NCrack ALPHA – High Speed Network Authentication Cracking Tool

Ncrack is a high-speed network authentication cracking tool. It was built to help companies secure their networks by proactively testing all their hosts and networking devices for poor passwords. Security professionals also rely on Ncrack when auditing their clients.
Ncrack was designed using a modular approach, a command-line syntax similar to Nmap and a dynamic engine that can adapt its behaviour based on network feedback. It allows for rapid, yet reliable large-scale auditing of multiple hosts.
Ncrack’s features include a very flexible interface granting the user full control of network operations, allowing for very sophisticated bruteforcing attacks, timing templates for ease of use, runtime interaction similar to Nmap’s and many more.
Ncrack was started as a “Google Summer of Code” Project in 2009. While it is already useful for some purposes, it is still unfinished, alpha quality software. It is released as a standalone tool, be sure to read the Ncrack man page to fully understand Ncrack usage.

Best CPU, Video Card and RAM Tuning Utilitie

If you want to optimize or configure your PC’s CPU processor, video card or even RAM memory for better performance, you have a few different options. Using some readily available freeware downloads from manufacturers and other software companies, you can easily tweak the performance of most of the components of your computer.

AMD OverDrive

If your computer utilizes an AMD CPU, you can adjust performance settings, speed and timing for the CPU and RAM memory as well as a few other components using AMD’s free OverDrive software.

Additionally, the software lets you control fan speeds and even provides some diagnostic software to help troubleshoot PC components. This utility makes the process of adding speed and performance simple, as it features a user friendly interface, accessible directly from the desktop.
Download AMD OverDrive

Intel XTU (Extreme Tuning Utility)

Intel also offers their brand of performance/tweaking software with XTU, or Extreme Tuning Utility. Using XTU, you can very simply make adjustments to speed, performance and even modify Intel exclusive features such as Turbo Boost Technology.

Download Intel XTU
Download Intel Desktop Control Center

AMD Catalyst

While the AMD OverDrive Utility listed above is mainly for enhancing CPU and RAM memory settings, AMD’s Catalyst Control Center is a utility for video and graphics. With this utility, you can fine tune GPU settings, enable graphics acceleration and speed settings and even configure displays.

Download AMD Catalyst

NVIDIA Control Panel

NVIDIA’s Control Panel software is another GPU utility that allows you to tweak graphics setting directly from the desktop. However, it also offers some other utilities for CPUs, Motherboard, Memory and even Power Supply.

Download NVIDIA Control Panel

MSI Afterburner

MSI’s Afterburner utility is a popular app that is compatible with both NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon based setups. With Afterburner, you can overclock, adjust fan speed, adjust voltage and monitor clock speed, temperatures and other settings, all from the desktop.

Download MSI Afterburner

EVGA Precision X

EVGA’s Precision X is a similar GPU enhancement program to MSI’s Afterburner. Specializing in GeForce controllers, the Precision X software allows you to do things like adjust voltage, set custom fan curves and even create custom profiles for different scenarios.

Download EVGA Precision X

CPUID

CPUID.com – x86 technical resources is a website that offers a wide variety of different utilities, mostly apps that allow you to monitor computer performance. Their most popular program is CPU-Z, a desktop utility that monitors CPU, Cache, Motherboard, Graphics and more. However, they also offer some other great programs such as TMonitor and HWMonitor.

Download CPU-Z

REX OF CYBER explain: What’s the Difference Between Office 2013 and 365?

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Microsoft has released Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium officially, meaning it is now available to everyone around the world who wants to buy them. Since this is a major revamp of the previous Office lineup with an entirely segment (Office 365) coming to picture, it’s only logical to expect that there would be some confusion among consumers as to the differences between the products and which one should they go for. This post is an attempt to clear the air.
To begin with, Office 2013 is the standalone version of Office, just like Office 2010 and 2007 versions were. You can buy the license, and download and use it. Simple.
Office 365 Home Premium on the other hand is the cloud sister of Office 2013. It’s a subscription based service that not only has all the Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more) but also connects them to the cloud through SkyDrive and Skype. It can work across five devices for a single license, which is a monthly fee that we will reveal in a bit.

