In the wake of the Gmail temporary loss of accounts a lot of tech sites are highlighting ways to back up your account.  I like the suggestion of Hotmail accessing your Gmail through POP but that’s another cloud solution to maintain.  Using Thunderbird and POP access is another good idea but you need to have it running to pick up your mail.

The best solution I’ve found is MailStore Home.  It will backup and restore your email from basically any email client native or online and it’s free for personal use.  …

All-In-One Tray is a great free Windows 7 utility that sits in your system tray and provides access to pretty well all the operating system’s built in utilities plus a lot more like purging DNS cache and rebuilding icons.  As well there are four custom spots for whatever you’d like.

Very slick and a 7 MB footprint make All-In-One Tray a must have.

A decent utility that in its free form give two great pieces of information: that TRIM is enabled and the relative life of your SSD drive.

Unfortunately it didn’t matter how long I left SSDLife running it never showed my drive’s estimated life.  I’ll leave it in my System Tray for a while and see what develops.

While on my recent trip I picked up the June 2010 issue of PC Plus; in it they glowingly recommended a product called DriverEasy.  I was on vacation and although PC Plus is the most expensive British tech mag import I was in Paris and splurged, but that’s an aside; back to DriverEasy.  It is a tool that scans, downloads and installs device drivers for your Windows system, all for free.  You can upgrade to the paid version that provides device driver backups and faster downloads.  I took the free …

Setting up a PC for a friend and they needed some sort of backup.  My first thought is always Windows Home Server but this was a single PC and the extra cost couldn’t be justified.  I turned again to Macrium Reflect Free Edition: the user had an older 200 GB Maxtor external USB hard drive that would hold the backup files.  To be fair I first tried Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Free Edition and ToDo Backup but neither one did exactly what I wanted: a backup that could be …

Eventually every PC user comes to the point when they try to save something on their PC and there isn’t enough space.  We all react the same way: what’s filled my hard drive?  It seemed for a while gargantuan hard drives with 1 to 2 TB were the norm and we could never fill that space, but now SSDs are the hot item and most of us can only afford something 40 to 120 GB.  Or you store everything on a server and only run the operating system and applications …

AVG produces a great anti-virus product and makes a free version available; it’s highly recommended.  Recently they released AVG Rescue CD and it’s just as it sounds: a bootable CD with AVG on it, ready to fix those virus issues on your FAT32 or NTFS formatted hard drives.  System requirements indicate it will only work with Windows 2000 and up but that includes server versions as well; nicely done AVG.
Like all great fixes available you need a second working computer or need to download and burn a copy every few …

Update 16-Mar-10.  Forfiles command line updated to show @file instead of @path; testing and working.
Update 02-Aug-10.  Download location for ForFiles changed since Microsoft CodePlex page has been removed.

I needed a simple and free backup program for a single purpose PC that chugged along day in day out.  It ran Windows XP Professional and had a total used space of 8 GB on a 40 GB hard drive.  For convenience I installed a second 40 GB hard drive that would hold the backup files. Since it was always running the program …

After working with FreeNAS as a free storage solution for small businesses I came across Lime Technologies unRAID, which takes a completely different approach to storage.  It’s a software RAID type solution that uses your largest disk as a parity drive that isn’t used for storage, and then all other drives of any size as storage.  You can lose the parity drive or one of the data drives and not crash the system, but two drive loss is bad.  unRAID splits data across your drives in a variety of ways, …

FreeNAS seems to be making a lot of news and tech sites lately; it’s a free network attached storage operating system so you can make your own NAS box out of whatever hardware you want.  I haven’t been interested because of how great works for me, but I had a friend who needed network storage cheap as in free.

He had a Pentium III 700 MHz PC, Asus CUSI-M SiS motherboard with a 20 GB hard drive and 512 MB of RAM and a CD-ROM.  Since it had to be …

To create some buzz for the upcoming Red Alert 3 Electronic Arts has released the original Red Alert for free.
Command & Conquer Red Alert

Originally published June 28th 2002.
Like most computer obsessed users I have a home server running at home. It handles my internet connection, stores my files and hosts my web, FTP, email, Certificate and VPN servers. No matter where I am I like access to my files, because you just never know. As well I like to play with a lot of different technologies and try to get an understanding of how they work. There are lots of connection options available to me, but what do you do when something stops …

Available for free are the original MechCommander, MechCommander Gold and MechCommander 2, as well as the manuals. I have fond memories of these the first time around and they’re a great addition to the growing list of free PC games.
MechCommander.org

Everyone needs to create a PDF file at some point for distribution, archiving, whatever.  The open source and free way to do it elegantly and simply is to use PDF Forge.  Installs as a printer driver and has lots of options for the finished product.
PDF Forge

This is a multi platform media player, completely open source and full of playback goodness.  I was thrilled with in on my Pocket PC, and it’s ready for fourteen other platforms.
VLC Media Player

SUPER is a nice GUI for a bunch of freeware and open source encoders that lets you convert multimedia files from one type to another.  The interface is a it busy but it handles everything you need.
SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer)

No, not for calculating the best way to work during rush hour.  PRTG Freeware Edition is a relatively simple way to monitor up to three devices for bandwitdh usage, such as your router (internet traffic), server or suspected issue.
PRTG Traffic Grapher

A nice and tidy one page collection of free security related programs, including anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware.
Security-Ops

This is a very nice simple undelete utility, in the vein of the old DOS command. It brings up what you can try and retrieve, you select the files and that’s about it. No install needed, just run the EXE. It will also permanently delete files from your hard drive, in a counter restorationary sort of way.
Restoration

While this is written for Linux the creators of GParted have a Live CD version that works very well.  I suggest you know what you’re doing with partitions before you get into this, but GParted does everything you would need to do for hard drive partitioning, without buying Partition Magic.
Gnome Partition Editor