You’ve just purchased a shiny new computer (or a notebook/netbook) for yourself. Now, you’re wondering if the system you’ve purchased is as specified by the sales person, or you just want to know what’s at the heart of this new system that’s booting up Windows in a few seconds flat? Speccy, a freeware application developed by Piriform, (the same developers, who developed the awesome app CCleaner) let’s you know about your system inside-out by displaying all system information related to all of your components.

This article will take an in-depth look and walk you through the usability, design, interface, and overall performance of Speccy.

Installation Experience

Speccy is available for download from the official website. It is also available as portable application for users who wants to carry around in their USB thumb drives. You’ll find the link to the portable edition at the bottom of the download page.

The download size of the application comes between 4.18 MB (for the installer) to 4.54 MB (for the portable). For the installer version, installation was straight forward and took just a few seconds to complete. Upon completion, you’re presented with the option to run Speccy and to view the change log to find out what’s new in this version.

Usability of Speccy

When you launch Speccy for the first time, it’ll start scanning your system. After initial scan is complete, you’re presented with an overall summary of your system and its components. The summary includes information about the Operating System, RAM, Motherboard, Graphics, Hard Drives, Optical Drives, and Audio. In addition to the basic information for each of these different categories, you can get detailed information about the connected peripherals and network hardware.

User Interface and Design

Speccy with its straight forward user interface and simple design is very easy to use. The application is easy to navigate for even the novice users. Now, let’s take a quick look through each sub-categories and what information you can find inside them.

Operating System

When you click on Operating System menu link (let’s call it “tab” for simplicity), the application provides you a complete details of the current specifications and settings of the operating system installed on your computer. You can view the product key of Windows, view Windows Defender, Windows Firewall and Windows Update settings. If you’re an advanced user, you will find information about Windows Environment Variables, Power Profile, Scheduled Tasks, Hotfixes installed, running Process list and Services useful.

CPU

The CPU tab displays detailed information about your system processor, including number of cores, caches and more. You can also monitor bus speed, fan speed, and average processor temperature. When you click on the green meters, the application opens an expanded view for a clearer view of the graph.

RAM

Using the RAM tab, you can get detailed information about the total amount of memory installed in your system, number of expansion slots in use and number of slots available for use. You can monitor RAM usage, speed and individual module specifications.

Motherboard

The Motherboard tab displays information about your motherboard make, model, BIOS manufacturer, overall system temperature, the individual and continuously updating voltage throughputs, and more.

Graphics

The Graphics tab displays information about the integrated or dedicated video cards and identifies the connected display.

One thing to note is, Speccy couldn’t detect our dedicated Nvidia Optimus graphics card present on our laptop, it did however correctly detected the integrated Intel HD Graphics. We don’t blame Speccy for this, since Nvidia Optimus graphics cards are designed to run only when needed by specific programs/games for saving power. Since Speccy doesn’t need it, it wasn’t activated, thus was not detected.

Hard Drives

The Hard Drives tab is useful for monitoring the S.M.A.R.T status. You can also monitor the temperature of your hard drives.

Optical Drives

The optical drives tab offers information related to all the optical drives connected to your system.

Audio & Peripheral Tabs

Just like the optical drives tab, the audio and peripheral tabs displays only hardware specifications.

Network

The Network tab provides very useful information which may come handy for troubleshooting network problems. Here, you’ll get detailed information about your local area connection, any wireless networks connected to. It provides detailed information about your network adapters, network shares, proxies, and remote desktop connections, and all active TCP Connections (applications/processes that are using your network/connected to the Internet, at any particular time).

Performance

Speccy is fast and once it completes the initial scan, it responds to any user actions immediately. Piriform is continually evolving Speccy with new features or improvements, so we’re confident Speccy will continue to get better and offer much more details.

Conclusion

You’ll find a lot of programs that allows you to monitor system health, some displays system specifications, but very few of them offer so much in-depth hardware analysis accessible through a simple, easy-to-use user interface as Speccy offers.

Speccy is completely free to download and personal use, though you’ll not get any support from the developers. If you need priority support, Piriform offers Home and Small business support for $19.95 and $34.95 respectively.

Whenever you uninstall application from your Windows operating system, theoretically, it should uninstall completely. Sadly, in reality, sometimes you will find that when you uninstall an application, it has left few files and unwanted registry entries behind. Down the road, you will notice Windows starts giving performance and compatibility issues. Manually finding and deleting leftover items is very cumbersome and risky.

Utilities like CCleaner are effective to some extent in cleaning up the leftover registry entries and temporary files. But using advanced application uninstaller that can completely uninstall apps makes more sense to keep Windows operating system in good shape. Revo Uninstaller is one such application that can completely uninstall an app and is an alternative to “Windows Add or Remove Programs” applet. Let’s see if it really can do what it claims for.

Revo Uninstaller Overview

Revo Uninstaller simplifies the process of removing leftover files and registry entries of an app after uninstalling it. It works by analyzing an application’s data before uninstall and after uninstall, scans for remnants. After the program’s regular uninstaller completes the uninstall process, Revo provides a list of registry values, files, and folders that it believes were not removed by the application’s regular uninstaller. You can now select the data you wish to delete, and it will clean your computer of the unwanted files, folders and registry entries.

Installation

Revo Uninstaller is available free and comes with several other tools about which we will tell later on. The installation process is very simple. After you have the installer which is around 2.4MB download, the application should be ready for use within a few seconds. If you don’t want to install another application on your Windows or like portable applications, Revo Uninstaller is also available in portable edition.

User Interface and Using Revo Uninstaller

When you launch Revo, you will be presented with a list of the installed applications on your computer. The user interface lets you switch easily between the default Uninstaller view and Tools view. Here we will work with the Uninstaller function first.