Describing Office 365, Steve Ballmer said, “This is so much more than just another release of Office. This is Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service with all the full-featured Office applications people know and love, together with impressive new cloud and social benefits.”

Let us take note of and learn the key differences. These will indeed answer many questions that you may have regarding the software and/or the service.

License and Pricing

Office 365 changes the concept of buy and install once. It will be available as a subscription product at the rate of $99.99 per year (Home Premium edition). The good thing is that the license is designed as a family product and you will be able to install it on up to 5 devices.

Office 2013 comes with a perpetual license and is priced starting at $139.99 for Home & Student edition. It goes up to $399.99 for Office Professional. The product is as standalone as the previous versions and can be installed on a single device.

Check these links to compare and know more pricing details for Office 365 and Office 2013.

Package Inclusions

The Office 2013 suite will depend on the product edition you choose to buy. The install will range among tools that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and more.

Office 365 will contain the list from Office Professional with other advantages like *Office on Demand, 20 GB of additional SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype world minutes per month. The best part is that it upgrades to the latest as long as you keep paying your subscriptions. So, you do not have to wait for the new versions. The change is almost always there.
*Office on Demand: The concept is that you can get a full version software streamed to your computer if you need it.

Online or Cloud Connectivity

With Office 2013 you can synchronize settings across devices by associating the product with your Microsoft/Outlook account. Nevertheless, you can always save your files on the cloud and access them or work on them (SkyDrive) on the fly.
Office 365 more of an online service. The catch is that you will be forced to save your files to SkyDrive which will then sync to the connected machines.

Note: When your subscription expires you will get some grace period to get it renewed or take a backup of all your documents.

Conclusion

So, before you decide and choose one among the two you will have to give a thought over the pricing and subscription schemes. You will need to conquer your thoughts and needs of a standalone product or the more connected one with multiple licenses as a single subscription. Keep in mind though that Microsoft has made it clear that Office 365 is the future. It will deliver updates to the cloud version first meaning Office 2013 users will have a longer wait when it comes to new features and updates.
Which one will you choose?

Give Firefox OS a Try On Your Windows Machine

Mozilla unveiled its latest Firefox OS late last year, a mobile operating system for start phones built around the latest modern web standard technology. It’s a very interesting move by Mozilla heading into the ever popular mobile OS market, with a lot of upsides and potentials for the future.

Try Firefox OS

You can give it a try by downloading the Firefox OS simulator from within the Firefox browser. It’s very easy to install and get it up and running. Essentially, Mozilla has packed it as an extension of Firefox browser. When you finish installing the simulator, head to the menu > Web Developer > Firefox OS Simulator

This will bring you up to a new page, like below. From here you can launch the simulator.

You will be amazed at how quick and smooth the simulator runs on the desktop.

There are some default apps that were pre-installed, although these are very early releases that might not work correctly or look good. You still can get some of the basic design elements by playing around with the new Firefox OS.

If you are a developer who are interested in target a new potential platform, be sure to checkout this documentation. Just note that Mozilla isn’t going after the high end, or even the mid market here. The way they designed is meant for inexpensive devices, competing with feature phones or low end smartphones. Give it a try and you will be surprised.

4 Effective FREE RAM Optimizer to Booster Your Windows System Performance

When it comes to improving computer overall performance, RAM is always one of the most efficient ways you should consider to improve, i.e. throw in a few more GB of RAM. And often time, the result is obvious and immediate. However, it’s not feasible that you can always increase the number of GB that easily, such as what about you don’t have empty slot left on the motherboard.

That’s why an effective way to optimize our existing RAM is badly needed. Most of all, we also need a better way to stop or fix the memory leak we are experiencing almost every day in our daily computing life, which adding more RAM has no way of fixing.
And, here are 4 of them for you to check out.

Wise Memory Optimizer

Wise Memory Optimizer, brought to you by the same vendor who made the smart Shutdown, is a free system utility that frees up the physical memory taken by some useless application to enhance your overall PC performance. When it’s running, it will free up and tune up RAM performance automatically whenever it finds your memory is below the value you’ve set in the program.

MZ RAM Booster

MZ RAM Booster is also a free system utility created to improve the performance of your computer by automatically recovering RAM to fine tuning system settings. When it’s running, it uses minimal resources with almost no CPU time. Same as Wise memory Optimizer, MZ RAM Booster also automatically frees RAM when it’s below the value previously set up in the program.

