Maintaining your disc drive in good working order can be a complicated job, and one that usually calls for an entire library of utilities and applications. As luck would have it there’s a less complicated option: you could simply install Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite.

The software is capable of creating, formating, deleting or undeleting, resizing or merging your selected partitions, for example. A straightforward set of backup tools let you do everything from backing up emails or selected files, to copy separate partitions or clone a whole hard drive. Additional modules assist with migrating to a new hard drive; installation and management of multiple operating systems on one computer; securely erasing a drive to get rid of private data; or defragmenting your files to increase performance.

Once you first start the program, for example, you are faced with an easy “Express Mode” menu that organizes the program’s functions into categories, such as “Partitioning”, “Backup and Recovery” and “Security and Optimization”. If you’re a newbie to Paragon’s software then this will aid you in finding your way around. (And if that’s not the case, you’ll be able to start the full program with a click as an alternative, and have total access to every advanced feature.)

And when you have picked out an option, the program will show a wizard to walk you through the process. These seem to be fairly well-designed, clearly explaining every step involved. And they will not make any changes to the harddrve till you expressly give permission (therefore you won’t find you’ve accidentally deleted something crucial by clicking “Next” once too often).

Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite seems to do a very good job of seeing to it that you can prepare your drives to better accommodate your requirements, with the very minimum of risk to your data. Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite makes up a great software package, with a neat user interface that’s quite simple to use.

Check it out at Paragon-Software.com.

As disc drives become larger and larger, they appear to fill quicker and quicker. Certainly, there is a whole lot of good stuff you intend to hold on to, but it really is too easy to allow things to get out of control. Next thing you realize that TB hard-drive you bought is 95% filled a bit like that 40 GB drive was a year before. So where did all the space go? Or maybe more correctly, what did you save on there that filled it all up?

JDiskReport is a utility you should utilize to take care of where all your disk space disappeared to. Yeah, you could possibly just run directory listings and sort by size or date and stuff like that, only with JDiskReport it’s simple to look at the bigger picture. It lets you identify what you’ve got on there, and shows it to you in easy to grasp charts and graphs, in addition to textually. At times that pie chart or a bar graph can make sense where a big screen packed with numbers just won’t do. You are able to examine things not only by size, but additionally by size distribution—the number of files you have that are 4- and 16 MB as opposed to between 16- and 64 MB, as an example. Or look at modified date—what number of older files do you have in comparison with how many more recent files? It also breaks them down by file type, so you can establish you have more Word DOC files (all those crucial reports) than you do MP3 files.

JDiskReport is a Java application, so you can utilize it on any computer with an appropriate Java runtime installed. That means it will run on a Linux system, your Mac, or a Windows PC.

Check it out at JGoodies.

Jokosher is a multi-track music editor. The user interface applies concepts that are well-known to musicians instead of counting on their understanding of multi-track recorders. Guitarists and other players who don’t desire to spend the cash or the time to learn the details of multi-tracking will value this program. The concept of Jokosher is to have the ability to ignore the program and be ready to focus on your music.

You are not constricted to only one instrument with Jokosher. You are able to add an audio file of your own or somebody else’s, drums, bass, cello, cymbals etc merely by clicking it in the selection box. It’s also possible to solo the instruments or mute them. It has the capability of moving and trimming and splitting throughout the editing process. VU sliders control the volumes during mixing. And you may import audio in WAV, MP3, FLAC or Ogg Vorbis formats. It’s also possible to export your completed project back to any of these.

Within the edit mode, the audio is broken into sections that you can split and move by dragging around, it is easy to trim and discard blocks or replicate them and put them where you wish. You may also copy and paste them for repetitive riffs or fills wherever required.

And because Jokosher is open source, what you see is just what you get at the moment. New contributions from musicians and coders around the world are added as they are developed. When you download Jokosher you can easily check occasionally for all the enhancements and new features being added or maybe even make some yourself.

Check it out at http://www.jokosher.org/

For those who enjoy using drawing and painting software but require an open source program for a tablet or digitizer, you might want to check into the features of MyPaint. This program supports pressure sensitive graphics tablets and is configured for artists that want to concentrate on their creations as opposed to being distracted by the program.

MyPaint means that you can create freehand drawings on a graphics tablet with a surprising selection of digital paint brushes. You’re able to toggle the paintbrush utility windows with shortcuts and also make your own brushes. The user interface stays put in the background where it is easy to get at it if you need it but you can still work without it intruding. The graphical user interface for manipulating layers features a layer dialogue, making it easier to use. Because it has unlimited basic layer support you never need to resize the canvas.

