LostInTechnology » Windows

How to Delete Undeletable Files and Folders in Windows

Aminul Islam Sajib — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:00:31 +0000

I’m pretty sure that most of our readers have found a file that won’t delete and is giving them problems. I’ve faced that problem.

I’m not sure why files or folders sometimes won’t let you delete them. It can just happen. It might be because it is infected with a virus, but this guide isn’t going to cover that scenario. We are going to tell you how to delete those files that get hung up for whatever reason and just won’t go away.

Today, I’m going to show you how to delete that pesky little file.

FileAssassin

FileAssassin is the best tool I’ve found that gets the job of removing an unresponsive file or folder. It unlocks the file/folder that is giving you trouble, unloads modules, terminates the file process and then deletes it.

Let’s walk through the steps of how to complete that process I just mentioned. Go download FileAssassin from this url. After the installation is completed, launch FileAssassin.

You will see the FileAssassin window, shown below. First, you need to locate the file or folder you want it to delete. You can either drag-and-drop the desired file/folder on its textbox or browse your computer to locate the file. Once located, you will have several options.

The best option is to select Attempt FileAssassin’s method of file processing. Below this option, you have several check boxes. Here is what each one does.

Unlock Locked File handles: If you feel that the file is locked in any way, use this to unlock.
Unload modules: FileAssassin will dive deeper into the file to check modules and unload them.
Terminate the file’s process: If you think that you should not delete the file; but terminate its process, check this.
Delete the file: That’s what we were talking about. To perform the action of deleting the file forever from your computer, check this.

Your final job is click the Execute button to execute your orders.

Conclusion

FileAssassin is a light weight and easy to use program that gets the job done quickly. I really recommend it, but I am interested in what software you use to kill off undeletable files. Let us know in the comments.

(By) Aminul Islam Sajib is a 16-years-old passionate technology blogger and reporter from Bangladesh. He writes Blogging tips, technology tips, reviews, Internet tips, etc at his blog Life with Technology. He is also a technology reporter at the most renowned online newspaper of Bangladesh. You can follow him on twitter and friend him on Facebook.

Image by Focal Intent

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Monitor Processes on Your System with WinPatrolToGo

Sourojit — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:00:20 +0000

We all know about the Task Manager utility provided by Windows, but what if you wanted to do more with it besides viewing the running applications? Here you will get a simple and complete answer.

WinPatrolToGo is a free and portable utility that can help you find all information you want about your computer whenever and wherever you want. Let’s dive right into all of the options WinPatrolToGo has to offer.

Services

Here you can view all services running in the background. You can select any service you like and click on the info button to get more information about the service. They can also be given startup permissions like disable, manual and automatic, or you can stop the running process if it is unnecessary.

Additionally, you can get more information on the processes by clicking on the expand button. If there is no information present, then you can click on PLUS info button to search the BillP Studios database for any related information and decide whether the process is safe to run or not. However, this feature is only available to members only.

Startup Programs

You can get information about all programs automatically starting on system startup. You can add or remove programs from the list . You can view detailed information of the application as told above.

Active Tasks

Information about all active processes on your system will be given here. These tasks can be stopped if you feel it is an unnecessary one.

Hidden Files

Displays a list of all hidden system files, these files can be selected and made visible. If you wish to delete any of the files, it should be done with extreme precaution and proper knowledge, as these files are constantly used by Windows to run.

ActiveX

List of all ActiveX controls registered by Internet Explorer and others are shown here. If you feel there is a security risk using some of the controls, they can be easily removed.

IE Helpers

Shows list of all applications and links installed on Internet Explorer. If by mistake you have have installed helper button which you do not require and facing trouble in browsing experience due to that, then u can remove that easily.

Scheduled Tasks

View list of all applications which have scheduled tasks on your system, this will help you to remove the scheduled task so that you get maximum system resources while you are playing games or performing important tasks.

Options

Here you can view logs made by WinPatrol and save it to your computer. These can also be saved as Spreadsheet Reports.