Removing an application using Revo is easy. You have a number of options to remove an application completely from your computer. The most easy way is to double-click the icon of the app and continue with the uninstall process. Revo Uninstaller will create a system restore (if not disabled in Options) and then it will run the built-in uninstaller of the uninstalled program. Revo Uninstaller is not directly involved in that part of the uninstall process. Revo than offers four methods for removing applications.

• Built-in: This is just like using the “Windows Add or Remove Programs” applet.
• Safe: It performs additional registry scan and hard drive scan to find leftover items that are safe to delete.
• Moderate: It is an extension to the Safe mode and performs an extended scan to find all the application’s leftover information in the most common places of the Registry and on the hard drive.
• Advanced: Advanced method includes the Moderate mode and performs a deep and thorough scan to find all the application’s leftover information in the Registry and on the hard drive. In our tests, we found this method most effective in completely removing the application.

One unique way for uninstalling apps offered by Revo is the “Hunter Mode.” This mode provides a cross-hair to place on any icon on your Start Menu, Desktop or Taskbar. After you place the cross-hair, Revo will literally “hunt” for the uninstaller of the app and go ahead with the un-installation process.

Revo Uninstaller comes with 8 handy and powerful tools to further clean up your Windows operating system. To access the Tools you have to press the Tools button on the main toolbar. Then on the left side of the main window appears the Tools panel. It has the tools included in Revo Uninstaller divided in two categories shown as buttons: “Optimization” and “Tracks Cleaner”. Under the first category Optimization, you will find an AutoRun Manager, Junk Files Cleaner and Windows Tools. The second category Tracks Cleaner lets you access Browsers Cleaner, MS Office Cleaner, Windows Cleaner, Evidence Remover, and Unrecoverable Delete.

Coming to the Preferences panel, Revo Uninstaller Free offers very few basic options. You can exclude specific file formats and directories, change the language of the application, and change system restore options.

Performance

The performance on this application varies upon which mode you use to uninstall an application. Although it does its job well, it will use a large amount of CPU as well as RAM. We would not recommend attempting to multitask while Revo is in the process of removing an application.

Conclusion

This application does what it promises and does its job well. It does take a little time depending on which method you use to remove an application. Despite this, we will recommend this application to all Windows user. Compared to the default “Windows Add or Remove Programs” applet, Revo is far better in what it does.

This application is available as a freeware application, however, if you are looking for more advanced features, you can buy a pro license for $39.25 $19.62. You can download the free or portable edition from RevoUninstaller.com.

Do you use any other uninstaller or do you use the default Windows uninstaller only? Let us know in the comments.

If you found this article useful and like it, please share it with your friends and contacts on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, and more using the share buttons below so that they can also enjoy it, thank you so much for reading!

gBurner Virtual Drive is a freeware app for Windows users. The lightweight application, whose download size is only 389KB, lets you create and manage up to 16 virtual drives on your computer. Users who are always working with ISO images or other proprietary CD/DVD images or gamers will find gBurner Virtual Drive very useful. With the large number of CD/DVD image file formats, that includes ISO, GBI/GBP, DAA, NRG, MDF/MDS, BIN/CUE, UIF, ISZ, ASHDISC, DMG, GI, BWI/B5I, IMG, CDI, PDI, NCD, LCD, CIF, P01, PXI, C2D, FCD, VCD, it is a must have solution for every computer user.

gBurner Virtual Drive allows you to easily mount any supported CD/DVD image file to get access to your favorite games, music, or software programs. Since, this is a virtual drive, so if you mount and run any image file, it will run at a very fast speed than when you would have run it through your optical drive.

How to use gBurner Virtual Drive?

After downloading the gBurner setup file, proceed to install it. After installation completes, you will notice gBurner Virtual Drive running in the system tray.

Right-click on the gBurner icon to show options for: Mount image file to drive, Unmount drive, Set Number of Drives, Unmount all drives and Options. Through the “Set number of drives” option, you can create up to 16 virtual drives.

When you select “Configuration” from “Options” menu, you can get access to the “gBurner Virtual Drive Configuration” window.

Through this window, you can set ”Virtual Drive Options” like setting the “Number of Virtual Drives”, enable or disable “Autostart” and “Automount“. You can also manually drive letters from the Virtual Drive Letter Assignment menu.

gBurner Virtual Drive works on all Windows editions starting from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit supported).

Download gBurner Virtual Drive

Microsoft Office 2010 Starter edition is a scaled down freeware version of the full-fledged Microsoft Office 2010. Other than the free Started edition, the productive suite is available as Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional, Professional Academic, Professional Plus editions. All these retail versions are easily available for purchase but not the Starter edition. Microsoft Office 2010 Starter is available exclusively with OEM-supplied computer.

The Started edition of Office consists of limited-functionality versions of Word and Excel and includes advertising. It does not include PowerPoint or Outlook. It allows users to upgrade easily to a complete Office 2010 productivity suite when they are ready.

Disclaimer: We are providing the download links as a backup for owners of OEM machines who may have lost the setup files of Starter edition due to formatting or any other error. We don’t recommend other users to download and install it on any other computer system. Read below.

If you like Office 2010, you should purchase it. Office Starter 2010 is not a trial; it has a perpetual license that does not expire. Office Starter 2010 is an advertising-supported base productivity suite that is available only on new PCs. It must be preloaded on new PCs at the point of manufacture. Office Starter 2010 is not available for existing PCs at any time after manufacture; such as, Office Starter 2010 cannot be installed on new PCs being sold by resellers, even brand-new PCs. It will not be sold through distribution or available to end users as a standalone product. (-Microsoft)

Caschy, a popular blogger from Germany has recently discovered that Microsoft stores the setup files of Office Starter 2010 on their servers. But before download, please read the Disclaimer above.

