There are lots of application launchers out there and we have covered some here, here, and here. Did you ever notice that every one of them calm to be the fastest in launching programs? Ofcourse there are various methods, my personal favorite is to use Run hotkey + AddToRun. But what if you hate hotkeys and want a quick way to launch a program using a mouse?

Deskbug aims to solve this problem. It is a small launcher utility(a bug) that always resides on the foreground. You can drag it around the screen and position it where you feel comfortable. Now double-click this small bug icon, in the main window add any file, program, or website link, and click Save.

Note that this utility is quite customizable, you can change the icon(if you don’t like the bug icon). If you want to test an a file, program, or link before saving it, click Test. Once all is done, right-click the Deskbug icon and you will find all items in a simple list.

Note: To add a website, just type the address under File name. The link will open in your Windows default browser.

It is great for those items that you use frequently. Whether it is your favorite file, program, or a website, now it is only a click away.

Download Deskbug

It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Enjoy!

Do you want a simple utility that can turn on computers over local area network? You don’t need to execute complex commands anymore. MagiWOL is a simple little WOL(Wake On Lan) utility for Windows that can wake up computer(s) on your network quickly.

All you need to do is to enter the computer name and MAC address and it will recognize the computer automatically over the network. It also supports SecureOn password protection. You have an option to either wake up a selected computer or wake up all computers over the network at once.

The names of the computer along with their information can be exported as well. If you want to perform quick wake up of any specific computer without disturbing any other computer over the network, there is always a Quick Wake button.

Note: In order to use this tool, Wake On LAN must be enabled.

Download MagiWOL

It works on Windows XP, Windows 2003/2008 Server, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Enjoy!

We have covered lots of tips on recovering deleted files, you can find them here and here. But what if you don’t want a specific file to be recoverable? There are certain reasons why some people don’t want their files to be restored, maybe they are selling their computers and don’t want someone else to get hold of their data, or perhaps simply because the files are quite sensitive.

To make the files irrecoverable in Windows you will need to overwrite the free space with some other data. Prevent Restore is a free tool for Windows that does exactly that. It takes over the free space and fills it with some junk data, once done, it will later remove this data and your previous files will become irrecoverable.

Simply run this tool, click Next, select the drives where you want to run the anti-recovery operation, and click Next once again.

In the next step, select the data with which you want to overwrite the deleted data. You can also choose to clear the recycle bin and make all files irrecoverable.

There are few options, such as, to clear virtual memory cache on disk and most data selections, but for this to be enabled you need to register(which is free). Once the operation is complete, all deleted files on the drive that you selected will become irrecoverable.

Download Prevent Restore

It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 only. Enjoy!

Microsoft Office 2010 is getting quite some coverage because of its cool user interface and enhanced features. If you can spare some time to play around with it, you will definitely feel the difference as compared to older versions of MS Office. Today, lets review two important enhanced security features in Office 2010.

Protected Mode:

Every time you will download some document , Microsoft Office 2010 will open it in Protected Mode. It will not allow you to edit the documents unless document editing is enabled. Click  “Enable Editing” option to enabled document editing as shown in the followings screenshot.

Restrict Editing:

Office 2010 offers yet another enhanced feature called Restrict Editing. You can launch this option from Review menu.

In Restrict Editing, you can limit formatting to a selection of styles, allow only particular type of editing,  limit users to some specific part of the document etc. Once you have made changes, you can click Start Enforcement Protection button to apply them. You can also disable them later if needed. Following screenshot shows all available options under Restricted Mode.

With these security features, Office 2010 aims to provide security to both publishers and readers. Enjoy!

Upcoming Windows 7 is being said to be the most secure and reliable as compared with other versions of Windows, but you can still run into problem, the worst case being when your Windows stops booting. Windows 7 has a solution to this problem, create System Repair Disc. Once you run into this problem,  you can boot your system with it and it will give you access to System Recovery tools which will let you diagnose and correct errors within Windows 7. It is very easy to create a System Repair disk since no special disk burning software is required.

Note: If you haven’t created the System Repair Disk and your Windows 7 fails to boot, you can borrow it from your friend or co-worker. The system repair disk should work on all computers that are running Windows 7.

First, navigate all the way to Start > All Programs > Maintenance > Create a System Repair Disc.

Now, insert a blank CD/DVD into you CD/DVD ROM and click Create disc. An empty CD should be large enough for a System Repair Disc because it does not consume much space. It will take some time to create the repair disk, you will be able to monitor the process with the help of progress bar.

Once the process is complete, click OK and eject disk from drive.

Thats all, now keep the System Repair Disc safe since it will be needed when Windows 7 fails to boot. Enjoy!

As you all know that ISO image is replica of an entire CD or DVD and the entire contents of a disc can be perfectly represented in a single ISO file. What you do when you download the ISO image file? You burn it to the CD or DVD, right?  You will need to install and use a burning software tool in order to burn ISO file, but not anymore.  Windows 7  has a build-in Disc Image Burner tool that lets you burn images instantly.

Lets explore how we can burn an ISO image in Window 7. First of all right-click the ISO Image file and select Burn Disk Image. A dialogue box will be displayed as shown in the screenshot below.