Conclusion

This is a very light weight and easy to use application. It constantly monitors background processes and even notifies if any application tries to add to the startup or changes the file association type. All the services provided by this utility can be found in many different programs, but WinPatrolToGo puts all of these features in a single, portable pack.

(By) Sourojit Nandi is a tech blogger from Tech-Compass with an eye for details and features of softwares and web-services. He likes exploring new concepts and software in his free time. He has years of experience in troubleshooting beginner problems in Windows and to him, blogging is an attempt to share this knowledge.

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Record Streaming Audio with PCWin Speaker Record

Aminul Islam Sajib — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:00:40 +0000

Have you ever wanted to record something that you’re listening to online? Maybe you’re streaming some music or a podcast online, and you don’t have any way to download it. You could find a mic and put it in front of your speaker and press record, but that sound quality is going to be terrible.

PCWin Speaker Record is a better solution than the mic one I just mentioned. It’s a free program that lets you record any music, voice, sound (or noise) you hear from your speakers.

Getting Started

First, you need to download PCWin Speaker Record and an MPEG Layer 3 Audio Encoder in order to be able to record. The MPEG Layer 3 Audio Encoder is only needed if you want to record your sound in MP3 format. If you are happy with WAV format, you don’t need the extra software.

You can find the links for both of those in the last two sentences of this page.

Recording

Play your favorite music on any player you choose, online or offline. While the music is playing, run PCWin Speaker Record and choose which format you want your audio file to be recorded in. Then, simply click “Start Recording” to initialize speaker recorder, and “Stop Recording” to stop it. As soon as you stop recording, you will be prompted to save the recorded file. You can choose any folder to save your file on. It’s as easy as that to record the music you hear on your speaker.

Conclusion

This is just one of the ways you can record streaming audio, but there are many, many other options out there. What software do you use to record audio from the Internet?

Image by Sproston Green

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How To Autoreconnect Dial-up Connections

Aminul Islam Sajib — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:14:31 +0000

Developing countries around the world like Bangladesh, India and others are still dealing with slow Internet connections. While people from developed countries are jumping towards 100 Megabit per second Internet speeds, we still dream of 1 Mb/sec speed. At this moment, I’m surfing the net at a data transfer rate of 10 Kilobytes per second.

One of the problems with dial-up is that you can have frequent disconnections. There are two options for enabling auto-reconnect for your dial-up connection. We will talk about both.

System Method

While your dial-up connection is active, click on the network icon from your systray and click Properties. In the Properties box, go to the Options tab, and check the “Redial if line is dropped” checkbox. Click OK.

After this is done if the connection is disconnected for any reason, the system will automatically try to reestablish by dialing up again without any secondary command by you.

Software Method

The system method is a good one, and so far, it has worked pretty good for me. In my opinion, it is satisfactory. However, in case you use a download manager for all your downloading, you may want something that won’t just resume your connection but will also resume your downloads.

To make this happen, you may choose to use a tiny software named ReConnect. ReConnect has some options to help you personalize the product to suit your needs.

Conclusion

I hope now you enjoy your dial-up connection without the hassle of reconnecting over and over again; which potentially used to destroy your pleasure of surfing the web.

Image by macinate

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Top Windows 7 Tweaks

UzEE — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:00:55 +0000

Most of you may have tried Windows 7 by now, and if you’re like me, your first impression would have been “WOW!”. Windows 7 is really an impressive operating system and is worth upgrading to whether you’re running Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Even though there are a ton of new features and usability improvements in Windows 7, there is still no harm in fine tuning or enabling a couple of features that Microsoft decided to hide under the mat for one reason or the other. Tweaks are nothing new to Windows. End users have been able to tweak operating systems according to their requirements since the beginning, so you shouldn’t worry about any tweak damaging your system.

Still, I’ll be including a level indicator for an estimated technical level required to execute the tweak, with Level 0 being the easiest. As for the tweaks I’m about to share today, none of them require any tweaker utility to activate. You can access them from within Windows itself.

