Losing your valuable files as a result of a hard drive failure, virus attack or even accidental file deletion can be very devastating. Whether it's your photos, giant music collection, important documents - data loss is always costly and stressful. Hard drives always crash, it's just a matter of time, therefore DO regular backups. Especially when there are so many free backup software options that can run regular backups automatically. Just set it once to run scheduled backups every week or so and forget about them. Then when disaster happens you will be able to restore your files in no t

Setting it as the default is now as simple as opening up the "Default Programs" panel then associating the search protocol with the third-party service you want. You will also need to set this program as the defa

The research feature is not only a Word 2007 tool but it is inbuilt into every Office 2007 application. It also combines several third party sources like Gale's company profile s, WorldLingo or HighBeam along with standard issue Microsoft resources like Encarta or Live Sear

An even better alternative is DropBox , however since it's still in beta, you will have to wait for the next round of invites before you can get in. With DropBox you're also able to access your files from other PCs, keep them synchronized across multiple computers and even keep a detailed log of all changes made to the file and restore it to an earlier version. Quite useful for people who work from multiple locati

The above tools are handy for running hard drive backups to another partition, external drives or your own FTP server. However if you want to backup only a handful of files and store them on reliable third party servers then you can try a free online backup service called Mozy . It's quick to configure, fully automated and available both for Mac and Windows PCs. The only problem is that the free account gives you only 2 GB of storage space. See all Mozy features h

If you are looking for a desktop calculator to handle complex mathematical calculations, SpeedCrunch would make a good choice. One thing that it is missing is the lack of a graphing ability for people to plot graphs and perform graphical calculations. Other than that, I have no complaints about this

Although not mandatory on all PCs, having some type of protection on your computer today is almost always a must. The problem that most tech savvy users have with them, is that most, just don't work and most eat up way to many resources. Having a way to actually test some of the options out there, is a fantastic way to make your final decision. So you try it out...Download the latest AVG, Symantec or NOD32 trial and see which comes out on top with each of these to

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Portable Firefox - The Web Browser is your door to the Internet, so first and foremost secure it. Use the portable version of Firefox from you USB drive as opposed to the browser on the public compu

The majority of the time you end up relying on on another product to get the annoyingware off of your machine. So now you've got a $60 bloated product eating up resources on your machine and doing absolutely nothing to protect

Internet Explorer 7 - Click Tools and then Delete Browsing History >Delete All

Internet Explorer (Older versions) - Click Tools and then Internet Options. On the General tab, under Temporary Internet files, click Delete Files, and then click Delete Cookies. Under History, click Clear History. Delete all the files in the temporary folder of your user account which you can find by browsing to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\T

Comodo Backup [No Longer Available] is an excellent backup utility from the creators of Comodo Firewall. It's free, easy to use and have everything you might need. You can easily backup your local files and folders to anywhere on your computer, network, DVD / CD or even FTP server. Plus it can be set to run automatically on specified time interv

Comodo has different backup modes: copy, move and synchronization. So apart from simply copying/moving the files from one place to another you can set Comodo to keep source and backup copy synchronized. That is to say, whenever you make some changes to the original files the changes will be replicated on your backup c

There are several different tests to run through. All attempting to try and take advantage of all the various activity that normal malware would. These tools are fantastic. Especially for a brand new system you may be setting up in a business or enterprise environm

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article in which I described some of the features I particularly liked about Vista. However in the comments Justin and anob pointed out that a couple of the features I had mentioned were not actually Vista speci

Hinx Backup Easy doesn't have that many features as the one above but if you're looking for a simple automated backup tool it's a worthy candidate. Similar to Comodo, Backup Easy also allows you to backup files to a local drive or FTP server. There is also a scheduler to run backups on a regular basis. Backup Easy can do both full and incremental backups. In the latter case, windows game Compatibility|https://windowsmastery.com/ it runs full backup only once, every backup afterwards just changes the files that were modified since last bac