Here is a list of available versions that you can download:

Download Microsoft Office Starter 2010 (English) (Microsoft has removed the file, link is no longer working.)

To install Office Starter 2010, you don’t need any product key. If you want you can also create a portable version of Office Starter 2010 from its start menu entry.

If you want to download the setup file in your language, just replace the LCID string in the web address as suggested by Martin, Ghacks Editor. For example, replace en-us with another LCID string. You can find a list of strings on this page.

If you want a full-fledged office productivity suite but do not want to use Microsoft Office Starter edition, we recommend users to try open-source or freeware alternatives like LibreOffice or if you want cloud features try Google Docs.

CloudShot is an open source screenshot application for Windows users that features Dropbox account integration. The program allows you to take screenshots of selected region, just a window, menu, or tooltip. You can use it with multiple monitors, and it includes a history with the 10 most recent screenshots. With its unique Dropbox account integration feature, the program uploads the screenshots taken by it to your Dropbox account. Thus allowing you to freely accesses all your screenshots from multiple computing devices. The program allows you to save the screenshots in JPG and PNG format and keeps a history of the 10 most recent screenshots.

Dropbox is an awesome service to keep your files in the cloud and we use it extensively. It also lets you share files publicly and collaborate with others within a folder. If you are a Dropbox “power user,” you should check out CloudShot.

How to use CloudShot and upload screenshots directly to your Dropbox account?

Download and install CloudShot from the download link given at the end of this article. You should also have official Dropbox application installed on your system. CloudShot requires the official application installed on your system for uploading the screenshots. Upon first install, CloudShot takes you directly to the Settings dialog box. From this dialog box you can change the image format between PNG and JPG. Select options to Copy Image to Clipboard, Copy Image Path to Clipboard and Open Image After Shot. You can set a custom hotkey (or keyboard shortcut) for taking screenshots to avoid conflict with other screenshot taking applications.

The program supports two modes for taking screenshots: Custom Screen Area Capture (taken by pressing the hotkey) and Window Capture (simply press the hotkey and click on the desired window to capture it). When a screenshot is captured, CloudShot automatically uploads the image to your Dropbox account. You can get access to the 10 most recent screenshots by right-clicking on the system tray icon of the program and selecting Recent Shots option.

Watch a small video demonstrating the program below.

CloudShot is a freeware download for Windows operating system.

Download CloudShot

RunAsDate is a freeware portable application for Windows users.

Developed by NirSoft, RunAsDate allows you to run a program in the date and time that you specify. The program doesn’t change the current system date and time of your computer, instead it injects the date/time that you specify into the desired application. One of the advanced feature offered by this software is it allows you to run multiple applications simultaneously. Each application works with different date and time, while the system date/time remains unaffected. We have covered many useful utilities developed by NirSoft: DevManView, WebSiteSniffer, CleanAfterMe, and WhatInStartup.

The developer reports that the mechanism behind RunAsDate is it intercepts the kernel API calls that returns the current date and time (GetSystemTime, GetLocalTime, GetSystemTimeAsFileTime). After that it replaces the current date/time with the date/time that you specify.

How to use RunAsDate?

RunAsDate is completely portable and doesn’t need any additional DLL files. To start using RunAsDate, simply download and copy the executable file (RunAsDate.exe) to any folder you like, and run it. In the main window of RunAsDate, select the desired date and time and the application that you want to run. There is also an option to Move the time forward, and then there is a new mode called “Immediate Mode.” Optionally, you can also specify the command-line parameters to run the program. Press the “Run” button to start the application with custom date/time set by you.

The specialty of ‘Immediate Mode’ is that when it is enabled, RunAsDate inject the date/time immediately when the process starts, without waiting for the kernel to load first. However, this mode can sometime cause trouble, especially if they were written in .NET. If executing of an application from RunAsDate cause it to crash, you should turn off the ‘Immediate Mode’.

RunAsDate Limitations:

• RunAsDate only works on 32-bit Windows applications. You cannot use it for old DOS 16-bit programs or for 64-bit Windows applications.
• RunAsDate will not affect applications that take the current date/time from another source. For example: application that loads the current date from remote server.

RunAsDate works under Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Older versions of Windows are not supported. The is also x64 version available in a separated download, for using with x64 applications.

Information: According to the developer, AVG Antivirus falsely reports that RunAsDate is infected with “Trojan horse Generic 10.THK”.

Download RunAsDate | Download RunAsDate for x64

Playing games is always a great way to relax yourself and have fun. Now, you can increase the level of fun and further enjoy playing 100′s of new free games without the trouble of searching for them. Game Downloader for Windows is a small open source portable game download client that lets you download open source, indie or freeware games.

Game Downloader basically has a large server-side library of free games. You can use the Windows client program of Game Downloader to browse and download the games easily. It makes your life easy by letting you download games without even visiting the official website. Other than making your life easy, using Game Downloader you can discover new games. It divides the games into several categories. And each category lists many free and open source games. Further, the program displays a description of the game, displays a screenshot of the game, allows you to view YouTube videos related to the game you want to play, lets you visit the official home page of the game, lets you know the estimated download size before downloading, and obviously lets you download the game of your choice.

Game Downloader’s main user interface is divided into six parts. At the top, you will find the Category drop down menu. Available categories include Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board games, Card Games, Fighting, First Person Shooter, Music, Platform, Puzzle, Racing, Real-Time Strategy, RPG, Simulators, and Turn based strategy. Below the drop down menu, you will find the Games list and Version information, Further you will find the About information of the game and a Screenshot of the game. At the bottom of the user interface, you will find four buttons: YouTube button lets you search the game on YouTube, Game Website button takes you to the home page of the game, Get File Size button gets the download file size of a game and the Download Game button lets you download the selected game. If you want to change the download folder and change other settings, right-click on the program’s tray icon and access Settings.

