Software

All the software that we review are included in this category. If you want to look for a specific software, go through the sub-categories listed here.

May 3, 2013

Four Ways To Insert/Eject CD-ROM Tray In Windows

UK List, Microsoft, Software, Windows command prompt, Windows command line 19 Comments

Inserting or Ejecting CD-ROM in the PC CD-ROM trays is not an easy task especially when the computer is placed under a table. We present four ways to insert/eject CD-ROM tray in Windows automatically without pressing the button on the PC.

Most of the times the desktop PCs are located under the tables or in locations where we can’t get our hands easily. The most frequently used item from the desktop PC itself is the CD-ROM drive which has to be opened and closed by pressing the button on the CD-ROM. This is not convenient for all of us. So it is better to eject and insert the tray from within Windows. Here are a few methods that can be used to insert/eject the CD-ROM tray from within Windows easily:

Using Command Line Tool: Eject

Eject is a small command line utility that can be used to insert and eject the CD-ROM tray from command prompt. Download the utility and extract all the files in your Windows directory (So that you may be able to use it from command prompt easily).
Now open command prompt from Start –> Run –> cmd.
Write the following command to eject the CD-ROM tray:

C:\>eject D:

(Where D is your CD-ROM Drive)

If you want to insert the ejected CD-ROM tray, then issue the following command in the command prompt:

C:\>eject D: /l

(Where D is your CD-ROM Drive)

[download id=”61″]

Using Express CD Ejector (From the status bar)

If you are not fond of using the command line utilities, you can go for this small utility. Download and install the utility. It will minimize itself into the status bar. If you want to eject the CD-ROM tray, just double-click the icon. And if you want to insert the CD-ROM tray, just right-click the status bar icon and select “Close tray”

[download id=”62″]

Using Emsa CD Tray Pal

This is a really cool small utility for managing your CD-ROM eject and insert functions. This utility can take care of multiple CD-ROM drives. One more advantage of this is that hot keys can be assigned to the Insert and Eject function. So if you are a keyboard shortcut junkie, this utility is perfect for you. Download the utility.

[download id=”63″]

Using Registry To Add “Insert” In CD-ROM Drive Context Menu

Download cdeject.dll from below and copy to C:\Windows\system32\

(Where C is the Windows drive)

[download id=”64″]

Now download the following registry key, double-click it to add to your registry.

[download id=”65″]

Right click your CD-ROM drive and enjoy the insert and eject options :-).

If you have any other ways of doing all this, please let me know. I’ll put it here.

April 29, 2013

Manage Dropbox, SkyDrive and Google Drive From One Place

UK Software Backup, cloud computing, dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, windows live 0 Comments

There has been a surge in cloud storage apps in the recent times. Although Dropbox was not the first one to offer cloud storage with automatic synchronization capabilities but it was certainly the most popular one. But then came so many other online sync and backup apps from tech giants like Google having Google Drive, Microsoft furnishing their SkyDrive app and so on and so forth.

Almost all the services provide some cloud storage for free. The cloud storage varies from 2GB to unlimited storage. Dropbox offers 2GB free space to its users while Google Drive offer and Microsoft SkyDrive offer 5GB. Many people prefer to use free online storage to store their important documents and files.

For this, they make use of multiple services to make sure that they have enough storage space available. The problem with this approach is that you have to manage your files for each online cloud app separately. This takes more system resources as each service has its own dedicated app for synchronizing data to the cloud.

If you are using multiple cloud storage services like me, another problem is with locating the desired file or document. It becomes difficult to find a particular file on the cloud.

RainbowDrive is a Windows 8 app which strives to solve this problem for us. You can sign into different cloud storage services using RainbowDrive and then browse data of all the services in one place. You can manage, add, edit and delete files from any service which you have connected through RainbowDrive.

RainbowDrive is available for Windows 8 Store, Apple App Store (iPad) and Google Play (Android). It supports integration of the following cloud storage services:

Dropbox
Google Drive
Microsoft SkyDrive
Box (Currently in Beta)

RainbowDrive even supports multiple accounts of the same service provider making it a lot easier to expand your overall storage. It will show the total storage of all the services you are signed in and the free space available in total.

Although the interface of RainbowDrive is quite intuitive, it needs to be easier to use in my opinion. Once you have signed into any of your cloud storage account, your data will be synchronized with RainbowDrive and will appear in the app.

Overall, I like the idea of integrating cloud storage provider accounts but it should also have been done using the Desktop interface of Windows as not too many people will be comfortable with Windows 8 store apps at the moment.