RAM Rush

RAMRush has a simpler user interface. It runs quietly in the system tray and pops up a real time CPU and RAM usage graph when hovering over. You can also set it up so that it automatically runs the optimization when the memory amount is lower than 8% of total RAM or manually being launched by a optimize hotkey.

Anvi RAM Booster

Anvi RAM Booster is actually an add-on tool that is part of Cloud System Booster, an all-in-one free system maintenance utility. I found it out accidently when I browse through the features in the tool. It’s actually quite good and effective. I like it quite a lot. But unfortunately, since it’s only part of another tool, you will have to install Cloud System Booster first and get it from Toolbox section. The good thing is, once you get it, you can put it on your external USB drive. Yes, that’s right. It’s a portable tool that you can carry around.

To make all our friends easier, for the time being until I can locate an official download link that always provides the latest copy, you can download the current version, 1.0.0, from this link (direct download link).

Last a few words

All 4 tools listed here are equally good from my own test. They are all free and manage our precious memory very effectively. Just one thing to notice for the first 3 tools. Because they are free, they may include some crapyware during the installation process. Make sure to unselect them when you spot them.

6 Great Benchmark Tools for Windows

You’ve spent quite a bit money getting yourself a new computer, and you are quite excited about it. You feel it’s running quite smoothly and lightening fast. But have you ever wondered how faster your beloved new toy is, comparing to other computers on the market? Or if you feel it’s not quite as fast as you expected, do you know why and what’s going on under the cover?
That’s when you need a benchmark tool to help you better understand your machine. Here, we’ve compiled a list of 6 of them for you to check out, most of them are free or have a free version with limited features.

Geekbench

Geenbench, developed by Primate Labs, is a cross-platform benchmark tool that provides a comprehensive set of benchmarks engineered to quickly and accurately measure process (CPU) and memory performance. It provides a very simple user interface with one-click benchmark feature that starts benchmarking process with the same way, same tests, and same parameters as every other people using the same tool.
The test result will be saved as a html file stored on Geekbench server.

Geekbench is a very powerful benchmark tool but unfortunately the free version only benchmarks the machine with 32-bit parameters. 64-bit benchmarking is included in the full version, which costs $12.99 at least.

BootRacer

BootRacer is a handy tool specifically measuring the Windows system boot time, which includes the time it takes to get to the logon screen and the time to boot to the desktop. Once BootRacer is installed, by default, it will benchmark your system boot time every time when the machine reboots.

BootRacer is free for non-commercial use, but costs
$19.95USD when used in business environment.

PCMark 7

PCMark 7 is a powerful PC performance analysis tool specifically designed to cover the wide range of form factors, including Netbooks, Laptops, Tablets, and Desktop PCs. It provides a complete PC performance tests combining more than 25 workloads tests that covers storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing, and gaming.
The Basic Edition is free of charge, with the core PCMark test included. But it also provides Advanced and Professional edition that offers much more features with a price tag at $39.95 and $995US, respectively.

Cinebench

Cinebench, developed by Maxon, is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s CPU and GPU performance capabilities. It’s a perfect tool if you are only interested in how your CPU and GPU perform in your computer. And it’s completely free.

Sandra Lite

SiSoftware’s Sandra suite is another powerful Windows system performance analysis that provides a full range of testing tool. It includes benchmarking, testing, and listing modules. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, GPU, ports, printers, sound cards, memory, network, etc. What’s interesting is that it even supports Windows Phone and Android platform. The Lite version is completely free with a limitation that you can only run the tool in a workgroup environment, which is good enough for most of the home users.

PerformanceTest

PassMark’s PerformanceTest is a fast and easy-to-use PC speed testing and benchmarking utility with a vivid user interface. Unfortunately, it’s a paid utility that only offers 30-day free evaluation. After 30 days, you will have to buy the license to remove the license clause in order to continually using the tool.