MyPaint has a big lay out of configuration and brush creation choices. The palette has a lot of options and distinct features like autogeneration of colors and shades. The brush collection includes ink, charcoal, pencil and smudge; the brush engine lets you experiment with your own brushes in addition to supplying tilt support for better control. If there’s a brush you like that isn’t included you’re able to import it or export one to another application.

There are 35 brushes in each group. There are 3 especially created artist brush sets and 2 non-artist brush groups, the classic and the experimental. It can save your creations in OpenRaster (.ora) or export it to JPG or PNG.

MyPaint supports ten languages and It has a quick-start tutorial.

Check out further information and download at http://wiki.mypaint.info/Main_Page

Storing image files on your computer can fast become disorderly and cluttered.

If you’ve only got just a few pictures—maybe several web images, perhaps some digital photos—it’s simple to keep a record of all of them. Though in the event you go beyond a particular point, everything just about spins out of control. Which means that more likely than not,you’ve got duplicates of images. And also considering the size of digital photo files nowadays, even a few extra copies could take up a lot more additional space on your hard drive or memory card.Wouldn’t it be nice if you could run through all that stuff once in a while and get rid of the extras?

VisiPics is a tool that can help you do just that. Although it can do a straight file comparison looking for matching files and checksums, it’s smart enough to take a look at your images in several different ways to see just how similar non-identical images are. Meaning that two versions of the same photo—maybe one cropped a certain way and the other not—are most likely going to show up as duplicates. You may then decide if you choose to keep both of them or not. And in order to make it easy, all suspected duplicates are displayed side-by-side so that you can make the final call.

Check it out at Visipics.info.

One particular misconception to have about your PC is to believe that its gradual slowdown and growing lack of stability is due to its physical health – that the only choice is to keep it going for as long as is possible and then get a new computer. In actual fact,with the overwhelming majority of cases, system instability and slowness is as a result of the state of your Windows installation over time – reinstall Windows from scratch on a fresh formatted drive and your computer is returned to new.

Of course, the down side to all of this is that re-installing takes the best part of an uninterrupted day to accomplish. It’s definitely considerably better to extend the life of your present installation by keeping your PC well maintained. You can do this manually,or else you can decide on a program like MAGIX PC Check & Tuning 2011 to do the job for you.

Once running, MAGIX PC Check & Tuning 2011 consists of a group of features. To start with, there’s the PC Check utility, which is placed in the background conducting a variety of checks on an hourly schedule, alerting you to any possible challenges it discovers. Then there’s the “1-click quick maintenance” tool: click this to see a list of frequent maintenance tasks – tick the ones you need to do, click the button and leave the program to carry out the rest.

The final component is the main PC Check & Tuning tool itself,which happens to be where you take full power over the maintenance process. This comes with a large variety of tools – some integrated into the main program itself, others launched as separate standalone tools – and overlaps to some extent the other two components. However, the 3 make an effort to work together, providing you with a staggered solution to PC maintenance: the PC Check utility helps to keep a zealous observation on major areas of system health, while the one-click tool is designed to be run on a weekly basis. Finally, the main component is there for occasional use to quickly optimize and speed up your system. (more…)

Nearly everybody can benefit from utilizing a To Do list to keep control of their personal and business tasks. Wunderlist is a good task management utility that can be utilized to handle your daily tasks and, different than other To Do list management systems, the program is superbly painless to use.

Available on both Windows and Mac, Wunderlist supports the Getting Things Done ideology, so you’ll be able to more easily concentrate on acting upon your to do list. The program is meant for use on a single computer, although if you register for a free account you’ll be able to synchronise your data online. This not just means that your data is backed up, but also that Wunderlist can be set up on different computers.

When set up to synchronise your to do list between multiple computers, Wunderlist can still be used in offline mode, and synchronisation will occur the next time an internet connection is available. Currently available for Windows and Mac platforms, there’s also an iPad and iPhone version of Wunderlist anticipated for release very shortly letting you take your task list when traveling and keep it up to date.

With plenty of keyboard shortcuts and easy task sorting and organization using drag and drop, Wunderlist is very easy to get rolling with, without the requirement of reading through a drawn-out introductory guide. Your list can be used in numerous ways – a simple list, a series of tasks with due dates, or a to do list complete with priorities. Wunderlist can be easily adjusted to work the way you prefer it to.