Classic Taskbar – (Level 0)

The new “Superbar” in Windows 7 is an awesome improvement. You can pin icons directly to the taskbar as shortcuts, plus we have support for Jumplists which give us quick access to common tasks in every program. Still, some of you might be accustomed to the classic taskbar as seen in the previous versions of Windows and prefer to revert back. Lucky for you, Microsoft decided to include the old functionality as well.

To get the classic taskbar back, all you have to do is:

Right-click on an empty area in the taskbar and click on Properties. You would reach the dialog box displayed above.
Check the box next to Use small icons and select Combine when taskbar is full from the Taskbar buttons dropdown menu.
Hit Apply, and you’re all set.

Explorer Checkboxes – (Level 0)

Remember the tiny little checkboxes in Vista that used to appear on files when you hovered your mouse over them in Windows Explorer. While they only served the purpose of allowing you to select multiple files which you can also do by holding CTRL or SHIFT key, the boxes were useful in situations when you didn’t want to use the keyboard.

To enable the Explorer Checkboxes, just:

Hit the Start button and type Folder Options in the search bar and hit enter.
Click on the view tab and scroll to the bottom of Advanced Settings Listbox.
Check the box next to Use check boxes to select items and click Ok or Apply to commit the changes. Check boxes should now appear when you hover your mouse over items.

Web Search Connectors – (Level 1)

Did you know that you can perform web searches directly from within Windows Explorer? You can search for anything you like (e.g. YouTube videos) and get results displayed in the Windows Explorer interface.

To enable Internet Search, all you have to do is find and download search connectors for your favorite web service.

Enable GodMode – (Level 1)

Wondering why there is a GodMode in Windows 7? Well don’t get excited. It doesn’t make your PC immune to malware. It just shows all the options in the Control Panel as a single page instead of being divided into categories. Useful if you like to use the Windows Search feature to find stuff rather than navigating through different screens.

To enable GodMode, just create a new folder anywhere and name it to GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.

Quick Launch Toolbar – (Level 2)

The Quick Launch toolbar (the shortcut icons that used to appear right next to the start button) got killed in Windows 7 because of the introduction of the new Superbar. While the new taskbar is a thousand times more useable then Quick Launch, it is interesting to know that you can still enable the functionality by a simple trick to get a fully classic look with the Classic Taskbar.

To enable Quick Launch:

Right-click on an empty area of the taskbar and goto Toolbars > New Toolbar…
Navigate to your user account >> AppData >> Roaming >> Microsoft >> Internet Explorer >> Quick Launch and click Select Folder button to add the toolbar. ({User}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch).
You can right click on the title of the new Toolbar to play with its look and feel and adjust it to the way you like.

Change Logon Background – (Level 3)

You might have heard that you can change the Welcome screen background in Windows 7 too like you could in Windows Vista. While Microsoft only intended this functionality to be used by OEMs, there are ways for you to get it done as well.

What you need to do is:

Open up the Registry Editor (Type regedit.exe in the start menu).
Goto HKLM > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Authentication > LogonUI > Background.
Look for a DWORD value named OEMBackground and change it to 1. If the DWORD doesn’t exist then create it.
Now in Windows Explorer, goto %windir%\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds and place the background image of your choice there. Again you’ll have to create the folder if it doesn’t exist already.
Rename the image you just place to backgroundDefault.jpg. You can add multiple images for different resolutions as well following this naming convention: background{resolution}.jpg. For example, if your desktop resolution is 1980×1080 then background1920×1080.jpg.
Oh and the image needs to be under 256kB for it to work properly.

Ultimate Windows 7 Tweaker

Lastly, I would like to share Ultimate Windows Tweaker which can tweak your Windows 7 installation from a nice and easy to use interface. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty by modifying different settings yourself, then give this a try.

Article By Uzair Sajid (UzEE), a technologist and a freelance blogger who also authors The Technopath.

