offers to be found that we thought that we had better collect together some of the highlights to make things a little easier for you.

Starting things off are two disc burning tools from Roxio.Roxio Creator 2011 is available for just $19.99 (a saving of 80 percent off the MSRP) while its big brother Roxio Creator 2011 Pro could be yours for just $24.99, instead of $105. These immensely powerful media suites include everything you need to create CDS, DVDS and Blu-rays containing video, audio and data.

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At first glance text files may seem very easy to edit and display. After all, even Windows Notepad can handle the key basics. If you’ve ever tried to view or edit a Unicode file, though, one which uses a different character set to your own, then you’ll know it can be surprisingly difficult -- unless you turn to a specialist tool, like BabelPad.

As you’d expect, the program offers support for opening files in more than 60 encodings: Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more, they’re all here. So if you’re just looking for a way to display a file as the author intended, BabelPad will do the trick.

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It should be simple. All you want to do is copy, move, maybe delete a particular file. And yet Windows won’t allow it, complaining instead that the file is “in use”. It’s annoying, but don’t give up: LockHunter can help.

Once installed, a quick right-click displays a new “What is locking this file?” option, and if you choose this then LockHunter will pop up, telling you which process “owns” the file. Or that’s the idea, anyway -- the program would occasionally give odd results in our tests, though for the most part it worked just fine.

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Microsoft has released the .NET Framework Repair Tool, a compact and portable executable file that aims to detect and resolve some common .NET Framework problems.

The program focuses mainly on issues relating to installation or updates. If its tests don’t reveal anything obvious in this area, though, it can also apply a couple of generic solutions: specifically, stopping, re-registering and restarting the Windows Installer service. And as a result, the Repair Tool may also help to resolve a variety of other Windows Installer-related problems.

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There are a number of worthy highlights this week, including the long awaited Opera 12 release, iTunes support for iOS 6 devices and a relatively major update to Skype for Windows and Mac.

The major release this week must be Opera 12. After months of beta-testing, the browser is finally available, along with an interesting twist, in the form of the first native 64-bit build. Whether a 64-bit version of a web browser makes a huge difference is another matter entirely. Opera 12 ships with numerous speed improvements, including basic support for hardware acceleration. It’s not all good news though as gone are the widgets and other features such as Opera Voice. Download Opera 12, Opera 12 (64-bit) and the separate Opera Portable 12, which you can take on the road.

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Long ago, in the days of DOS, there was no Registry where key system settings could be stored. And so variables such as, say, the location of the operating system Temporary folder were saved instead to the Environment, where they could be freely accessed by all your programs.

These days the Environment is largely a relic of the past, but it can be useful to check its contents occasionally, if only as a part of cleaning up your system. And while you can do this within Windows (right-click Computer, click Properties > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables), it’s generally much easier to use the free Rapid Environment Editor.

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I you have some text that you’d like to get translated then there’s usually no need to know its language. Plenty of online services will do their best to automatically detect the language for you, then translate it to whatever you need. If your preferred service can’t recognize the language, though, it might be useful to have a desktop alternative like Polyglot 3000 to hand.

The program’s design is very straightforward, and works exactly as you’d expect. Just paste your sample text into Polyglot (or enter it manually, or open it in a plain text file), click the “Recognize language” button, and the program will deliver its report. Which usually means naming the most likely language for this sample (currently 474 are supported), and providing a Recognition Accuracy estimate to let you know how reliable this verdict might be.

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Emptying your Recycle Bin and clearing away temporary files are a good first step in cleaning up your system, but there’s another type of hard drive clutter which is a little less obvious: duplicate files. These can consume a surprising amount of hard drive space, but fortunately tools like Anti-Twin make it easy to detect and delete them.

While there are plenty of duplicate file finders around, Anti-Twin scores points immediately for its lengthy list of configuration options. These don’t get in your way -- the default settings are sensibly chosen, and you can have the program checking your system within seconds – but if you have more complex requirements then Anti-Twin will do its best to fulfil them.

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When managing a PC you’ll normally want software updates to be installed just as soon as they become available. But there may be occasional exceptions.

If you’re working on a slow and expensive mobile internet connection, say, or you’re going to make a really important presentation tomorrow and want to be sure your PC behaves exactly as it does today, then you may want to disable updates, just temporarily. And Update Freezer is a compact, portable and free utility which makes that very straightforward.

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Berlin-based O&O Software has announced a major update to its Windows back-up and restore tool. O&O DiskImage 6.8.1 Professional, also available in 64-bit, boasts full Windows 8 support, plus promises faster performance in key areas.

Version 6.8.1 also takes into account third-party power settings, ensuring it stays on for the whole backup process, plus streamlines and simplifies key parts of the program in response to customer and partner feedback.

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When Windows dies it’s not always easy to determine just what caused the problem. Sometimes you may be lucky and find that you are shown a helpful error message that singles out the culprit, but for most BSoDs and crashes you’ll end up with an error code that is all but impossible to interpret. In many cases you will find that Windows simply restarts, giving you no opportunity to find out what has caused the problem. Install WhoCrashed and you should be able to learn so much more.

After or during crashing, Windows will generate a crash dump file that could help you to find out just what the problem is. However, finding, reading and understanding these dump files can be a problem on its own. WhoCrashed Home Edition is a free program that will automatically scan your hard drive for the presence of crash dump files and let you know which drivers are likely to be responsible.

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If you’ve read a few PC speedup guides then you’ll know that Windows Search (or its indexing service, at least) often gets significant blame for tying up system resources and generally slowing you down. We’re not entirely sure how accurate this is -- the indexing service should only run when your PC is idle, minimising any disruption -- but if you’d like to try an alternative index-free search tool anyway then you might be interested in the portable UltraFileSearch Lite.

The program looks a little like the Windows XP search tool, and is similarly easy to use. There’s no need to remember a lengthy list of search filters: you’re able to search by name, size, and file creation/ modification/ last access dates in just a few clicks.

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Microsoft Sysinternals has released Process Explorer 15.2, the latest edition of its excellent Task Manager replacement. And while recent Sysinternals updates haven’t exactly been exciting, this is one you don’t want to miss: it contains some very useful additions.

The Process Timeline column, for instance, displays a bar which shows how long a particular process has been running in relation to everything else. And so you can tell at a glance what’s been running since Windows launched, and what’s only just started (very useful if, say, you think you’ve just been hit by malware and want to check new processes in particular).

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