Insert the blank disc into CD/DVD ROM(if the inserted disk is not empty then it will eject itself immediately), click Burn to start the disc burning operation, it will take some time to analyze the disk and then burn the ISO Image. If you want to confirm that burning process went fine without a glitch, you can check the Verify disc after burning checkbox. Enjoy!

Do you want an image viewer that can be fully controlled via a keyboard? Most Image Viewers allow keyboard functionality but they soon get cluttered up with various other features. If you have a large photo collection that you want to browse in fullscreen mode and also want to control everything through a keyboard, then there is still luck.

Keyboard Image Viewer is a unique image viewer for Windows that has been developed keeping keyboard functionality in mind. Whether you want to rate, tag, and search photos, you can do so using your keyboard. It supports the following image formats: JPG, PNG, TIF, BMP and GIF(including animation). To begin, first of all select the folders that you want to browse and add them in the library.

Once done, click OK and it will immediately start showing the pictures in fullscreen mode. This is where all the fun begins, the next step would be to control everything through the keyboard(individual keys + hotkeys). If you want to leave fullscreen mode, hit Alt + Enter.

Now to rate an image, click any numerical keys from 1 to 5(press ~ to clear the rating). You can perform a quick search of all photos that have been rated 3 or higher, by pressing 3 in Numpad.

To tag an image press T, enter the tag, and hit Enter. Suggestions are enabled by default, which means that when you start typing it will suggest tags that you have previously used.

Now to search for a specific image via filename or/and tag, you can press any one of the following keys: F3 or /. You can also exclude a keyword by adding the ‘-’ in front of them, for example in the screenshot below it will search for all images that are named ‘browser’ but don’t have the name ‘firefox’.

It can also detect and show duplicate images. Since finding duplicates take time, the developer has disabled it by default. To enable it, go to options by pressing F4.

Here you will find two options, the first one(track duplicates) will only find the exact duplicate, but if the second option is enabled(use image-based detection), then it will find duplicates even if they have been resized, cropped, or altered in any other way. Image-based detection is obviously slower. To add more folders in the library, go to Library Folders tab.

Once find duplicates option is enabled, you can search for all duplicates in your library by hitting Ctrl + D.

It is a dead-simple image viewer with some great functionalities that can be easily controlled with a keyboard. When running it takes around 35MB of system memory, which is quite impressive when compared with other image viewers.

Download Keyboard Image Viewer

It requires .NET Framework 3.0 to run and works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003/2008, and Windows 7. Enjoy!

There are so many ways in which you can stop unauthorized access to your computer but what if some one steals your hard drive? Windows 7 has a solution to this problem. BitLocker is a full disk encryption utility which was originally introduced in Windows Vista Enterprise edition and now it has been implemented in Windows 7 with some enhanced options like  USB drive encryption. It has now become very easy to protect your drives and even in case of stolen or lost disk your data will not be accessible to the unauthorized person.

Lets see how we can apply BitLocker drive encryption in Windows 7. First of all go to Start > Control Panel and choose BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Now to apply BitLocker on any specific drive, click  Turn On BitLocker.  Here is the dialogue box which will be displayed.

Now, set password of the particular drive by checking “Use a password to unlock the drive” and entering password twice.

You can also use your smart card to unlock the drive by using Use my smart card to unlock the drive or you can Automatically unlock the drive on this computer. Click Next to proceed to next step, at this step choose where you want to save your unlock key. This will be needed if you forgot your password, then you will be able to unlock the drive by using this key.

Click Next and  you will be taken to last step, confirm to encrypt the drive by clicking Start encrypting.

Now your drive will be protected and in case someone steals your hard drive or USB drive, that person will not be able to access your data. Enjoy!

Windows Media Center lets you enjoy videos, music, photos, TV, and much more. You can easily access the latest online videos, movie trailers, sports clips, etc through Windows Media Center on your PC. Now the upcoming version of Windows 7 Media Center will offer many more enhanced feature. You can now schedule Windows 7 Media Center to start downloading data at any specified/preferred time,  thus in this way you can prevent it sapping your bandwidth for the rest of the day.

First of all launch it from Start > Media Center.

Now, navigate to  Tasks > Settings > General. Here is the list of options that will be displayed.

From the list of available options, choose Automatic Download Option. Enter the start and stop time of automatic download and click Save.

Its that simple. Enjoy!

If you analyze your Ubuntu machine then you will be amazed to see that there is a long list of utilities and packages which you have never used or have no intention to ever use, but they are installed in your system nevertheless. Although they are not being used they are still consuming some resources in your system. You should clean up your system from unused packages so that you should get plenty of resources free for running applications.

Computer Janitor is a tool in Ubuntu which lets you find and remove software package which you might not need any more. It can also suggest some very useful changes in configuration files. Lets see how we can use it.

It is pre-installed and you can launch it from System > Administration > Computer Janitor.

Once launched, you will see the main window as shown in the screenshot below.

Now you will see list of programs that you have installed in your system, select the ones that you don’t need anymore and click Cleanup. Computer Janitor works like Windows Uninstall utility since it lets you remove the programs that you don’t need anymore in Ubuntu. Enjoy!