Image by peasap

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Easily Reinstall All Your Programs with Ninite

Aminul Islam Sajib — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:00:30 +0000

Did you just upgrade to Windows 7 or recently format your computer? One of the most tedious parts of an upgrade or a format is going out an downloading all your favorite programs all over again. There is a solution out there that makes this much easier.

Ninite is a free service that allows you to select your favorite software from a list and quickly download and install all of them to your computer. There are probably services out there that would do a mass download, but the real appeal of Ninite is that it does the installing as well. This makes reformating much less of a chore. Let’s learn a little more about Ninite.

How It Works

Ninite has a many different software applications to choose from on its website. You just have to visit its website and choose the programs/software you need. Ninite will download its lightweight application onto your computer and will ask you for the necessary settings the first time you use it.

That means all the commands are given at the first time so that other programs won’t interrupt your browsing or gaming while they are being installed. However, if your necessary program or software isn’t listed on Ninite website, you have to go back to the old slow way of downloading and installing applications.

Ninite in action.

Software Choices

Ninite has a lot of things that you may need on your computer. Ninite has browsers (i.e. Google Chrome, FireFox), messengers (i.e. Digsby, GTalk), media players (i.e. KMPlayer, VLC), office suites (i.e. Open Office) and many other useful software choices (i.e. uTorrent, Foxit Reader).

What I recommend you do now is go over to Ninite’s website and take a look at the programs it has. I think, if you are migrating your PC or setting up a new one, Ninite is the best solution to get your computer up to speed.

(By) Aminul Islam Sajib is a 16-years-old young enthusiastic blogger and technology writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh who usually blogs in his technology blog Life with Technology . He is a technology reporter of a national daily newspaper and an online news agency of Bangladesh. You can also connect with Aminul on Twitter or Facebook.

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FileZilla: Fast and Smooth FTP Client

Chinmoy.Kanjilal — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:12 +0000

FTP is a very useful application service and is of prime importance for bloggers and webserver admins for transferring files to and from servers. It is also necessary for general users to download files from FTP servers.

A good FTP application can make interactions with a server easy. Previously, we covered 5 great and free FTP clients. FileZilla was included on that list, and we like it so much here at LostInTechnology that we felt it deserved its own post.

Features

Some of the great features of FileZilla as an FTP client are:

Site Manager

Site-Manager

The site manager of FileZilla is very powerful and has a lot of features.

Under the General tab, we have option to provide host details which includes host address, connection port, server type selection and login with username and password. There are options to create bookmarks to selected folders on the site, which provides a direct login to the specified location from the Bookmarks drop down menu.

Under the Advanced tab, we can select the server architecture and the default server and local root locations to load when connecting to the site. Options to adjust server timezone offset is also available for a better synchronization.

The Transfer settings tab allows us to select between Active and Passive transfer modes. We can also limit the number of simultaneous connections to the server, managing bandwidth effectively.

The Charset tab allows us to select the character set of the server. This setting can be generally left at Autodetect.

Quick Connect

quick-connect-filezilla

Quick Connect lets us connect to the site quickly by directly entering the host address, username, port and password. There are no other settings required for this. The quick connect also saves a history of your last visited sites. This makes it easy to reconnect later and eliminates the need for entering details over and over again. The quick-connect history can be cleaned as well if your computer is accessed by many people.

The View

The view is divided into two areas. On the left, we have the local disk, and on the right, we have the server storage. Any changes made to files on the left, prompt you to upload the file with the changes. Choosing yes, keeps data synchronized. The prompt can be safely ignored as well.

Queue Management

filezilla-queue

FileZilla also provides us with advanced queue management which lets us manage the files being uploaded in an easy way through the GUI. The application supports multi-threaded uploads which is a very useful feature and speeds up transfer of files to a huge extent.

Other Features

Else than the features listed above, there are one click buttons to

Break all connections and disconnect from the server.
Toggle file transfer and put the file processing queue on hold.
Search directories recursively.

Each frame shows extra details like

The queue area shows the current transfer speed and the number of files queued up. It also shows the failed transfers if any and the current transfer progress.
The files area shows the number of files, directories and the size of all the files under the current directory level.

