September 9, 2014

First Hand Experience With Piriform Recuva

I found myself in a jam the other day as I was moving hundreds of gigs around to the new drives I bought. There was a bit of a mis-click and instead of copying a folder of images from one drive to another, I deleted it. And not to the Recycle Bin either. My setting in XYPlorer is to bypass that and just get rid of the files. This is one of the very rare times when the Recycle Bin would have saved me. But I didn’t fret, I jumped over to my trusted set of disk utilities and use the Undelete function inside Ashampoo to get the file back. That would have been a great end to the story, but none of the Ashampoo tools recognize my 5TB dive. Or something else is wrong, but it couldn’t read any information off the drive. Oh crap, now what? Alright, no need to panic, plenty of tools out there to choose […]

October 2, 2013

Ashampoo Burning Studio 12 for $7.99

  If you’ve read my previous articles, you know I’m a big fan of the Ashampoo Tools. Uninstaller 5 has been a huge help with managing, testing and then removing software and WinOptimizer 10 is a great and cheap way to clean the junk off your machine, defrag your drives and tune things up. And for those who want to get tricky there is Core Tuner. But if you’re looking for some CD/DVD/Blu-Ray burning software, you can now get a copy of Ashampoo Burning Studio 12 for a mere $7.99. It does all the obvious tasks of burning discs, burning ISO images, making system backups and it comes with an incredibly easy to use interface that simplifies tasks. I’ve got a lot of backups to make and I’ll be using Burning Studio 12. It has just the DVD features and not a bunch of stuff I won’t use. If you need some DVD software you won’t it any cheaper than […]

July 1, 2013

Removing Programs with Ashampoo Uninstaller – System Optimization Series

If only Windows had an Undo function when it came to programs. When you uninstall a program so much of it is left behind that it’s like you never got rid of it. You end up with orphaned files and folders all over the place. VirtualBox has an awesome Undo feature that lets you throw away any of the changes you make to a machine. Install apps with reckless abandon, change what you want, but then shut the machine down and check the option to discard changes and everything is back the way it was. Too bad you can’t get Windows to do that… Or can you? Installation Monitor tools have been around for a long time. I even remember Symantec putting out the Norton Uninstall Deluxe for Windows, which was actually a pretty decent tool for removing apps from your machine. It was also great for monitoring the changes made during an install. Yet another good tool from their […]

June 29, 2013

CCleaner – The Basics of System Maintenance – System Optimization Series

When it comes to system maintenance you may not need to look any further than CCleaner. This free tool should be the very first step in recovering space and cleaning the registry after deleting a slew of unused programs. The cleaning tools take care of the typical browser cleaning functions as well as cleaning up history from dozens of applications. You can easily remove the document history from Word and Media Player. Once that’s done you can check the registry for orphaned entries. Under the Tools option you get quick access to all your installed Apps so you can remove old progams. You can also see everything in the Startup group where you can either delete the entries or simply disable them. Don’t need a particular app for a little while? You can put in on pause instead of removing so you can go back later. You can also check out what Scheduled Tasks you have on your machine such […]

June 28, 2013

TuneUp Utilities 2013 – System Optimization Series

The barrage of tools available in TuneUp Utilities 2013 reminds me of the grandeur that once was Norton Utilities. Far more than just a simple cleanup utility TuneUp Utilities offers tools to check the heath of your hard drive, monitor which programs you haven’t used so they can be removed, disable startup programs, check where all your hard drive space is going and it even comes with a Turbo Mode that boosts system processes when the system gets bogged down. Of course it does the usual tasks of cleaning up hard drive space, cleaning the registry, defragging hard drives and removing browser traces. What I like about TuneUp Utilities is that it isn’t just using the built in Windows tools. It presents it’s own tool for toggling whether a program should start when Windows boots. It has it’s own Disk Space Explorer that allows you to see where hard drive space is being used and lets you move and delete […]

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