Update: Game Downloader 2.5 is released with a revamped user interface. You can now search for your favorite games. The file size is displayed along and now you don’t have to click on a button to get it. Also the settings menu has been added to the main interface. Using the right-click context menu, from the tray icon of the program, you can now check for new version of the program.

To download a game using Game Downloader, you have to follow a simple procedure. At first, you have to select a Game Category using the Category drop down menu. Upon choosing a category, the Games section is populated by a list of games available in that category. Select a game from the list to see a small description about the game in the About section, a small screenshot, latest version number. The Yes/No flags are used to show whether the game is single player or multiplayer. If you want to download the game, simply click on the Download Game button to start the download.

Game Downloader will run on any computer system that boots into Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating system. It requires .NET Framework 3.5 to run. You can download the program from SourceForge.

P.S. We are resuming normal daily updates, My Technology Guide will now be back to normal.

DevManView is a very good free alternative to the standard Device Manager of Windows.

The standard Windows Device Manager is a simple and handy tool when troubleshooting Windows problems related to device drivers. It basically lets you browse through all the devices to check for device properties and driver conflicts or driver errors. But in terms of user experience, it doesn’t offer much of a good experience. Sometimes while using it, we here have also felt how cumbersome it is to use sometimes.

DevManView is a freeware program from the popular NirSoft developers. The program takes a different approach in displaying all devices and their properties. Instead of displaying the devices in a tree viewer like in the standard Windows Device Manager, it displays them in a flat table view. In addition to displaying the devices of your local computer, DevManView is an advanced device troubleshooting program that also allows you to view the devices list of another computer on your network, as long as you have administrator access rights to this computer. The program is also capable of loading the devices list from external instance of Windows and lets you disable unwanted devices. This feature is very useful if you have a Windows operating system which is not booting, and you want to disable the problematic device to boot into the operating system.

DevManView is completely portable and doesn’t need any installation process or additional dll files. In order to start using it, simply download and run the executable file, “DevManView.exe”. After running DevManView, the main window displays the list of all devices found in your system. By default, the program doesn’t display non-plug and play drivers (LegacyDriver) are not displayed. If you want to show them, you can select the “Show Non-Plug And Play Drivers” in the Options menu. One of the advantages the program offers upon the standard Windows Device Manager is, you can select one or more devices from the list, and then save their details into text/html/xml/csv file (Ctrl+S) or copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+C) and then paste the data to Excel or other spreadsheet application. Which you can use later for advanced troubleshooting.

DevManView allows you to easily disable, enable, and uninstall the selected devices. However, always be cautioned while using these system utilities. You must be very careful when using the disable/uninstall options, because disabling or uninstalling an essential device might cause troubles to your operating system.

As mentioned earlier, DevManView allows you to connect another computer on your LAN, and view the devices list in the remote computer. But, to successfully connect the remote computer, you must have full administrator access to this computer. The program allows you to view the devices list stored in the Registry of another instance of Windows operating system. In order to use this feature, simply go to Advanced Options (or Press F9 key), choose “External Windows Directory,” and then type or choose the right Windows directory.

Using this feature, you can disable/enable the selected devices. The program will write the disabled/enabled information into the SYSTEM Registry file of the selected Windows operating system. The next time when you start this Windows, the device will be disabled/enabled according to what you’ve set.

Warning: Use this feature only in emergency cases (for instance, when a system cannot boot properly). You should also backup the SYSTEM registry file before making any change on the external Windows system.

Another advanced feature offered by DevManView, the program by default loads the devices from the default ControlSet, which is loaded by Windows. However, through “Advanced Options” window of the program, you can choose to view the devices of “Last Known Good” ControlSet or any other ControlSet by its number. When you use non-default ControlSet, disabling/enabling a device, and save the changes in the Registry. The next time that Windows is loaded with the selected ControlSet.

DevManView works on any version of Windows, starting from Windows 2000 and up to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. It is compatible with both x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) version of Windows. You should download the x64 version of DevManView for 64-bit Windows, because the 32-bit version of DevManView cannot disable/enable devices on x64 operating system.

Download DevManView for x86 systems (32-bit) | Download DevManView for x64 systems (64-bit)

FavBackup is a freeware portable software for Windows users that lets you save and migrate almost any major web browser settings. It archives all your personal settings and data such as bookmarks, history, cookies, and saved passwords from all major web browsers: Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari and Flock.

In this digital age, one just can’t afford to lose their personal settings and data. As the number of web browser choices have increased, most of us like to use multiple web browsers for surfing the Internet. Keeping a backup of all the data, spread over all these different browsers is difficult, thanks to FavBackup it is less of a hassle now. FavBackup offers an easy and comprehensive way to back up all the data and even lets you migrate easily to a browser on a different computer.

FavBackup is completely portable application and requires no installation. The program has an intuitive Ribbon user interface, so getting started with it is easy and quick. After downloading the program, extract the FavBackup executable file in your choice of folder, run the executable.

Backing Up a Browser Profile

The “Backup” option allows you to choose which items you want to save for a specific profile, while “Full Backup” saves all settings for all profiles. FavBackup saves all your personal settings and data into a default.dat file.

Choose either “Backup” or “Full Backup” option according to your needs and select the browser that you would like to back up. Browse to the place where you want to keep the backup and click on “Next”. After the backup is completed, click “Finish” to close the program.

Note: In case of “Backup,” all items are selected by default. The Backup process for all the other browsers are identical (pictured above).

