Category: Windows 7

Few months ago, I watched an advertisement of a Kodak digital camera which involved famous pop singer Taylor Swift. She comes up and takes a panorama shot of all her fans and the digital camera automatically creates a panorama image. But not all cameras have this special feature. If you also do not have a camera with the ability of creating panorama images, then you can use the free Hugin software to stitch together many photographs into a single panorama image

My friend Kate has a huge 1 Terabyte hard disk but when she tried to copy some of the new movies that she recorded onto her hard disk, Windows threw up an error saying the computer did not have enough disk space. This was unbelievable. Where did all the 1 terabyte space go? I suggested that she should clean her computer with Wise Disk Cleaner and sure enough, she recovered more than 100 gigabytes of disk space.

Fortunately my Canon printer comes with a function that can automatically convert scanned documents and images into PDF files. But not all printers have this luxury. If you use one of those printers, then you know the pain of first scanning a document and then converting it into a PDF file using a third party tool. But WinScan2PDF can save you from all this trouble because it has the functionality to scan any document or image straight into a PDF format file.

From time to time, I have to format my hard disk and re-install Windows. The real painful part of this is updating Windows with latest hotfixes and patches. This becomes a lengthy process if you have a slow internet connection. The WSUS Offline Update can make your life easy in situations like this. WSUS Offline Update lets you choose options for updating Windows, downloads the updates only once and creates an ISO image which you can use to update Windows later without using any internet connection.

When I bought my new computer it used to start very fast, but after some time it started to take longer to boot. I could not figure out exactly how long it takes to boot. Windows does not have any built-in tool to show the amount of time it takes to boot. But you can use BootRacer to find out the boot time. BootRacer is a Windows application, which shows you how many seconds it takes you to boot in Windows.

Like most of people if you own a digital camera, then most likely you have come across the basic problems of resizing and converting your pictures. You cannot do this easily with the programs like Microsoft Paint that come installed in Windows. But freeware like Photo Magician can make your life easy. Photo Magician is a free program that you can use to resize a picture, convert a picture to a different format and applying different image effects to your picture.

These days everybody has high speed broadband and we regularly download all kinds of files everyday. This increases the chances of duplicate files present on your computer. These duplicate files are simply a waste of hard disk space. Duplicate files cannot be manually found out as they are scattered all over the hard disk and may be present multiple times in various folders. But now you can find and remove duplicate files easily using the free DupScout.

When you give away your old hard disks, you should always securely erase all the contents so that nobody is able to recover your personal data stored on it. There are many tools like Dariks Boot and Nuke (DBAN) and Eraser for wiping data off your hard disk. HDShredder is another such free tool which can be used to securely erase the contents from your hard disks and partitions easily.