Options for entering custom commands are also present. There is a drop-arrow which gives us access to the last used sites.

Conclusion

With all these features, it’s amazing that FileZilla is totally free. To try out FileZilla, head over to the download page here. FileZilla is available for both Windows and Linux.

(By) Chinmoy Kanjilal is a technology, web2.0 and Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He has an in depth knowledge of working of Softwares, Operating Systems, Hardwares and Computer Networks. Blogging is his favourite pasttime. He blogs primarily at Techarraz. You can find him on Twitter @chinmoykanjilal.

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Recover Disk Space with DiskMax

Chinmoy.Kanjilal — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:00:58 +0000

DiskMax is a completely free Windows software developed by KoshyJohn. DiskMax, as the name suggests is primarily software to free up disk space. It uses various methods to check for Windows space hogs like temporary files, logs, installers, caches and backups and simply removes or disables them thereby leaving the users with more free space.

DiskMax boasts of having removed 15 GB of junk from some computers. I removed 3 GB of unnecessary files with it when I tried DiskMax for the first time. It has been used by over 40,000 people and has been recently updated to support Windows 7.

Getting Started

To start using DiskMax, download the application from here.

Now, install the application. DiskMax is compatible with all versions of Windows from Windows XP to Windows 2003, Vista and Windows 7. It has a very comprehensive UI and has only three scanning profiles.

All cleaning operations are accompanied with appropriate user prompts to perform only the operations the user wants to. That way you can also prevent any possible loss of data. Let’s take a quick look at the different types of scans DiskMax offers.

Quick Scan

The Quick Scan covers the recycle bin and the user profile documents like history, browser cookies, multimedia caches like flash, shockwave and QuickTime content, browser histories, caches from IM, windows CD burning cache, error reporting data and user registry entries etc. for the current user.

Standard Scan

The Standard Scan performs all the operations performed by a quick scan. In addition to that, it also cleans the office installer cache, hibernation files, backup files and performance and application log files. It also cleans the last known good configuration data, the dll cache, memory dumps, registry backups, downloaded installers from windows update as well as other applications. There is a deep scan which removes all junk files from the all system folders. Apart from this, the software also performs a defragmentation to rearrange data for optimal access.

Detailed Scan

The Detailed Scan covers all the features of the standard scan along with deletion of explorer thumbnail cache, user registry entries and defragmentation of all drives, which in case of standard scan is limited to the system drive. The detailed scan is recommended to be run with an admin privilege which will be required by all the extra feature of the detailed scan.

Conclusion

The software works like a breeze on all versions of Windows. All cleaning actions are accompanied with an easy to understand icon which guides you through using the software. Every successful cleaning is accompanied with a report at the end of the operation. Sized at only 750 KB accompanied with the features and powerful usage it offers, DiskMax is a must have software for all Windows users.

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FeedDemon: The Best Offline Feed Reader

Chinmoy.Kanjilal — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:51 +0000

Reading feeds is an integral part of keeping up to date with the latest happenings on the Internet. Almost all blogs provide their users with an option to subscribe to their feeds.

Now, feeds are a powerful medium of compact knowledge, but if you start reading too many of them, you have every chance of missing out the important news on time. Reading just a few of them might make you miss out on certain other perspectives of an event. In these situations, you run into a problem either way.

Another thing that can be a challenge with feed readers is that they don’t all provide offline reading options. This isn’t a big deal for everyone, but it can be for some users.

A feed reader goes a long way in making life easier. I have tried out a lot of feed readers but none of them could attract me as much as FeedDemon.

FeedDemon has lots of great features that we need to cover in order to give you an idea of what it brings to the table, so lets just get right into them.

Features

Feed Prefetch

feeddemon-prefetch-options

Feed Prefetch allows you to prefetch feeds in order to read them later and offline. The prefetch location can be selected and the items to be prefetched can also be defined. Prefetching of embedded content can be turned off if not required. The maximum number of feeds to be prefetched and the age of the feeds to be prefetched can be customized heavily.