Restoring a Backed Up Browser Profile

To import all your personal settings and data which you backed up using the steps above, use either “Restore” or “Full Restore,” and select the backup file “default.dat”.

If you choose the “Restore” option, you can selectively import items from the backup file. “Full Restore” lets you restore the complete data back.

Choose the option that best suits your needs and select the browser that you would like to restore. Select the backup file and click “Next”. The program will restore your browser settings and data. Click on “Finish” to close the program.

Note: In case of “Restore”, all items are selected by default. The Restore process for all the other browsers are identical (pictured above). If you are restoring portable browser data and custom location is not provided, it may overwrite your regular browser settings. If you don’t want this to happen, please provide portable browser’s backup location.

Convert Opera 10 Profile

FavBackup also lets you convert Opera 10 profiles from Windows XP to Windows 7/Vista in both 32-bit and 64-bit format. Simply select the options available under conversion and click on “Next.”

Conclusion

FavBackup is a powerful backup and restore program which is extremely easy to use. It is definitely a recommended software by us which lets even the most novice users to keep their browser settings. You can download FavBackup from the author’s page.

Joulemeter is a freeware software tool developed by Microsoft Research that estimates the power consumption of your computer and improves energy efficiency. It tracks computer resources, such as CPU utilization and screen brightness, and estimates power usage.

Joulemeter provides a modeling tool to measure the energy usage of virtual machines (VM), servers, desktops, laptops, and even individual software applications running on a computer. The application helps improve power provisioning costs for data centers, virtualized power budgeting, desktop energy optimizations, and mobile battery management.

The Joulemeter project focuses on the following aspects related to energy optimization:

• Modeling — Joulemeter provides a software tool to estimate the energy usage of a virtual machine (VM), a computer, server, or software application. It also allows modeling the impact of power management of various components such as the CPU, screen, memory, and storage on total power use. Many of these power measurements are not possible in hardware since software components such as VM do not have a single wire supplying their power where a hardware power meter may be installed.
• Optimization — We use the visibility provided by Joulemeter’s modeling techniques to improve power provisioning and consumption costs in various scenarios ranging from data centers, enterprise computing, and battery operated machines.

How to use Microsoft Joulemeter?

Download Joulemeter setup file (JoulementerSetup.msi) from the Microsoft Research website and install it. It is available only to Windows 7 users.

Laptops, notebooks or netbooks users do not need any extra hardware. Desktop computer users will need a WattsUp power meter (WattsUp Pro with USB connection) for learning an accurate power model. The software will also work without a power meter as well.

Run the application and select your setup for calibration. On the Calibration tab, select the option that best describes your setup:

• Running on batteries: For laptops; disconnect the power cord and make sure the battery charge level is above 50%.
• WattsUp PRO (Monitor(s) not on WattsUp): Desktop is plugged into a WattsUp PRO, but monitors are not plugged into the WattsUp.
• WattsUp PRO (Laptop OR Monitor(s) also on WattsUp): Desktop and monitor (one or more) are plugged into a power strip that is in turn plugged into a WattsUp PRO; Or if the computer and its monitor(s) are powered by a single power outlet (such as for laptops) from a WattsUp PRO.
• If none of these options apply, you have to do a manual calibration (see at the end of this article).

Close other open programs and click on “Perform Calibration” button. Leave the machine unused for 15 or more minutes. Joulemeter will switch to “Power Usage” after calibration is over.

Note: During calibration, the monitor may turn off and change brightness. Do not use the mouse or keyboard during calibration.

After calibration is complete, measure the power use of the computer. In the “Power Usage” tab to see the power consumption. The WattsUp meter, if used, may now be disconnected.

All power values are in Watts. Base power is computer’s power consumption when powered on but sitting idle. CPU power is the extra power used when some program(s) or the OS use the CPU. Disk power is the extra power consumed by the disk due to IO activity (disk spinning power is included in the base power). Monitor power, if shown, is the additional power consumption of the monitor and may change with brightness.

To estimate power consumption by a particular application, in the Power Usage tab, under Application Power, enter the name of the program executable, such as “myProgram.exe” and click “Start.” If the “myProgram.exe” is not yet running, Joulemeter will wait for it to be started.

Power consumption data is saved in comma separated values (CSV) format that can be opened in Microsoft Excel for easy plotting, or viewed in any text editor.

How to perform Manual Calibration in Joulemeter?

If the computing device is not a laptop or runs on battery or WattsUp based setups is unavailable, the expected range of power values can be manually entered.

• On the Calibration tab, click the “Manual Entry” button. Select the Model type to be a laptop, desktop, or one of the values shown. Joulemeter will recommend typical values to be entered.
• Edit the “Base power” to be the value when the computer is simply turned on but not performing much work.
• In “Processor peak power (high frequency)” enter the power consumed at 100% CPU utilization with the processor using its highest frequency. This power value may be available in your processor’s data sheet as the Thermal Design Power (TDP) value.
• In “Processor peak power (low-frequency)” enter the power consumed at 100% CPU utilization with the processor using its lowest P-state frequency.
• In “Monitor power” enter the power consumption of your monitor (available from the monitor user manual). If using more than one monitor, add up the power consumption of all monitors.
• Please consult the User Manual of the respective devices for more details.

The impact of hardware components on the battery life of your laptop allows you to tweak the power management settings. Thus you can improve battery life of your laptop. Managing and tracking PC sleep, combined with remote wakeup, allows optimizing desktop power consumption. Measuring the VM power allows developing power budgeting techniques for virtualized data centers.

Grooveshark is one of the popular streaming music service. You just have to visit their web page and start listening to your favorite music for free. We will not go into too much details about Grooveshark as we think everyone here knows about them. Earlier we have seen Grooveshark desktop application for Windows users.

