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

While it’s quite annoying and can produce different pop-ups including a fake blue screen of death, it’s actually rather easy to remove thanks to the free Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.

Per a member’s request, I have posted a quick and easy removal guide here on our free support forums.

It should also be noted that Antivirus 2010 and other malware like it can be easily thwarted by using solid anti-malware protection. I have listed many free programs here to choose from that will help keep you safe and free of malware going forward.

A few folks have asked us if there’s a way to install Windows from a flash drive. Well, there sure is.

I have posted the simple methods here on our forum.

There are a couple of reasons why we prefer installing Windows from a flash drive. One, installing from a flash drive is much faster than installing from a CD or DVD. And number two, we waste fewer disks!

Have an easier method that you would like to share? Drop us a comment below or on our forum thread.

Soon after installing and optimizing Vista, I noticed that when I opened a portable application or file on one of my secondary drives, there seemed to be a delay in Vista of about 10 seconds.  I would notice the pause… then the drive clicked a few times before finally opening the desired file.  I started thinking, what the heck is going on?

After some digging around, I found out that Windows Vista — by default — turns off hard drives that are not in use due to inactivity, in order to conserve energy.  If people rarely access their secondary drives, then it made sense.  However, in my case I’m constantly accessing files on these backup drives when using my main PC.

The solution to this frustrating problem?

Not allowing Vista to turn off these secondary hard drives.

If you are experiencing the same problem or want full efficiency out of your hard drives, follow these simple steps:

• Go to Start> Control Panel> Power Options (you may have to click “classic view” on the left sidebar).
• Select your desired power plan:

• Next click “Change plan settings”
• Select “Change advanced power settings”
• Per the below screen shot, select the “Hard disk” option and change it to “never”:

• Click apply and OK.

That’s it.  This frustrating problem should plague you no more

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.