Losing your valuable files as a result of a hard drive failure, virus attack or even accidental file deletion can be very devastating. Whether it's your photos, giant music collection, important documents - data loss is always costly and stressful. Hard drives always crash, it's just a matter of time, therefore DO regular backups. Especially when there are so many free backup software options that can run regular backups automatically. Just set it once to run scheduled backups every week or so and forget about them. Then when disaster happens you will be able to restore your files in no t

Comodo Backup [No Longer Available] is an excellent backup utility from the creators of Comodo Firewall. It's free, easy to use and have everything you might need. You can easily backup your local files and folders to anywhere on your computer, network, DVD / CD or even FTP server. Plus it can be set to run automatically on specified time interv

If you're like me, you frequently need to move the same types of files to the same places over and over again. While you could keep a shortcut pointing to that location on your Desktop, there's an even easier (and more flexible) way to quickly move files to a favorite place. The secret lies in the "Send To" command found in your right-click contextual m

As you can see above, I cleaned out my folder so it only has a few items in it. Now I have the ability to create shortcuts to the Desktop, zip files, and send files to My Documents, My Pictures, and Screenshots. This last folder, 'Screenshots', I added by holding the Alt key while dragging Screenshots into the 'Send To' folder. This created a shortcut of the selected folder instead of moving it. If you don't feel comfortable with that hotkey, simply right click the desired item, click "New->Shortcut" and drag your new shortcut into the 'Send To' fol

This virtual TrueCrypt volume can be kept hidden thus making the files invisible. TrueCrypt can also encrypt an entire drive, partition or even an external storage device like a USB drive. As further evidence of its capabilities, TrueCrypt can also encrypt the Windows boot partition or the entire boot drive. Furthermore it has the ability to create and run a hidden encrypted operating system. With these advanced features, TrueCrypt has become a power user's favorite t

One of the unadvertised features of 'Send To' is that you can directly change the items that show up in the list. This is done by going to a specific folder and changing its contents. That folder is found in "Documents and Settings/yourusername." Note: replace "yourusername" with whatever your user account name is on your computer. Here's what mine looks l

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article in which I described some of the features I particularly liked about Vista. However in the comments Justin and anob pointed out that a couple of the features I had mentioned were not actually Vista speci

Now when you first saw this tool, if you even noticed it at all, you probably thought it was pretty terrible. Most of the locations on the list, by default, are fairly useless. The only way I ever used 'Send To' in the past was to create shortcuts and put them on the Desktop. What you see above is my newly cleaned-up and customized 'Send To' m

With Vista there is no new features or changes to the User Interface but the Windows indexing technology will be working significantly faster . (If you are using XP then you will see a whole new search interface, and I would suggest you download this update if you haven't alrea

At this point you're probably either thinking, "what command where?" or "that has a function?" Hopefully we'll answer both of those in that order for you. First, right-click on any file or folder. Notice that the "contextual" menu, that is, the menu that drops down from your cursor, has several options on it. The one we're interested in is "Send To." Once you run your mouse over the 'Send To' command, it drops down with a list of locati

Superstorm does it differently. The software enables a user to hide his secret files in any media such as pictures, audio, video, executable programs and many other file types. The secret file gets merged into the media file, but the media file continues to function like bef

A good way to find what files you don't need is to run a unspecific search and take a look at the results. Chances are you will see some kinds of files included which are fairly irrelevant and unnecessary, right-click these and take a look at the file types in the properties pa

Constants library - If you have difficulties remembering the value for atomic mass or astronomical units, don't worry, it is all documented in the constants library. This library contains most of the constant values you will ever n

SyncBack - We have already covered the SyncBack backup tool earlier, but basically, it's another backup software. Although the app has both free and relevant site paid versions, the free one has enough features for running local back