Microsoft Security Essentials Failed To Pass Anti-Virus Certification Test, Microsoft Committees To Change

From the latest AV TEST done by AV-Test, the independent IT-security Institute, Microsoft’s own SEQURITY PRODUCT for home users failed to gain the Anti-Virus Certification, along with 2 other products, AhnLab V3 INTERNET SEQURITY 8.0 and PC Tools Internet Security 2012. A pretty bad news for the still relatively new but highly regarded free anti-malware product from Microsoft.
According to THE DETAIL REPORT explained on AV-Test, MS ESSENTIAL scored very poor in both Protection and Repair category but did well in Usability. It did especially bad in protection against 0-day malware attacks and the detection of the recently discovered malware, which lead to a disappointing 1.5 score out of 6.0.
In  by Microsoft, Microsoft conducted a rigorous review of this result, and had its own explanation why it failed. It first breaks down the test result as the following charts,

and explains:

During the test, our products didn’t detect 28 of the 0-day malware sample, and 9 percent of the recent malware samples. AV-Test uses a minimum bar in their scoring: our results for these two areas fell under that bar. The missed samples in both of these sections were where we focused our analysis, as we wanted to ensure we weren’t missing anything impactful to our customers.

According to its own analysis, the conclusion is that the missed and failed sample files affects roughly 0.0033 percent of its customers. The percent is small but the total amount of machines that have the potentials got hit is still noticeable, according to how many Windows 7 machines are deployed over the world.
Even though Microsoft has its own point of view, still it understands how valuable and important these industry test is to its customers, and committed to reducing that 0.0033 percent margin to zero.

Easily Schedule Shutdown Restart Your PC With Wise Auto Shutdown

Windows has a built in command line Shutdown that you can use to schedule a time to shutdown, power off, restart, or hibernate your PC. You just add the command line as one of the actions in a task in Task Scheduler. It will do the work perfectly as you wished. But the problem is, it’s not very intuitive. Another words, it’s not easy enough for a regular user to set it up every time when a scheduled shutdown is needed.
Wise Auto Shutdown is a freeware that only does one thing, easily schedule your computer to shut down, log off, restart, sleep, and close power at any time you want. Once it’s running, it stays in the background and can be brought back from the system tray when needed.

With the tool, you can specify the time in different ways to execute the shutdown task, either at a specific time every day, at a specific time in a certain day, or at a time from now. You can also enable to let the tool to remind you 5 minutes before PC starts to shutdown, or reboot.
Wise Auto Shutdown is a windows application that works well on all popular windows platforms, from XP and up, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

Double Driver Makes Backing Up & Restoring Your Drivers Easier Than Ever [Windows]

Your drivers can be a scary and intimidating thing. The two pieces of the Windows backend that I never recommend the novice user play with are the registry and device drivers. The smallest of errors in handling either of these can result in system instability or a completely bricked operating system, and that’s no fun.
As you become a more experienced, savvy, and paranoid citizen of the Internet, you’ll grow accustomed to religiously backing up your system and online data. Drivers are clearly a crucial part of this process, and in this post I’d like to introduce you to a free and portable tool that can completely back up or restore every driver on your machine in just a few clicks.

Double Driver

Double Driver works with versions of Windows from XP to 8. The download is just a little over 2 MB in size and can be extracted anywhere on your hard drive, external drive, or flash drive.
Launching the application shows how simple it is.

Upon launch, Double Driver will immediately begin to scan your system for drivers. Note that you need to launch the application with administrator privileges for it to work properly.
The main tab of interest, across the top, is Backup.

Click the Scan Current System button (near the bottom) and you’ll get access to every driver that exists on your system. Checkboxes are then automatically ticked for drivers that Double Driver detects as your most important, which by default are non-Microsoft drivers. The Select tab will drop down into a menu that allows you to invert your selection, select all, or select none.
The Scan Other System button will let you scan a non-live version of Windows, if you’re trying to backup another OS installation on a second partition or hard drive.
Clicking Backup Now will do just that.

I’d recommend you set the output as a zipped folder, as it will save the most disk space. The operation should then take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.
Restoring your drivers is practically the exact same process, in reverse. Go to the Restore tab, select the folder where your backup has been saved to, and load it. You’re then able to select which drivers you want to restore, if not all.