Wunderlist is available free and can be downloaded by visiting the program’s web page at 6wunderkinder.com

A lot of people know how much RAM is in their PC, and perhaps the type and speed, but after that the details get a little fuzzy. That could be a potential issue if, for example, you are considering adding extra RAM to your computer, or perhaps do some memory over-clocking.

It’s not necessary to open your machine to discover more, though. Simply run PassMark’s latest release RAMMon, it will access the Serial Presence Detect (SPD) data on your memory modules, and immediately let you know everything you ever needed to find out about your RAM setup.

This begins with the basics: the number of DIMMs you have, which sort (DDR2 or DD3, for example), capacity, the memory slots that are occupied, and any that are free and available, altogether very useful if (for instance) you’re running the program on a system your considering purchasing.

It also has details like the DIMM’s manufacturer and part number, which will help out if you’re considering adding more RAM and would like to make sure it’s compatible. RAMMon also has a “Search!” link that opens a browser window at Amazon.com, displaying matching DIMMs.

The program provides extensive details on the CAS latencies supported by these DIMMs, and all your other memory timings, crucial information if you’re planning to fine-tune these for a PC performance boost.

There are competing utilities around that accomplish something similar, but RAMMon reveals more information than most, and so if you need to find out more about your RAM configuration then it’s certainly a great place to start.

This program is free for personal use, but companies must purchase a licence, with prices starting at $15.
Check it out here.

The great thing about open-source software such as Google’s Chromium (on which the popular Chrome web browser is based) is that there is always somebody prepared to take the source code and move it in a new direction, or at any rate add new or better things lacking from the original program. ChromePlus is one of these things, taking Google’s progressively popular browser and sticking on various new features to give it additional functionality.

Now, ChromePlus – which recently updated to version 1.4.2.0 (repairing several bugs) – provides 5 features lacking from Chrome: firstly is support for mouse gestures, letting you execute various actions by dragging the mouse in a certain manner (for instance, to scroll the page down, click and drag down the page using your right mouse button). The 2nd feature is “super-drag”, which lets you click and drag on a chosen weblink to open it up in a new tab, or click and drag selected text to search it using your default search engine.

The IE tab allows you to view those webpages that don’t work in ChromePlus in a new tab using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, seeing to it they work right, whilst you can also double-click tabs to close them. The last extra feature is support for third-party download tools – if you’ve installed stuff like NetAnts, FlashGet3 or WebThunder (among others), you can right-click a download link to download it utilizing one of these tools.

Another thing worth mentioning is the privacy features are entirely customizable, a big difference from chrome.

The latest version of ChromePlus is now available for free download. Check out the homepage at chromeplus.org

Mozilla have released the first public beta of Firefox 4, and whilst it’s not exactly stable so far, the browser already includes a few worthy of note changes that are well worth a closer look.

Take Flash, for example – are you tired of applets crashing your browsing session? Mozilla are, too, and so beta 4 gains different crash avoidance features to inhibit this from happening. If Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight crash or lock up in that case they will no longer bring down the complete browser, and you can simply refresh the current page and attempt to view it again. Sounds fine to us.

One obvious interface tweak sees the tabs moved to the very top of the browser window, which Mozilla say this is giving them “top visual priority for more efficient and intuitive browsing”. Everyone else will say it’s simply borrowing from Chrome, however either way, it does fit in for a cleaner, simpler interface.

Also along the same lines, it’s good to set eyes on the menu bar replaced by a solo Firefox button, top left of the screen. Clicking this gives you entry to a good number of the options you require: New Window, Save Page As, Print, Find, History and the rest. Furthermore again, it altogether helps to make simpler the browser, cutting down the amount of places where you have to click to look for commands, as well as leaving the biggest quantity of space available for the web page you’re looking at.

The Add-Ons Manager has been changed, now taking up an entire tab of its own, and making it easier to discover new-found extensions and handle the ones you have already.

And elsewhere there are privacy improvements, recent support for HTML5 and CSS3, and several changes that may perhaps turn out to be very useful in the future. Indexed DB, for instance, will permit sites to save data locally, therefore apps like GDocs can operate even while you’re not connected to the internet.

There’s enough to discover and performance seems good quality for a beta. If you’d like to give it a check out, then download your copy here.