PCTips Box

As I am sure you know I have been waffling on for years about how your PC monitors your web surfing activities and logs every website you’ve ever visited, from the day you switched it on, in a hidden and protected file called index.dat. Regular readers may also recall a couple of utilities I’ve been recommending to wipe these files. Back n the days of Widows 98 my cleaner of choice was Spider, sadly it was never updated for XP but then along came Crap Cleaner CCleaner, as it is now known which does a brilliant job. Now we have a new utility that works with CCleaner, called Click&Clean, Basically it lets you put a quick-launch icon appropriately enough a toilet roll on your Internet Explorer or Firefox toolbar. You need to have CCleaner installed on your PC first, and the new icon has to be added manually, so don’t forget to read the instructions. One click and it launches CCleaner and your tracks are covered. (more…)

Stop for a minute and take a look at your desktop. How many icons, folders and files do you see? Probably a lot. So what’s the big deal?

It could be causing your Windows Computer to slow down.

Not when your Computer boots, but when you log on or off, right click on folders or icons, even trying to open a folder or file from the desktop. For users with roaming profiles, having a large user profile can degrade system performance. But it can also cause issues even if you do not have a roaming profile.

Storing large folders or file on your desktop is convenient, as long as you keep the size under control. Even if you use tools such as Disk Cleanup or CCleaner, desktop files and folders are not included during cleanup and can get out of control. (more…)

This second and final part of our quick tour through the world of portable applications will focus mostly on programs that are not necessarily needed by the common user, but may come in handy in certain situations or to the more experienced Windows fans.

Compressing and decompressing files may be a very easy task, but things change when you have to use another computer that doesn’t have a compression utility installed, so here are some of our suggestions. You can try using the trial version of popular archivers WinRAR and PowerArchiver, or consider giving 7-zip, IZArc2Go and PeaZip a go, which are free for both personal and commercial use.

An organizer is not very helpful if you need to access your agenda from more than one computer. To overcome this inconvenience, feel free to install any of the following portable organizers and personal information managers: Sunbird, EverNote, EssentialPIM Pro, Avignon Concept or MSD Organizer. (more…)

Slow computer getting you down? Wish you could speed up your system so that games won’t crawl by like a slide show permanently set to slow? Well look no further! I shall share five easy steps that you can take to improve your system’s speed! Most of them are free of charge, and all of them should have some effect on your system. So without further ado, we begin with:

1. Remove spyware and adware from your system. Have you noticed recently that ads seem to pop up whenever you go to a Web page? Or that Internet speeds are about that of diseased livestock? Your system’s probably chock full of spyware. What to do? Well, thankfully there are several things you can do. First, download either Spybot-S&D or Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, and run it. This should remove most if not all of the spyware and adware on your system. Neither of these are particularly robust, however, so we move on to: (more…)

We have been receiving many mails from our readers these days with a problem that when ever they start up windows they see the error messages like as follows:

* Windows cannot find ‘C:\windows\svchost.exe.’
* Could not load or run ‘C:\windows\svchost.exe.’ specified in the registry
* Windows cannot find ‘C:\Windows\System32\amvo.exe’
* “Windows cannot find ‘copy.exe’

These type of messages appear at windows startup, when windows tries to load the virus files like amvo.exe, copy.exe etc. These error messages appear, because these files were removed by your anti-virus programs but still the registry entries for them exist.

Different types of viruses create some files which got executed at the windows startup so that they can come in action as windows load itself. In order to run the primary virus files required, they create run entries in windows registry. (more…)

Do you feel that the free space on your hard-disk is too little ? Does it seem that something fishy is going on which is eating your hard-disk space? If your answer is yes, read on till end to uncover the secrets of this type of behavior.

Some of the key reasons are:

* Temp files on C drive
* Temporary Internet files
* Backup files created during installation
* Windows system restore data
* Duplicate copies of large files like movies, songs etc.
* Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates.

There are some more reasons as well, but these are most common reasons which can be observed. Now the important question, how to fix it ? Lets read on for the solution. (more…)

The Windows Disk Cleanup utility does a good job of deleting old Microsoft temp files, logs, memory dumps and other OS related junk files. It can free up a lot of space on your computer but it often leaves a lot of junk behind. A great program that I use all the time on my computers is called CCleaner. Not only does it clean the Microsoft OS related junk files from your computer, it also removes junk files from other popular applications such as Firefox. Additionally, it is very good at locating other temporary files. (more…)