These two features really sum up the core functionality of Double Driver. It allows preserving your drivers to be very easy. The only feature that would have been great to have would be a scheduled driver backup, but drivers are so rarely touched that many people should probably see that as unneccessary.
If you’d like to print out your drivers, there’s a tab for that. Clicking Print will automatically queue up your list of drivers to your default printer. Clear will clear your scan.
Let me stress again how sensitive the Windows system is when it comes to drivers. You should always be careful when tampering with, disabling, or updating any drivers on your system. In my honest opinion, if it ain’t broke then don’t go trying to fix it. Though I haven’t used the software in over a year, just using an automated driver handler like SlimDrivers has caused catastrophic problems for me in the past.

X-Mouse Button Control Lets You Bind New Functions To Your Mouse Buttons [Windows]

As a regular gamer, I know just how important of a peripheral the mouse is. The mouse offers so much control and, unlike certain areas of the keyboard, your hand is practically always resting on it. It’s a powerful tool!
Your average mouse isn’t very flexible on the software end, though. For the typical user, a plug-and-play mouse is all you’ll ever know. Just because you aren’t willing to drop $80 on a mouse doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have full control, however. While there are a lot of Windows applications that specialize in rebinding keys on the keyboard, X-Mouse Button Control is the king of tweaking your mouse. You just have to know how to use it.

X-Mouse Button Control

X-Mouse Button Control is described as compatible with Windows 2000, XP, 2003, 2003 R2, Vista, 2008, 2008 R2, and 7. I’m currently using it on Windows 8 Pro and not encountering any issues at all.
XMBC does not come with a portable version, unfortunately. The installer itself is just 4 MB in size and should take just a second to download.

While the program cannot be installed portably, it’s good that XMBC gives us the option of storing all of our data and log files in a folder outside of the Program Files folder. This will essentially allow you to save your XMBC settings on a flash drive and immediately load them on another system’s installation. It’s not complete portability and it’s far from perfect, but it works.
The application’s main interface is very plain and straightforward, as I’d prefer it would be.

Already set up for you is a default profile. If you intend to rebind mouse buttons globally, just make the appropriate changes to this profile. Otherwise, the default profile will only apply to applications that don’t have their own settings set up beneath it. We’ll get into that in a moment.

XMBC allows you to force mouse buttons to do things that you probably thought were never possible:

• Activate your screensaver.
• Launch your email.
• Lock the entire workstation.
• Control all media key functions.
• Print screen.
• Run an application.
• Show/hide desktop.

These are just a few. There are plenty more that you can see for yourself.
Adding a new application/window profile will first ask you which process you’d like to save these settings for.

This is a really great feature, most especially for those of us who play games! It’s nice to be able to set specific binds for games that won’t interfere with our most casual and professional activites (assuming you do all the same from one machine like I do).
As you can see in this example, I’ve got two binds set up for when the Notepad process is active.

There are even more extensive options in the Scrolling & Navigation tab.

X-Mouse button control is the kind of software that Windows ought to take into consideration when improving their OS. Wouldn’t simple features like this be awesome in Windows’ integrated settings for the mouse? This application is a must for gamers and requires very little explaining. Install, launch, set up default binds and binds per process, and you’re good to go.
What do you guys think of X-Mouse Button Control? Is it the best third-party application to manage your mouse button binds? Let me know in the comments!

IObit Launches Advanced SystemCare Ultimate With BitDefender Antivirus

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IObit has recently announced the latest version of Advanced SystemCare. Known as Ultimate, this version is built to be a one-stop solution for all of a user’s system management and security needs. It accomplishes this by incorporating anti-virus technology provided by well-known security company BitDefender.
These features are provided through a pair of intuitive interfaces similar to those found in ASC 6. The simplified interface allows for one-click system maintenance while the expert interface provides more experienced users with options for managing their system.

Advanced SystemCare Ultimate serves as a replacement for Advanced SystemCare with Antivirus 2013, which is no longer available. Current owners of ASC with Antivirus 2013 will be automatically upgraded to ASC Ultimate. It’s stand-alone software, so while it includes BitDefender antivirus, ownership of a separate product is not required.
Users can try the software free for 30 days. After that period the software can be purchased for $29.99. This license allows the software to be install on up to 3 PCs simultaneously.
IObit is also a MakeUseOf rewards partner. Advanced SystemCare Pro, Malware Fighter Pro and Protected Folder Pro can be obtained free of charge by redeeming points on our rewards page. Please note that the version of Advanced SystemCare offered via rewards is Pro, not Ultimate.