Download RainbowDrive for Windows 8, iPad and Android

April 29, 2013

Easily Backup And Recover Data From Corrupted Hard Drive

UK Software Backup, Hardware, recovery 0 Comments

Any storage device such as a hard drive is the most important component of any computer. This is because all the data is stored on the storage device. All other hardware can be replaced but the data can’t be retrieved if the hard drive gets corrupted.

This is why we always say that backup is an essential part of our digital lives. I recently wrote an article about how to check and monitor hard drive health in Windows. This makes sure that we are aware of any future problems that may possibly occur.

Today we will go one step further and discuss how to recover our data even if the hard drive gets corrupted. Long time ago, we discussed about Unstoppable Copier which copies the contents of and CD/DVD even if it is unreadable and corrupt.

DataRescue DD (also known as DrDD) is a free software that can create an image of any hard drive even if it has been corrupted. You can always create an image and then copy the content to any other location.

DataRescue DD does not require any installation. Just unzip and run the executable. But you will need to run the executable with administrative privileges if you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8. Otherwise, the hard drive will not be detected. Each partition on the hard drive will be detected separately. You can select any drive as the source and then the destination where you want to save the data.

Unlike other backup and copy programs, DataRescue DD supports imaging the drive from both sides, from the start to the end and from the end to the start. The logic is very simple. Usually the hard drive gets corrupted contagiously. That means adjacent sectors will get damaged. Normal back programs will be stuck on those sectors and will not proceed forward.

Using DataRescue DD, you can easily skip those sectors which have been corrupted. All other data will be backed up.

Although there are many other data copying and imaging software available, DataRescue DD comes in handy when you have to skip the bad sectors from copying. The best feature of DataRescue DD is that it is portable and can be run from the USB flash drive.

April 28, 2013

How To Check And Monitor Hard Drive Health In Windows

UK Software Backup, Hardware, recovery 0 Comments

The hard drive is the most important component of a computer mainly because all the data is stored permanently in the hard drive. Like wise, hard drive failure is the worst case a person can encounter especially when no data has been backed up.

Modern hard drives make use of a technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which monitors the hard drive for different reliability indicators and reports any possible failure before it occurs.

If you have a modern hard drive, the S.M.A.R.T. technology will already be monitoring the health of your hard drive and this is done in the background. The user doesn’t have any idea of what’s being monitored. S.M.A.R.T. monitors a huge number of parameters to make sure that it reports all possible indicators to the user and warn if any indicator goes wrong. Here are some of the parameters which S.M.A.R.T. monitors:

Read Error Rate
Throughput Performance
Spin-Up Time
Start/Stop Count
Reallocated Sectors Count
Read Channel Margin
Seek Error Rate
Seek Time Performance
Power-On Hours (POH)
Spin Retry Count

The article about S.M.A.R.T. on Wikipedia lists down all the 254 parameters.

Windows does not provide any monitoring statistics of S.M.A.R.T. by default but it provides some tools which can be helpful in checking the hard drive for errors. The most useful tool is Disk Checkup tool. If you are not comfortable with Windows Check Disk, you can install one of these third party chkdsk alternatives. I personally prefer to use Windows Check Disk utility.

You can open command prompt and run the following commands in order to start checking a particular drive for errors.

chkdsk c: /F

DiskCheckup is a free software from PassMark which can give detailed information about the health of your hard drive by reading the S.M.A.R.T. values.

DiskCheckup gives detailed information about the hard drive. The user interface of DiskCheckup displays four tabs.

Device Info – gives hardware related information about the hard drive including capacity, serial, model, firmware etc.
SMART Info – gives information about the latest health check carried out by SMART.
SMART History – keeps a history of SMART tests. It is not activated by default and can be activated in the configuration settings. Just make sure you cleanup the history regularly as keeps on taking more space with time.
Disk Self Test – runs a self test on the hard drive and reports any errors.

Above these four tabs is a list of physical hard drives attached to the system. Clicking on a hard drive will fill information below in the tabs.

Although the SMART functionality will report errors automatically, you can run the Disk Self Test in order to make sure your hard drive is in good condition.

PassMark DiskCheckup

What do you do to keep your hard drive in a healthy condition? Does using DiskCheckup provide you with useful information about your hard drive?

April 28, 2013

Messenger Reviver Enables Windows Live Messenger Again

UK Software windows live 0 Comments

Windows Live Messenger was one of the most used instant messenger apps on the Internet. Microsoft shut down the service when it acquired Skype. Windows Live Messenger and Skype were merged together. Now anyone can use the same Microsoft ID (Hotmail/MSN messenger account) to login to Skype. The Windows Live Messenger contacts will be available on Skype.