This highly customizable prefetch option helps a lot in reading feeds offline. The feed prefetch can be backed up and restored as well. Options for compacting the prefetch database are also available.

Informative Homepage

The homepage of the FeedDemon UI has a lot of information. It shows a quick list of popular content, and a sidebar with the number of unread feeds to check your inactivity, your tagged feeds, and all the folders on the left hand side of the display.

Folder Organization

feeddemon-folders

With FeedDemon , organizing feeds into folders is much more than just putting them there. Clicking on a folder will show you the latest feeds. So if your folders are arranged with a certain category, you get the latest news from that category. Also, the feeds which have been updated today, yesterday and before that are shown under separate headers.

Themes

FeedDemon provides many different color themes for reading through the feeds. This improves readability and soothes the eye for hours of reading. I prefer using the blue theme.

Managing Subscriptions

The subscription list of FeedDemon can be exported and imported into/from any other application. On exporting the existing subscription list, the folder view remains intact, even when you synchronize FeedDemon with Google reader.

Dinosaurs and Panic Button

The Dinosaur feature allows us to check the feeds which have not been updated in 60 days. This lets you chose which feeds to ignore with the next prefetch to save network usage as well as disk space. The panic button tells us when the feed database gets bloated with unread items. This deletes feeds which are older than a certain number of days, which we can specify.

Other than this, FeedDemon has an extremely light and user friendly UI which is amazingly smooth in spite of handling so many threads all together. Tagging and analysis of feeds helps us reduce effort to search through all the contents to read all the important news. A keyword search feature is also available which returns all feeds with a certain text in the feed body.

FeedDemon is one of the most popular feed readers. Know more and try out FeedDemon here.

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How To Lock Folders and Files with My Lockbox

Will Mueller — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:37:09 +0000

Have you ever needed to keep a certain folder out of view and safe from prying eyes? Maybe financial documents, birthday presents for family members on a public computer, etc? Enter My Lockbox; a free, easy to use, security application for Windows that allows anyone the ability to very simply lock a folder (and its contents) from anyone on your computer or network for good. No exceptions. Let me explain.

My Lockbox not only hides the locked folder from view, but goes the extra yard and safely encrypts all the data so the folder literally no longer exists in its previous path. Furthermore, by doing this, My Lockbox safely keeps folders from ever even being discovered accidentally and suspiciously.

Getting Started

Start by downloading My Lockbox (Windows Only). Now, installing My Lockbox is relatively easy, except for one essential part:

Simply enter a well encrypted, well devised password and enter a hint that does not give away the password (of course). The rest of the installation is quite standard; accept the agreement, select an install location, then double-click the “My Lockbox” icon on the desktop.

(Note: For some good password generators, check out this article on LostInTechnology.)

What you should see is something similar to the following:

Locking a File

Obviously, enter your highly secure password and My Lockbox should load with a successful dashboard. To begin by locking a folder, browse for a folder on your computer, and click “Lock.” The status message on the left of the window should change from “Unlocked” to “Locked.”

Furthermore, if one were to look for the folder in the original directory, e.g. C:\Users\will\Downloads\Documents, no folder labeled secret_folder will appear or be accessible to anyone using the computer. (Note: To unlock, simply load My Lockbox and click “Unlock.”) The following is what My Lockbox should display after locking a folder:

My Lockbox can be set up to load with a hotkey, which is, by default, Ctrl+Shift+P. This can allow for even more secrecy by not showing any icon on your taskbar, quick launch bar, or open whatsoever.

If you would like to make absolutely sure no one learns about your locked folder, you can delete the My Lockbox icon from the desktop and access the application from the C:\Program Files\My Lockbox\ directory, or even install My Lockbox on your flash drive.

(Note: There is also an optional upgrade for My Lockbox (for $29.95) which allows users the ability to hide and lock an unlimited number of folders and files unlike the free option which allows only for the locking of one folder.)

(By) Will Mueller spends far too much time on the computer. Check out his website at willm.me.

(Image Credit: tijszwinkels.)

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