Category: Windows 7

Recently I had to fill up an online form and one of the requirements was to upload my picture of 300px by 400px dimensions. How could I measure the picture inside my computer with that much accuracy? So I found out a free tool called Ruler for Windows. Using this tool, you can measure anything that appears on your screen in terms of pixels without any difficulty.

Earlier this year many Java related vulnerabilities were discovered by security researchers. Some of them were so severe that many security companies like avast!, ESET, Trend Micro etc., advised everyone to either completely uninstall Java from Windows or disable it from their web browsers. A better and more secure way to run Java based apps is to use the portable Java called jPortable. This way you do not have to install anything on your system and you run Java only when required.

The files that you have deleted using Windows delete function can be easily recovered using various freely available tools, unless you securely delete them using a tool like Blank and Secure. It is a freeware utility that can be used to wipe out the free disk space on your hard disk as well as delete the files securely. It can overwrite the contents of the files multiple times so that nobody can recover them even with the help of the recovery tools.

After watching movies like the Harry Potter series, I often dream about having a magic wand using which I can make my spoon stir my coffee or tea on its own. But magic is only seen in movies and books, so the closest I could come to the wand is Ghost Mouse. It is a freeware software using which you can record and play your keystrokes and mouse clicks. When you play the recorded events, it appears like things are happening magically.

When you want to work in the late hours without getting sleepy, you drink coffee. The caffeine inside the coffee (or tea) keeps you awake, alert and prevents you from sleeping. How about you give a little bit of caffeine to your computer too, to prevent it from dozing off. Yes, a freeware program called Caffeine can prevent your PC from sleeping, shutting down or hibernating. It keeps PC awake by generating random keypress events, making Windows think that your PC is not idle.

When you leave office, you sometimes copy some of the files on your USB key so that you can work on them back at home. Now you can use the Copy to Flash too to automate the copying files to flash disk process in such a way that as soon as you insert the USB key, the files from a pre-specified folder get copied to your USB key. This saves you from all the trouble of manually selecting the files and folders and copy-pasting them to the USB key.

When showing someone how something is done in Windows, you usually either use your small mouse cursor or your fingers to point the things out to them. You can use the freeware Epic Pen software instead of your fingers. It is a software using which you can draw over your desktop in many different colors. The drawing stays over the top of all the applications and therefore makes it very useful application for demonstration purposes.

The pictures you take using your digital camera contain meta data such as camera model, camera firmware version, time and date of picture, geolocation, latitude and longitude etc. Sleuths or hackers can easily track you down with this information. If you do not want this to happen, then you can clear the meta data from your photos using a free tool called AntiPhotoSpy. It can automatically search the photos on your hard disk that contain meta data and clear it.

The underworld on the Internet is an entirely different world. Cybercriminals buy and sell malware, malware kits, email addresses, login details, bank details, stolen credit cards and more in the Internet underworld. All these items sell from hundreds to thousands of dollars. If you want to know for how much your own Gmail address would sell there (if hacked) then you can visit the Cloudsweeper website and have your Gmail account audited.

Sometimes we find useful information on the Internet and want to save it on the hard disk. We usually copy that information whether it is text or image and then paste in a supporting program (for example, paste text in Notepad or paste image in Paint etc.), and then save it as file. This process involves many steps and takes long time. But now you can save the contents of your clipboard directly to a file using the Paste As File utility.