For Mac OS X users, who love to listen to music using Grooveshark, here is an application, which they will like a lot. The application aptly called Grooveshark Desktop for Mac which is also known as gsfluid, lets Mac users enjoy music without having to launch a web browser and visit the website. Grooveshark Desktop for Mac is a freeware application which is very simple to use. Developed by Jake Teton-Landis, it’s an unofficial Mac desktop client for the Grooveshark.com website.

Some of the key features of gsFluid (or Grooveshark Desktop) are:

• Bowtie-like miniController with fully customizable themes
• Media key support
• Growl notifications
• reduced pixel waste
• native Last.fm support
• miniController, minify, and full-screen view modes

The app is available in installer format as well as a disk image for convenience. The developer recommends the use of the installer package but you are free to use whichever of the two to install the app.

After installing, simply launch the app and listen to your favorite music. If you want to clear your preferences from this application, simply run the following commands in the JavaScript console (accessible via Window → Show Error Console…)

gsFluid.pref.clear()

gsFluid.pref.save()

You can download Grooveshark for Mac or gsFluid from the developer’s page.

WebSiteSniffer is a freeware portable packet sniffer tool developed by NirSoft. The application captures all files downloaded by your web browser while you browse the Internet. After capturing the files, it stores them on your hard drive under the folder “Website Files” in the folder where the program resides.

WebSiteSniffer allows you to filter the files types which are captured and saved. It offers the following choices: HTML Files, Text Files, XML Files, CSS Files, Video/Audio Files, Images, Scripts, and Flash (.swf) files. By default all supported file types are selected but you can customize it from Options dialog box. While the packet sniffer is capturing the website files, the main window displays general statistics about the downloaded files for every website or host name. The statistic includes the total size of all files (compressed and uncompressed) and the total number of files for every file type (HTML, Text, Images, etc).

For effectively capturing, you will need WinPcap packet capture driver. Other options for capturing are Raw Sockets which work in some systems and Network Monitor Driver. You can download WinPcap driver from here. Except the capture driver needed for capturing network packets, WebSiteSniffer doesn’t need any installation process or additional dll files. To start using WebSiteSniffer, simply download it from the developer’s website and extract the archive to a folder of your choice. Now, simply run the executable file “WebSiteSniffer.exe“.

When you run WebSiteSniffer for the first time, the “Capture Options” window appears on the screen. Here you can choose the folder where you want to download and extract all Web site files, filter the file types that you want to capture, the capture method (if you have installed WinPcap, keep it selected), and the desired network adapter. This options screen is presented to you only once, when you first run the application. If you want to change any settings later, simply click on Options menu and select Capture Options or Press F9 key on your keyboard. After changing the options press OK and you will see all the files getting saved automatically to your hard drive as you surf the Internet.

You can also select the desired Web site item and press F8 (Open Website Folder) to open the folder of the selected website in Windows Explorer, and easily view all files captured from this Web site. For every website or host name, WebSiteSniffer creates a separated sub folder under the main download folder. For example, if you browse into www.mytechguide.org, all files downloaded from www.mytechguide.org are stored under www.mytechguide.org sub folder.

WebSiteSniffer is a very powerful packet sniffer tool which is very easy to use. WebSiteSniffer works on any version of Windows, starting from Windows 2000 and up to Windows 7, including 64-bit systems. It is available for download from the developer’s website.

Windows operating system comes with a built-in firewall to protect the system. Windows Firewall like all other software firewalls available out there, protects your Windows system from unauthorized access while allowing legit network to pass through. Unfortunately, configuring the firewall settings is a daunting task for most users.

For all users who are looking for the ease of use in configuring Windows Firewall should check out Windows Firewall Notifier.

Windows Firewall Notifier is a freeware portable application for managing Windows Firewall rules in Windows 7 and Vista. Using this small portable application, configuring both inbound and outbound firewall rules is very easy.

After you have downloaded Windows Firewall Notifier and extracted it to your preferred location, launch it. It will enable the Windows Firewall, if not already enabled. It then blocks all inbound and outbound network connections for which no rules exist. Then it enables inbound connection notifications and outbound connections logging, if disabled. It will then show a notification balloon allowing or disabling incoming and outgoing connections, just like you see in many advanced commercial and freeware firewalls. From these prompts, you can choose to allow (temporarily or permanently) or block connections from being established by applications.

Upon clicking on the notification, you will see the following prompt on the screen with options to: temporarily allow the application, create a rule for the application, block the application once only, always block the application.

As you can see, the prompt also displays more information such as the application name, system path and target IP or hostname.

The application is intelligently built and creates a task in the Windows Task Scheduler. This task is basically linked to the firewall event log entries. Thus, whenever any network activity occurs for which no firewall rule exists, this task will automatically launch Windows Firewall Notifier. Thus this application will not even run in the background and hog any system resource.

If you ever felt that you do not need Windows Firewall Notifier anymore, you can be easily disable it by launching the executable file of the program again and selecting Yes. The program will also provided the option to disable the firewall and revert back the settings to default.

Windows Firewall Notifier is a must have application for Windows Vista and Windows 7 (compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit edition) users who rely on the built-in firewall. It is available as a free download from the developer’s website.

Windows Firewall is a built-in, host-based, stateful firewall that is included in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and later, and Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 and later. Windows Firewall drops incoming traffic that does not correspond to either traffic sent in response to a request of the computer (solicited traffic) or unsolicited traffic that has been specified as allowed (excepted traffic). Windows Firewall helps provide protection from malicious users and programs that rely on unsolicited incoming traffic to attack computers. In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Windows Firewall can also drop outgoing traffic and is configured using the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security snap-in, which integrates rules for both firewall behavior and traffic protection with Internet Protocol security (IPsec).
Microsoft Technet

Microsoft’s upcoming operating system Windows 8 is coming with a unique feature called “System Reset“. System Reset will let users restore Windows 8 to factory defaults. This feature will save a lot of time for system administrators and users alike, and will save you from having to reinstall Windows.