The people who were addicted with Windows Live Messenger were highly disappointed and wanted Microsoft to reverse its decision. But the fact is the Windows Live Messenger is gone and now you have to be content with Skype for your IM conversations.

Messenger Reviver 2 is a free program that can enable Windows Live Messenger again! It will patch the installed version of Windows Live Messenger to make it working again. Messenger Reviver 2 can patch various versions of Windows Live Messenger including 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012.

Although it the above mentioned WLM versions can be patched, it is always recommended to install the latest one i.e., Windows Live Messenger 2012.

Messenger Reviver 2 is compatible with all versions of Windows including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. The only requirement for running it is that you must have .NET framework 2.0 or higher installed on your computer.

Download .NET Framework 4.5

Download .NET Framework 4

Download Windows Live Messenger 2012

When you start Messenger Reviver, it will automatically try to detect the versions of Windows Live Messenger installed on your computer. If it does not find any, it will give you a link to the download.

To patch the messenger which is already installed, you will need to click on the Advanced button which will open a drop down menu. The following three options will be given:

Patch messenger
Do a new messenger install
Do a repair messenger install

All the three options are self explanatory and automated. Just select an appropriate option and Messenger Reviver will do the rest.

When you start Windows Live Messenger after patching, it should work fine like before. All functionality is the same and works perfectly.

Messenger Reviver 2

April 27, 2013

Download Google Drive 1.9 Installer With Offline Access To Google Docs

UK Software Google, Google Drive, update 0 Comments

Google has released a new version of Google Drive. The latest version at the time of this writing is 1.9.4536.8202. The new Google Drive 1.9 offers some exciting changes the the software. First of all, the users will see a clear improvement in synchronization and download speeds.

The download speeds will improve by 50% in the version 1.9. The speed improvement can be higher if you have smaller files in your Google Drive account. Let’s discuss some of the new and improved features of Google Drive 1.9.

Right click menu

Now Google Drive comes with a dedicated context menu item. When you right click on any file in Google Drive folder, you will see a new Google Drive context menu item which can be use to either share the file of view the file on the web.

Offline access to Google Docs

Now you will be able to access Google Docs in offline mode. This means that you don’t need to have any Office suite installed on your computer in order to view or edit the documents in Google Drive which you are not connected to the Internet. The only requirement for this to work is that you must have Google Chrome installed on your computer.

Once you have installed Google Drive 1.9, you can go to drive.google.com in Google Chrome. It will open in offline mode if you are not connected to the Internet. You can edit the documents. The changes will be synchronized when the computer connects to the Internet again.

Faster downloading

Google has optimized how Google Drive downloads and synchronizes files locally. Now the users will be able to see download improvements of over 50%.

Download Google Drive

For downloading Google Drive from drive.google.com, you will need to sign into your Google account. Here are the direct download links to the latest Google Drive installers:

Google Drive 1.9.4536.8202 offline installer direct download link [29.7MB]

April 17, 2013

Java 7 Update 21 Offline Installers Direct Download Links

UK Software Java, Offline Installer, update 0 Comments

Java 7 Update 21 has been released by Oracle. Oracle has been working tirelessly to make sure that Java remains secure in the future. Java was in danger of its existence when many security vulnerabilities were found of which some were already being exploited on the Internet. If anyone is interested in reading the history of updates of Java, just head towards Java tag which will list all the updates we have been covering.

Java 7 Update 21 is a critical update for April 2013. A total of 42 vulnerabilities have been fixes. The update also contains some non-security patches. 39 of the security vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable meaning that they have a very high severity level. Of these 42 vulnerabilities only two affect the server deployments of Java.

Going deep into the updates reveals that Oracle has changed how Java runs on computers. Now Java requires code signing for executing the Java applets and programs. It will alert the user of unsigned, self signed or expired certificates to make sure that the user understands what he is doing.

You can learn about Java code signing here.

Oracle recommends that the Desktop users download and apply this update as soon as possible.

Java 7 Update 21 offline installer links

For Solaris and other Operating Systems, you can find the installers here. For complete information about the latest update, you may want to read the release notes.

If you are using Portable applications, you can also download portable version of Java 7 Update 21.

April 16, 2013

Harden WordPress Security For Brute Force Hacking Attempts

UK Internet, Software Wordpress, Wordpress plugins 1 Comment

WordPress based sites have been under attack over the last week or so. It has been a massive attack for hacking blogs and sites that are using WordPress content management system. This attack seems to be on a very large-scale which seems to be affecting WordPress sites globally. According to CloudFlare, a content delivery network with integrated security, they have blocked more than 60 million malicious requests to its customers.

