Author: Trisha

When you run your computer for a long time, the CPU (processor chip) on the motherboard starts to heat up. If you continue to use your computer in a hot environment, then it would slow down your computer overtime. What you can do is monitor your CPU chip for its temperature and if its very hot, then make arrangements for cooling down your computer working area. You can monitor your CPU temperature using the free Real Temp program.

Windows has an inbuilt feature using which you can safely remove a removable drive (for example, a USB disk drive). But this feature is pretty much limited in nature. It does not clean the MRU and registry entries created while you ran programs off the removable drive. You have to manually remove these entries or use a program like CCleaner to clean them. Now you can use freeware ProEject program to safely dismount removable drives and clean the left over entries.

Usually, it is the Windows operating system which determines the modified, accessed or created dates of a file. There is no way in Windows to manually manipulate these dates if you want. This can be a problem if you want to adjust these dates. Although you cannot do it using any in-built Windows utility, but there is a free program called SKTimeStamp which lets you modify these dates.

Two of the best free system program suites for Microsoft Windows are Sysninternals program suite and the NirSoft programs suite. But both of these suites do not offer an automatic method of downloading or updating the programs. You have to manually download the updated editions of the individual programs. But now you do not have do the manual labor anymore. Now you can download and update Sysinternals and NirSoft programs automatically using WSCC (Windows System Control Centre).

These days most of the notebooks and netbooks are coming with latest SSD (solid state drive) hard disks. They are faster than the traditional hard disks and perform smoother. The power consumption is also lower than the traditional hard disks. But you can get much more from these SSD disks if you optimize Windows operating system to work with SSD disks. The free SSD Tweaker can help you optimize Windows for you easily with a few clicks.

When you delete a file from your hard disk, Windows only removes its record from the file tables. The actual contents of the file are not removed and can be recovered later using a software like Piriform Recuva. This is a serious security concern if you share your computer with someone else. Anybody with a readily available tool like Recuva can recover your delete private and sensitive documents easily. But if you use Hardwipe, then you can permanently delete files so that cannot be recovered later.

Windows comes with basic file search functions in-built but they might not satisfy you if you are looking for some kind of customized searching for your files. This is why there are many file searching tools available for Windows. UltraSearch is also a file searching tool that can be used for searching files and folders on local NTFS drives and provides the results within just a few seconds.

If you turn off your Windows based computer using the start menu, then you know that it provides not many options to shut it down. If you want to have more control over shutting down your Windows computer (for example, if your want to set timer to shutdown or restart Windows), then you can try Daxtars Shutdown Timer. Daxtars Shutdown Timer is an open-source free software that enables you to schedule your Windows system shutdown.