RefreshPC is a free program developed for Windows that offers similar system reset option to current Microsoft Windows operating systems. Though this freeware application will not restore the operating system like Windows 8′s “System Reset” feature, but it will restore only a few sections of the operating system.

RefreshPC will be handy for users, who love to experimenting with Windows Registry settings and system services. Another example would be users who have used Windows system optimizer and have caused more harm to the system than good. Malicious virus, spyware, trojan attack that changed critical system settings can also be restored back to default after cleaning it using your favorite antivirus.

After you have downloaded RefreshPC, you need to install the program and create a System Restore point (recommended). The program than detects your operating system and version, and displays the information. You will find only a single button that will let you restore the settings to their factory defaults when clicked on.

RefreshPC will do the following:

The freeware application is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system, from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Download RefreshPC for refreshing your Windows back to defaults.

SpringPublisher is a freeware desktop publishing application for Windows. The application lets you easily create business cards, flyers, postcards, letterheads and other artworks within a few minutes.

Quality free software for creating business cards, flyers, postcards and letterheads are very sparse. Professional desktop publishing applications are normally very costly. But SpringPublisher comes here to fill in the void. With its powerful multilayered editor and lots of templates, your desktop publishing task becomes easier.

Spring Publisher desktop publishing software is small in download size (2.13 MB to be exact) and requires less system resource. When installed, it lets you easily create various artworks fast. You can use it to create professional looking business cards, letterheads, flyers, postcards, etc. You can start from scratch and use your imagination to design or use templates that came with it. Insert or edit shapes, text, logos, and vectors in your artworks to get them completed quickly.

You can simultaneously work on different artworks using its tabbed interface. It lets you save your work as a project to later edit it. You can save your artworks as image if you want to send it to professional print shops. You can also directly print using your own printer. SpringPublisher Free do have a limitation of 96/180 dpi output quality. It is more than enough for normal usage. If you are looking for high quality 350 dpi output quality, you have to go for SpringPublisher Pro. One more limitation is that using the free version you will not be able to download templates from the publisher’s website.

• Enables you to add images, texts, vector shapes, logos and arrange them as you like;
• Provides various image effect: shadows, opacity, rotation, etc.
• Makes it easy for you to print your artworks either with your own printer or in professional print shops.
• Generates high-resolution artwork with a maximum output of 180 dpi.

You can download SpringPublisher Freeware version from the official website.

Last year in August, we reviewed a powerful flash animation software titled “Vectorian Giotto.” Back then it was a premium software worth $89.95. Vectorian Inc., the developers of Vectorian Giotto has announced a great news for all. They have released the new and redesigned version of Vectorian Giotto 3.0 and made it completely free. The developers also said that the new version is exactly 4 and a half times easier to work with the earlier version.

Vectorian Giotto helps create professional quality Flash animations without coding and experience. The application features more than 50 customizable effects that can be applied to both shapes and text. With over a 100 effect presets in store, it can display your flash content in different ways which you can adjust easily. The developer’s website hosts a very handy help manual with many tutorials to guide you through. Although it features full ActionScript 2.0 support, designers won’t need to think about this as the animation is created without any coding required.

If you are wondering what is the difference between Giotto and Adobe Flash Professional? Here’s what the developers are saying:

Vectorian Giotto is simpler, easier to use and much cheaper alternative software to Adobe Flash. Both applications use similar approach (with Giotto being easier to use) to produce SWF (“Small Web Format” or “Shockwave Flash”) files that can be embedded into websites to enrich them with animation and/or interactivity.

Using the free flash creator software you can create from simplest to complex vector illustrations, apply effects to them (blur, shadow, glow) and then animate them. You can create Movie Clips and Buttons, store them in the library and use them later. You can easily work with text elements and adjust things such as kerning and alignment. The animation can be executed using motion, shape tweens. Sounds can be included in your creations to make more advanced animations.

The built-in editor of the application’s color palettes is very intuitive. The editor uses special algorithms build upon human perception of colors instead of the old school mathematical models.

To conclude, Vectorian Giotto 3.0 is certainly a very remarkable tool for designers who don’t want to code but instead concentrate on their designing, plus the application is completely freeware for all. You can download Vectorian Giotto 3.0 freeware from the official webpage.

Piriform, the makers of the popular Windows system cleanup software, CCleaner, has released a Mac version of it. CCleaner for Mac is in beta stage now, so it might have bugs. Also, the OS X version isn’t nearly as full-featured as its Windows counterpart, but it does promises to gain the same amount of popularity.

The beta version of the freeware application can clean up junk files that takes up a bit of disk space, from all corners of your Mac OS X as well as some popular web browsers with a single click.

The app can free up disk space and maintain privacy by emptying out the trash as well as clearing out the temporary folder and logs such as recent documents, applications and servers. The app which is at beta stage, only supports Firefox and Safari. It can erase caches, browsing history, cookies and download history. In case of Firefox, it can also wipe out the saved form information.

You can control all the options by simply selecting the check boxes. So, if you want to keep some data which you need, such as form data, simply leave the option unchecked in the application and it will not touch it.

How to use CCleaner for Mac?

As usual, like CCleaner for Windows, using CCleaner for Mac is very simple.

1. Start by selecting the check boxes to tell the app which parts of the Mac system you want to clean up
2. Click on the Analyze button to find out which files will be removed and how much disk space will be gained after the operation.
3. If you are happy with the analysis result, click on the Clean button.

