My Favorite PC Utilities

Posted by admin on March 2, 2009 under 2-User Tips |

I don’t go crazy over PC helper programs. But I’ve found a few that I absolutely rely on, so I would like to pass them on. Here are 4 programs that I use constantly. I’ll review some others in a second post.

Roboform
The first program is Roboform.  This program allows you to save and retrieve all your web passwords. You enter a single (strong) password the first time you use it forthe day.  After that, any time you go to a website that requires a log-in and password, Roboform allows you to log in with a single click. You also have the ability to launch your password protected pages from Roboform. All the functionality resides in a simple toolbar on your Web Browser. Roboform also allows you to generate strong random passwords, create password protected notes, and save more than one profile or identity. One of the features I like about Roboform is that its data is stored in the My Documents folder, so the data is backed up when you back up your documents. Roboform stays active as long as you are logged in to your computer, but you can also set a timeout that requires you to enter your password after a certain time, for example 3 hours.

 Xobni
I just recently found about about Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). This is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. It indexes all your email and allows you to very quickly and easily search by name or keyword. But that’s just the start. It will also allow you to view email threads and all the attachments related to a search result. It also will display the “network” of people you send and receive emails from by linking together all the CC:’s on your emails. It provides a variety of useful and interesting statistics about your email contacts - including average response time and a histogram of the time of day that they send you emails. It is a free program and seems to work unobtrusively within Outlook.

 Stegano Safe
Steganos is a “virtual safe” used to store sensitive documents and data.  It works by creating an encrypted file that acts as a virtual hard drive. So after I open the safe, I see a new hard drive (e.g. H: drive) on my system. You can have several virtual drives for different purposes, and drives can be as large as your system allows. I have used a 50 GB virtual safe successfully. I use a 20 character password, which the program deems uncrackable. One thing I like about Steganos is that it automatically closes the safe if you log off, sleep, hibernate, or shut-off the computer. The program also includes a “shredder” which will completely wipe a file from your hard drive, or clean the empty space on your hard drive by writing random information to it. This is an important sidebar - when you “delete” a file from you hard drive Windows only removes the file name from the directory. There are many programs that allow one to recover deleted files and they can also be used maliciously if someone steals your computer.

Mailwasher Pro
I don’t let any email come directly into my inbox. Instead I use a program called Mailwasher. Mailwasher checks my mailboxes just like Microsoft Outlook does. But instead of reading the entire email, it just displays the Subject and From address of each email. It also scans the first hundred lines of so of each email so that it can flag it as good or spam. A very efficient display shows all my pending email, color coded as good, or spam. One click flags an email as spam, or a sender as either friend or foe. If you flag an email as spam it “learns” the content of the email so it can flag similar mail. Clicking a button to process the mail deletes all the bad mail from my email server. I can then go into Outlook and manually download my mail. The downside to this process is that receiving email becomes a two step process - first to review and filter the email with Mailwasher, second to retrieve the mail with Outlook. However, at one time I was receiving 200 or more spam letters a day, so it was well worth it to keep my Outlook folders clean. My email server now has a spam filter which removes 95% of the spam I receive, so Mailwasher isn’t as much of a necessity. But I still prefer to screen the email before it hits my inbox.

 Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement for any of the products, and I can’t be held responsible for your use (or misuse) of them. Please try at your own risk!