PC and Internet

MP3, WMA and other compressed audio formats have been becoming more and more popular in the last couple of years for several reasons. These audio files can be played on mp3 players. Because of their small size, compared to their audio CD counterparts, you can get hundreds of songs on a CD, where normally 10 - 20 songs fit and so on. How do you however get music on a normal audio CD into the mp3 format? There are many free & not free programs for doing that. One program that can quickly do that for you is the CDex Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor.

Do you work on different PCs, which do not necessarily have the software you need or on which you cannot always install that software? There is an attractive solution to this. Simply get “portable” versions of that or similar software and install them on a USB (thumb) or other portable, external drive, which you can then carry along with you and use on multiple computers.

System Explorer Portable

This is the portable version of the installable Taskmanagers System Explorer. When you start system explorer (the first time), it asks if it should make a security scan of running processes & compares them to an online database. The results can be viewed in a browser. The security scan can also be started by clicking the Security Scan button.

Ever wondered what on earth is using up your PC hard drive space and where it’s all hidden? Sometimes it’s easy to find it, sometimes not, especially after using a PC over a long time. This small tool, WinDirStat, a disk usage analyzer can be very helpful because on starting it, it shows disk usage statistics.

The article below, was written as a response in the forums to a user, who was asking for advice on how to speed up his PC which had over time become noticeably slow. It's based on Windows XP. The accompanying video above, though was done on a Windows 7 system. Some few things like the names of some components or items are a bit different, though if one has some PC experience or after taking a good cup of coffee, as you work, you will note a lot is not that different at all. So here is an updated version of the original Windows XP based article, explaining how YOU can do this YOURSELF:

This utility is small but can come in handy in many situations when you need some of the wide range of information it extracts and displays from your PC system components.

Apart from being able to view this information on the screen, you can save it as html, xml or csv file and for example avail it to a technician who can then help deal with some issues.