The freeware application only works on Apple Mac running OSX 10.5 or 10.6. You can read more and download a free copy of the application by visiting the CCleaner for Mac webpage.

LogViewer Pro is a simple, freeware, lightweight, portable application developed to quickly view, analyze and compare huge log files, even if the size of the log file is 4GB or more. It offers simple tabbed interface for doing comparisons of multiple log files simultaneously.

LogViewer Pro is lightweight in the sense it is very light on system resources, especially when you’ve opened simultaneously multiple large log files. It helps you to quickly analyze any log file by marking the information, errors and warnings present in it. Errors are marked as red, yellow signifies warnings and blue signifies information. You can however customize the colors according to your choice. LogViewer Pro also lets you create a new regular expression to be marked with custom color.

The search option present in the app helps you find any specific part of the log file easily. It also lets you search in forward and backward directions. You can also define filters to narrow down the search. It also lets you bookmark any place of your log file. You can get access to all the bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu.

Special “Follow tail” mode lets you change on per-tab basis. So you can enable “Follow tail” for one file, and disable it for another. The file highlighting feature now supports 20 different colors. Lines can be matched using RegEx, so you can use one color option for several different words: you should specify “word1|word2|...” for this.

LogViewer Pro Features:

• Fast scrolling, lightweight app that consumes low memory even when you are working with large log files.
• Supports any file size. (Even files of size 4 GB and larger)
• Multi-tabbed interface for easy comparison.
• Auto-reload file, “Follow tail” mode.
• Allows to highlight some lines. (“errors”, “warnings” and “info” )
• Supports multiple encodings: ANSI, OEM, UTF-8, Unicode LE/BE etc.
• Powerful log file search both in forward and backward directions.
• File printing, line wrapping, configurable tab expansion, line numbers
• Always-on-top option
• Unicode names support

The application is a boon for people like us who have to deal with large log files regularly. It runs on all 32-bit versions of Windows.

Note: This application is free for Personnel Home Use only.

[ Download LogViewer Pro ] [ Mirror Download Link ]

The Emsisoft Emergency kit is a freeware portable virus scanning tool for Windows that you can use to clean infected systems. The Emsisoft Emergency kit is basically collection of four utilities that you can run without installation from any device connected to the computer system.

The four utilities included in the emergency kit are: a disc scanner to check and clean infected systems, a command line scanner that offers the same functionality but without the graphical user interface, HiJackFree that provides an in depth analysis of the system and a cleanup software called BlitzBlank which can delete data that cannot be deleted by normal means.

To use the Emsisoft Emergency kit, all you have to do is download the zip file and extract it to any portable device (if you want to run the kit on other machines) or extract it to your local hard-drive. To start up Emsisoft Emergency Kit, simply double-click the start.exe executable file. This launches a choice screen for you to choose one of the four main programs included in the kit. Each of these programs can be launched with a double-click. You can also launch the programs directly from the kit’s directory.

Emsisoft Emergency Kit Scanner

The main interface of the scanner displays the current security status of the system as well as update and scan buttons. It looks very similar to the Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5 security status screen, which we have reviewed earlier. The scanner may want to retrieve the latest definition files before scanning, from an online server, it is recommended to allow this if your firewall asks for confirmation.

Clicking on the scan button opens a new window, with options to do a quick, smart, deep or custom scan of the system (again looks like Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5 scanner).

• Quick Scan: Scans all active programs, spyware traces and tracking cookies.
• Smart Scan: Scans same as Quick Scan plug programs and Windows files.
• Deep Scan: Scans all files on the hard drive.
• Custom Scan: Option to do a custom scan of the PC.

Emsisoft Command line Scanner

The command line scanner tool is the same scanner sans the graphical user interface, made for the experienced advance users and can be used perfectly for batch jobs. You can get all the command line options and help on how to use it here.

Emsisoft HiJackFree

HiJackFree included with both this emergency kit and the Anti-malware app is the same app. It helps advanced users to detect, remove and manage processes, services, drivers, autorun entries, open ports, hosts file entries and more.

It’s offers similar function like the old HiJackThis app, except that it offers detailed information by using its online analysis function for advice and the results are color coded directly in the listing. Green for instance is given to safe entries.

Emsisoft BlitzBlank

BlitzBlank is a tool for experienced users and for all those who deal with Malware on a daily basis. Malware infections are not always easy to clean up.

BlitzBlank deletes files, Registry entries and drivers at boot time before Windows and all other programs are loaded.

Note: Use BlitzBlank only if you know what you are doing.

After using Emsisoft Emergency kit, we can safely conclude that it is one of the best computer security emergency kit that will be praised by both normal and advanced users for its usefulness and effectively cleaning any infected computer system.

Starter is a freeware portable application that functions as a startup manager, Windows service manager and process monitor. It is very small but very powerful in functionality.

As you go on installing new applications in Windows, some of them are configured to launch themselves when Windows starts up. This slows up the start-up process and you end up hogging your system resources. You can use Starter to remove any unneeded program that is in your startup list so that it doesn’t run on startup any more and you gain back system performance.

Using Starter is pretty straight forward, you just have to deselect those apps which you don’t want. If are confused with any entry you can take the help of Google to get more info. Starter will help you with detailed information about the applications including where they are located in the hard-disk. Starter also lists all startup entries, including hidden registry entries as well as common startup folder items.

Starter doubles up as a very good process monitor. You can use it to list all the running process including details such as their current memory use, process priority, thread counts, and DLL. It also lets you stop selected process (even a Windows NT service, if you are having enough access rights).

Starter also comes with a very good, advanced service manager (better than Windows service manager).

[ Download Starter ]