If you’re a Windows user, you may feel a little better thinking that your Windows account password will keep the thief from sifting through your personal information stored on your hard drive. While it’s understandable to feel that way, you might want to think again.

There are many programs out there that make it very easy to hack one’s Windows account password. While most of these programs are designed for legitimate purposes, they often fall into the wrong hands allowing personal information to become discovered and distributed very easily.

Our suggestion to protect against this form of data theft? Disk encryption — including your OS — by using a secure algorithm. Which leads us to this handy little program called TrueCrypt. Not only is TrueCrypt free, but it allows you to encrypt your entire hard drive(s) very quickly and easily thanks to this tutorial aimed at beginners.

Choosing the right level of disk encryption is optional depending on your needs obviously. But it is far more secure than a simple Windows account password and will keep the common thief from harvesting your private data. To better understand encryption algorithms so you can choose the right one for you, see their documentation located here.

It should be said that it is always a good idea to backup your data to an external source prior to encrypting your drives in case anything goes wrong during the encryption process (we’ll follow up with a later post on our favorite backup/imaging methods).

TrueCrypt not only works on Windows, but Mac OS X and Linux as well. If you’re ready to give TrueCrypt a shot, you can download the latest version here.

TrueCrypt's boot time protection

Title: Re-use of freed object due to scope confusion
Impact: Critical
Announced: April 1, 2010
Reporter: Nils (MWR InfoSecurity)
Products: Firefox

Fixed in: Firefox 3.6.3

Description:

A memory corruption flaw leading to code execution was reported by security researcher Nils of MWR InfoSecurity during the 2010 Pwn2Own contest sponsored by TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative. By moving DOM nodes between documents Nils found a case where the moved node incorrectly retained its old scope. If garbage collection could be triggered at the right time then Firefox would later use this freed object.

You can update your version through Firefox’s internal updater by opening Firefox and selecting Help > Check for Updates. You can also get the full download here.

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Well Jim, I’ve been using this piece of freeware for a while now and love the simplicity.  WinFF is a frontend GUI (graphical user interface) for the popular commandline video encoder known as FFmpeg. 

In other words, WinFF makes it very easy to convert your video files to DVD, AVI, WMV, VCD, Quicktime, cell phone format, etc.  Yes, you can convert your video files to MP4 as well for use on your iPod. A great thing about WinFF is that is supports batch jobs, so you can queue up all your files at once. Keep in mind though that depending on the size of your video files, they can take a while to convert.

You can also use it to convert your audio files to MP3, M4A, WMA, WAV, Ac3, etc.

It should also be mentioned however, that while WinFF is a great file converter, it will not transfer your converted files to your iPod. Since you dislike iTunes, you can use the free Winamp + the ml_ipod plugin to accomplish this task.

Download it here and give it a shot.



Have other suggestions? Leave us a comment!

The first program I run is called CCleaner by Piriform. CCleaner is great for cleaning up accumulated junk on your hard drives.  It also includes a registry cleaner.  You can check out all CCleaner’s features here.

The second program I use is called Disk Defrag by Auslogics. With this you can defragment each hard drive installed inside your computer.  It also supports USB hard drives (you’ll have to enable this option in settings) and has a built-in scheduler.

After I run Disk Defrag, I run a third free program from Lars Hederer called NTREGOPT. This small program will defrag your registry on your Windows machine. Once you run this program, it will ask you to reboot to complete the registry optimization process.  However, if you are running Windows Vista, you will need to run NTREGOPT with administrator privileges, otherwise you will receive an error message.

While there can be many more processes to run through when cleaning up and optimizing your computer, this is a good place to start.

This update includes:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Many users experienced an issue where a corrupt local database caused Firefox to “lose” its stored cookies. (bug 470578)
• Fixed an issue where, starting with Firefox 3.0.7, inline image attachments on popular webmail services (like AOL and AIM) would not display. (bug 482659)
• Large forms would sometimes take a long time to submit. (bug 426991)
• In certain cases, new windows would not have proper focus. (bug 446568)

You can download the portable version of save2pc here.

Have other suggestions? Leave us a comment!