Uniblue Powersuite 2013 is released with more benefits for users.

Powersuite 2013 is Uniblue’s complete PC performance solution that allows you to unleash your PC’s optimum performance by increasing processing speed and improving stability, whilst providing ongoing maintenance in an easy-to-use interface. This established product ensures that you benefit from a smooth-running operating system, an optimized hard disk alongside improved hardware functionality with the latest drivers.
Powersuite 2013 comes with a fresh new look that tells you, at a glance, the state of your PC’s overall health, as well as a range of customer-centric features and benefits such as three types of scans and a direct link to support.



Uniblue Powersuite 2013 will:

• Find out what is slowing down your PC. With one click, start a full system scan to discover how to optimize your system and identify refinements that can be made, such as removing invalid registry entries, unused processes, junk files and outdated drivers;
  
• Make your PC faster. Custom speed tools sharpen your PC speed by managing CPU resources, boosting software and thumbnail image launches and decreasing start menu launch times;
  
• Clean up, gain space. Uniblue Powersuite 2013 cleans unnecessary items, such as junk files and old backups which take up space and can slow down a PC. You can also choose to compress large files to gain hard drive space;
  
• Improve PC health and stability. Uniblue Powersuite 2013 deactivates unused processes and removes invalid registry entries for a cleaner, healthier PC whilst preventing slowdowns, crashes and freezes;
  
• Ensure your disk runs smoothly. A disk analysis will help you find out which files can be defragmented and how much disk space isavailable. The software will organize your disk files to enhance file access speed;
  
• Enhance your hardware efficiency. Every PC needs a fully-functional set of audio, video and other drivers to communicate with and control various hardware devices. Your drivers can be checked against a daily updated, tested and maintained driver information database supporting more than 88,600 drivers.

Auslogics BoostSpeed 5

Auslogics BoostSpeed is an outstanding PC system utilities application that’s sure to keep your computer optimized and maintained with its numerous speedy, effective features. Every feature in this application that seemed difficult to use had an additional section that simplified its tools for less experienced users. The only disappointing thing about this PC system utilities application is the sparse customer service that backs it up. This application is easy to use, but it would be helpful to have a solid support system to lean on in case anything goes wrong.

Management/Diagnostics: 

Auslogics Disk Explorer finds the areas on your hard drive that are taking up the most space. With this feature within the PC system utilities, you can free the maximum amount of hard drive space when you start to run out.

Auslogics Startup Manager lists the processes that are currently set to open when your operating system starts up. This feature allows you disable dangerous startup entries, but it falls short because it doesn’t indicate whether your system needs any of the startup entries to function properly. Unfortunately, you won't know whether one of the startup entries was important until disabling it causes your system to slow down or crash.

Auslogics Uninstall Manager displays the applications you have installed and indicates whether they’re well-used or trustworthy. With this list, you can choose to uninstall any of the applications using the uninstaller that comes with that respective application. We would’ve liked it if this feature went back and removed any traces the uninstalled application left on your hard drive or in the registry though.

Auslogics System Information provides in-depth data on every piece of hardware that’s associated with your computer. With this feature, you can maintain your computer better because you will be able to look up support information for each peripheral device based on the manufacturer and model number.

Auslogics Task Manager is one of the PC system utilities that let you terminate applications, processes, services and locked files that are currently running on your system. Other task managers only let you deal with applications, so it’s nice to see one that expands its coverage into other items running on your system.

The System Scan PC system utilities feature looks for junk and fragmented files in addition to disk and registry errors. Since this feature doesn’t incorporate any optimization features, we question its effectiveness. It does make a difference, but without optimization features, that difference isn’t going to be significant. The System Advisor picks up where the System Scan left off, presenting a list of additional tweaks that could improve the performance of your system.

The Resource Usage section displays graphs that analyze how a variety of system resources are being used. This PC system utilities feature is strictly informational and does not offer any options for increasing your system’s performance in any of the areas it analyzes.