The botnet which is spreading this attack seems to be very powerful and is capable of brute forcing 2 billion passwords per hour. And the botnet is brute forcing from more than 100,000 IP addresses. This will make it absolutely impossible to defend against if anyone is using any IP address blocking techniques or limiting login attempts per IP because the botnet will be able to change the IP address and try again every second for 24 hours.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress wrote a short article about this brute force attack and offered a solution too. Let’s take a look what he says:

Almost 3 years ago we released a version of WordPress (3.0) that allowed you to pick a custom username on installation, which largely ended people using “admin” as their default username. Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).

Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).

The solution offered in his article is quite workable but it becomes difficult for people to use two factor authentication if they are not using an Android phone. And I hope, a lot of people including me are not using Android phones. So the people who can’t use two factor authentication solution will need to find another solution.

I have installed Better WP Security plugin which provides a lot of ways to keep yourself on a safer side from these types of brute force attacks. I will only discuss some features of Better WP Security plugin which will help you harden your WordPress security from brute force attacks.

Before going through the plugin features, let’s see how the botnet attack WordPress sites. The botnet will mostly attack sites which default configurations. This is because if the default configurations are not there, it will require manual action and human intervention for a hacking attempt.

So our best bet would be that we change everything which is configured by default in WordPress. We will be changing the following for our WordPress site using Better WP Security plugin.

The default admin username
The default admin ID
The default login URL
The default registration URL (only if you have open registrations enabled)
The default admin URL

These are the absolute basics if you want to prevent brute force attacks which are carried by botnet.

When you install Better WP Security, a new menu will appear named “Security”. You can click on the menu which will take you to the dashboard. You will have two options by default:

Secure my site from basic attacks
No thanks, I prefer to do configure everything myself

Obviously, I prefer to configure the plugin myself so I select the second option.

Now go to the “User” tab. It will have two options.

Change the admin user name
Change the admin user ID

We need to change both. Make sure that your WordPress installation does not have a common username like “admin”. You should keep the usernames hard to guess and remember like passwords.

Now go to the “Hide” tab. On this configuration screen, you will be able to change the login URL of the site. The default URL for WordPress based sites is yoursite.com/wp-login.php. Since this is very common, the botnet and even the hackers themselves will try to login to the site using this default URL. You can change the URL to something which is difficult to guess. Please do not use the default ones like login, register and admin. Change the URL slugs completely to make your site administration hidden.

Following these steps will make sure that you are preventing a large majority or hacking attempts which are carried out by botnet and other automated attacks. What is your WordPress site’s security structure? Please share your views with us in the comments.

March 27, 2013

Resize Windows 8 Start Screen With These 2 Tools

Arfa Mahmood Software Desktop Enhancement, Start Menu, Windows 8, Windows 8 tips 0 Comments

After the launch of Windows 8, it was pretty disappointing that the start menu or even the start button was not included in Windows 8. The main disadvantage of Windows 8 Start Screen was switching between desktop and the Start Screen because the start screen opened in full screen mode. In this article, we discuss two great software that will help you to re-size the start screen according to your needs.

Windows 8 Start Menu Modifier

Windows 8 Start Menu Modifier lets you re-size your start screen and place it anywhere on the screen at your convenience. This means that you can use your start screen by staying at the desktop as you do in earlier version of Windows.

March 19, 2013

ModernMix Runs Modern Apps In Window Mode In Windows 8

Rahmeen Ahmad Khan Software Windows 8, Windows 8 Apps, Windows 8 tips 6 Comments

Windows 8 Modern apps (metro apps) are colorful and exciting but limited to the full screen mode. This difference distinguishes them from the old desktop applications. Windows 8 users have to switch between desktop and modern apps using the app panel at the left side of the screen.

ModernMix is a free software from Stardock which will let Windows 8 Modern apps run in window mode instead of full screen by default. By using ModernMix, the metro or modern apps will open in their own window which will have the same minimize, resize, and close buttons. The user will be able to close the apps instantly using the close button instead of going to the left side menu, switching to another app and then closing the app.

Where to Get StarDock ModernMix?

ModernMix is still in beta and can be downloaded as a 30 day trial. To get ModernMix, you need to visit the official website of StarDock and request a download link. They will email you the download link instantly. Open that link and download the setup. Rest of the installation procedure is self-explanatory.

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