PCTips Box

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…)

The Microsoft acquisition Sysinternals that is famous for their useful Windows utilities has a new site up that allows you to easily access any of their utilities for free over the internet in your command prompt. This allows you to run any of their utilities without first downloading it to your computer. Just open an administrative level command prompt and type in:

\\live.sysinternals.com\tools\toolname.exe

For example if you want to run Autoruns (a great program to see what starts up automatically) type \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\autoruns.exe and hit Enter.

Every Sysinternals utility is available for “live” use. (more…)

No one ever bought a car or a computer because it could go slower. If your hard-disk drive seems to take forever to go about its business, or if it’s having trouble keeping up with your CD-R burning software, chances are it’s time for a tune-up and defragmentation.

Step 1: Close any open applications. Disable antivirus utilities, screen savers and other background programs. Make sure you’ve quit all programs in Windows by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete once (don’t press it twice or you’ll restart the computer).

Step 2: Windows will show you a list of applications running. Highlight each application (one at a time) and click on End Task to close each one. (more…)

There are literally hundreds of freeware applications and utilities that you can download for Windows XP to tweak and improve computer performance, however, it’s still hard to find really good ones for Windows Vista. If you’re looking for some good free programs to configure, customize and tweak Windows Vista, check out the list below. The programs range from system configuration tweakers to Windows Vista boot screen modifiers. Enjoy!

1. MZ Vista Force is a full-fledged tweaking machine! It’s broken down into Performance Tweaks, Windows Tweaks, Internet Optimizer, StartUp Manager, Services Manger, and Backup Restore. Use it to easily clean up junk files off your hard disk or speed up Internet browsing in Vista. You can also modify lots of esoteric settings like the speed at which the Start Menu displays and clearing out the page file at shutdown. Lots of options and a definite download! (more…)