Repair/Recovery: 

Auslogics Disk Cleaner empties your browser cache and the history of what you’ve downloaded from the internet. It also removes unnecessary system files and temporary files. We were impressed with this PC system utilities feature because it dealt with 22 file types that usually clutter hard drivers. Auslogics Disk Doctor analyzes and repairs your hard drive much faster than similar features. Usually, you would have to restart your computer and wait a long time to complete this process, but this feature does it all without interrupting your current tasks.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder browses your hard drive looking for files that are the same size and share similar names and content.

Auslogics File Recovery effectively restores files you’ve deleted from your hard drive or from various forms of removable media. You can also use this PC system utilities feature to determine if a file you wanted to delete really was deleted after all. If any changes you make with Auslogics BoostSpeed result in your system performing worse than it did before, you can undo them in the Auslogics Rescue Center.

Auslogics Registry Cleaner scans 16 types of registry keys looking for invalid or erroneous entries. We were impressed with how fast this PC system utilities application processed the registry. It scanned thousands of registry keys in a matter of moments and returned our scan results quicker than we had seen with other registry cleaners.

Auslogics Track Eraser is one of the PC system utilities that remove traces of your activity from Windows, your internet browsers and other applications in an effort to maintain your privacy. If this information remains on your system, it can be used to track your activity and possibly steal your personal information. Auslogics File Shredder permanently deletes selected files or folders, but it doesn’t let you choose the method it’s going to use to delete them. Auslogics Disk Wiper permanently erases files you’ve already deleted, ensuring that files you’ve deleted remain deleted.

Optimization: 

Auslogics Disk Defrag does a fantastic job of quickly scanning your hard drive for fragmented files. The disk defragmenter that comes with Windows slows down your computer while it's working. This PC system utilities feature completes the defragmentation process so fast that it doesn’t even have time to slow your computer down.

Auslogics Tweak Manager presents a wide assortment of tweaks you can perform to optimize the performance of your system. We liked this feature because of the optimize button that’s in each section; however, the fact you have to optimize each section individually can get a little tedious. Auslogics BoostSpeed’s Optimize Services feature doesn’t do enough to truly optimize every Windows service. It only deals with a handful of services while there are plenty of them that could easily be disabled.

Auslogics Registry Defrag is another PC system utilities feature that benefits from the lightning fast scan speeds present in Auslogics BoostSpeed. We were disappointed that we had to reboot our computer to complete the defragmentation process, though.

Auslogics Internet Optimizer is broken into sections for manual and automatic optimization. We recommend the automatic optimization section. The manual optimization section is far more complicated, and the odds that you'll accidentally disable an important setting are high. The automatic optimization process might take a little longer, but you’re not going to open yourself up to the risk of disaster if you use it.

Ease of Use: 

We found Auslogics BoostSpeed to be very easy to use. All of its features, except for the manual optimization option for your internet connection and the system tweaks section, were self-explanatory. Every feature that scans your hard drive or the registry does so in a remarkably quick fashion. This PC system utilities application has pretty much every tool you would need to keep your computer running smooth and presents them in a fashion that makes them universally usable.

Help & Support: 

Auslogics provides a frequently asked questions section for this PC system utilities application, but it covers more common sense terms and problems with installing and registering the application than anything else. They have a contact form on their website in case you have any pressing questions. We would like to see them have more contact methods and add information to their help documentation. The current resources can answer numerous questions, but they don't present the user with enough options to get their questions answered in a way that works best for them.

Summary:

Auslogics BoostSpeed has the tools necessary for getting the job done. If Auslogics were to improve their customer service for this application, it would increase its standing in this category. We were impressed with how fast this application’s features were. You’re going to be able to optimize your computer quickly if you perform an all-in-one scan or use each of this application’s features individually.

review source : www.toptenreviews.com

Screenshot:

Take Control of Your Computers With Switch Shutdown Manager [Windows]

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The act of shutting down or rebooting a PC seems like such a simple task doesn’t it? When you’re done work at the end of the day, you choose “shut down” and you’re done until Monday morning. If only the rest of the world of IT were so simple, right?
For those that manage computers and servers, shutting down and rebooting takes on a whole new life. When people have problems, IT techs are often quick to ask if they tried rebooting. It’s not because they’re lazy, it’s because they know that rebooting a PC fixes nearly 90% of the most common issues out there.
In fact, in the field of IT, the ability to reboot a PC or server from anywhere in the company or even from outside the company can mean the difference between fixing a problem from the comfort of you own home, or having to drive in to work to reboot that machine. Not a fun proposition.
Thankfully, there’s a really cool tool called Switch that does nothing more than lets you remote reboot or shut off a computer. Okay, I lied, it does a whole lot more than that, but on the surface that’s all it appears to do.

Using Switch To Maintain Your PCs & Servers

So here’s the bottom line about Switch in just one sentence – it gives you the flexibility to schedule regular maintenance reboots, remotely restart servers or PCs when there are problems, and it lets you actually detect problems and instantly respond to them without any user input required. Now it sounds a lot more interesting, doesn’t it?
You install a license of Switch onto the server or PC that you want to monitor and manage remotely. It allows you to do this by installing itself as a “server” on your PC, available on port 2388 of your host.

If you notice any problems, you may need to make an exception for it in your AV software. If you are using this software in a Corporate environment, you can access it from home by dialing in via VPN and then connecting to the host using port 2388 as shown above. Similarly at home, you could set up your own VPN to connect in from the Internet.
In its simplest form, Switch basically gives you the ability to connect to that machine using your web browser. On the Dashboard for that PC or server page, you’ll see the dropdown list with the shutdown, reboot, or sleep options as well as the option to delay before those choices.

But that is just scratching the surface of what this software can do. If you scroll down the dashboard page, you’ll see where you can “Add” new switches. This is where the juicy stuff resides. When you click on “New” you’ll go to a new page where you can configure when and how you want this PC or server to reboot, shut down or go into sleep mode. You can have as many “switches” set up as you like, which means you can configure an entire set of circumstances where the computer will essentially perform its own maintenance.

What do I mean by this? Well, for instance, maybe you’re running this in a Corporate environment where Corporate headquarters issues regular Windows patches and some PCs that don’t have regular users, like multi-use kiosk PCs, may never get rebooted. Switch lets you either go in and reboot remotely, or you can just set up the PC to regularly reboot once a month or so, and you never have to worry about a post-patch reboot on that PC again.
Another really cool feature that I like for my laptop is the “Low Battery” switch option. This is useful for those times when you accidentally leave your laptop sitting at home, turned on, and unplugged. Rather than let the battery run down to absolutely nothing and potentially have a hard shutdown that could affect the hard drive, you can set up a switch so that when it detect a certain low battery percentage (say 20%), it’ll automatically shut down or go to sleep mode – your choice.

Oh, and here’s another really cool feature – the “Ping” tool. This Switch allows you to have the computer automatically perform a regular ping to some URL or IP address. When the Ping fails, you can have the computer reboot.

So, why on earth would you ever want to do this? Well, if you think about it, this is a good way to constantly monitor the network connection, or even the Internet connectivity of a server or device. If you have a critical PC or server that has to have a good Internet or network connection, this will allow you to instantly detect problems and then perform a reboot that will hopefully resolve the connectivity problem.
It also allows a nice delay so that it’ll only reboot if connectivity is lost for up to a certain amount of time, like 30 minutes or an hour. Rebooting doesn’t always fix the problem, but anyone in the IT field knows that very often it does, and it can save you a lot of downtime if the computer automatically tries that option without your intervention.
Another feature of Switch is the ability to ensure a certain process is running. If it isn’t, you can reboot the PC so that it kicks off upon startup again.

This can be really useful for servers where you have a single critical process serving lots of clients. That service has to be up 24/7, and when it’s down, the server is essentially serving no purpose. It’s a paperweight. You know the service launches upon startup, so why not just have the server reboot itself, restart the service on its own, and the connectivity issues your users experience just went down dramatically.
The Dashboard page gives you an overview of overall uptime for that system (time since last reboot), and a list of all of your configured switches.

Switch also provides you with a logging feature that you can use to make sure that all of the switches you set up are working as desired.

The service also comes with a nice login security feature so that only you, the administrator, have the ability to configure and monitor the switches.
Another really cool feature is e-mail notifications, where you can receive an email every time one of the switches is triggered.

This is a nice way to have an overview of the activity for all of the computers where you’ve installed switch – so basically you get to sit back and be an IT superhero without exerting very much effort. Isn’t that what every IT administrator dreams of?