Raymond.CC Blog

It’s pretty safe to say that at some point in time nearly all of us have probably deleted some files or folders by accident. It’s easily done if you are giving your PC a bit of clearout of rubbish and useless data and put something you don’t want deleted into the recycle bin without realising. Of course, if you haven’t emptied the recycle bin yet, no problem and just restore them, unless a file was too big to fit and has been deleted directly. It’s a bit more of an issue if you have turned off the recycle bin function altogether or have done this via the network because there will be no second chance to get anything back through Windows itself.

Anybody with a reasonable amount of knowledge will know that just because these files have been deleted, it doesn’t mean they cannot be undeleted and recovered under the right circumstances. There is a wide market for this kind of tool ranging from professional recovery solutions like Runtime Software’s GetDataBack and EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard Pro, to the free undelete utilities like Recuva and Wise Data Recovery from Wisecleaner. Wise Data Recovery has just come out of beta so is now a fully fledged stable release and certainly worth looking at.

As with most tools like this, Wise Data Recovery is able to recover just about any type of files like music, video, compressed archives, executables, etc. Once a drive is scanned, the files are given a traffic light status for the chances of recovery. Green is for a good chance of recovering the files, Orange for a poor or very poor chance and Red if the program thinks the data is lost and there is no chance of getting it back.

Wise Data Recovery is available as both installer and portable which makes it a good addition to the USB toolkit.

The program boasts a very clean looking and efficient interface with only two buttons needed for it to function effectively. Simply select the drive to be scanned for the deleted files and click the ‘Scan’ button. What I did notice is most of the time this program seemed to complete a scan quite a bit quicker than Recuva, which is the utility most people will compare Wise Data Recovery to.

After only a few seconds on my system, the results were displayed in both the main window and a file directory structure window on the left, much like a standard Windows Explorer display. You can then search for your files by scrolling through the list and ticking the files for recovery. If they are green then they can be recovered. I tried a few Orange files of ‘Poor’ recoverability but none of them fully recovered properly. You may still be able to extract partial pieces of data from these files but it’s no guarantee.

Keywords and wildcards can be entered into the search box to filter the files. Some are provided for you by clicking the dropdown arrow; images, audio, video, documents, archives and emails.

Once all files to be recovered are ticked, clicking ‘Recover’ will ask you for a location to save the files to. For obvious reasons the program will pop up a warning if you try to save to the drive the files are to be recovered from. After that, job done.

I ran a quick scan of my S: partition using Wise Data Recovery and Recuva. Both found 1418 deleted files although Wise did complete the scan quickest. Of those, Recuva found 37 unrecoverable (red) and 23 Poor (orange) files, while Wise Data Recovery found 60 unrecoverable (red) files. Scanning other partitions yielded similar results. It seems they are pretty even in finding the amount of deleted files that are recoverable although Recuva also has a slower and more thorough ‘Advanced’ scan mode available.

So, is Wise Data Recovery a viable alternative to Recuva? I’d have to say if you’re unhappy with Recuva for some reason, then yes it is. But it isn’t something you would use instead of Recuva because Piriform’s utility is still the better program overall. Wise is a nice clean program which does its job quickly, but Recuva still has the ability to Ctrl or Shift click for multiple selections, has a secure overwrite function, different view modes, preview and header view tabs, a wizard and some other options not available in the Wise software as yet. The program is still in its infancy, so there is plenty of scope for the inclusion of more functions as time goes on.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Win7/8 32bit and 64bit

Website and Download

A lot of PC keyboards and a good number of laptops will usually have a couple of hotkeys somewhere to control the system volume, either by pressing an ‘Fn’ qualifier key and a number key, or some extra added on buttons. You might even have a nice little dial or slider to handle it for you. Sometimes there will be a function in the provided driver or software that shows the volume level status in a nice on-screen display. But if it isn’t available, you’re stuck with the basic Windows volume control options using the icon in the system tray. My Logitech keyboard has a dial and a mute button but nothing to display this on the screen.

A neat little program called 3RVX gives an on screen display of the volume level with a number of different looking skins included. There are eight with the program, but extra ones can be added. Not only that, but if your keyboard doesn’t have its own dedicated buttons to control the volume, some hotkeys can be configured for the up, down and mute functions as well as an optical drive eject hotkey.

The introduction of the Autorun feature was brought to our Windows systems way back in the day when Windows 95 was around. It was a great idea of allowing things like game and application installs to automatically launch themselves whenever a CD or DVD was inserted into the drive. This is quite a big help to the novice and inexperienced users because they don’t have to do anything to trigger an installer or specified piece of software. The idea behind Autorun is simple with a file called Autorun.inf located in the root of the media containing a command to execute the required program. The inf file is looked for, and if found, is read when the disk is inserted.

With the invention of USB drives and sticks, the Autorun feature has been the target of attack from viruses, Trojans and other malicious software. This is because of the ease at which the Autorun.inf can be replaced and then pointed to start the malicious executable, and begin the infection as soon as the device is inserted into a machine. The ease at which these viruses can then travel from system to system with the aid of the unwitting user poses a major security risk. It would come as no surprise to anyone that Autorun based threats have been one of the most common forms of infection over recent years.

Whether you think it might be a good idea or not, sometimes there could be a legitimate case for monitoring what is happening on a PC when you are not physically sitting there in front of it. Some people may call it spying but I guess it really just depends on your point of view. While using monitoring techniques to gather private or confidential information from another person is obviously not something anyone should be doing, there are times when someone is perhaps engaging in certain activities on your PC you are not completely happy with.

Perhaps you are just worried about your children visiting places on the internet you’d rather they didn’t, or trying to stop them going to parts of the system causing stability or security issues. As a couple of simple examples; a relative came home from work two or three days in a row to find his kids had infected the machine with a rogue antivirus. Needless to say, they wouldn’t, or simply couldn’t tell him what they were doing or where they were going to get infected. Another person I know has several kids and one of them kept disabling the laptop’s security software and obviously no-one was admitting responsibility. Monitoring the mentioned systems could have given a much clearer indication of what was happening, why it was happening and when.

When mentioning the word ‘Keylogger’, a number of people reading this will raise their eyebrows and think ‘Trojan’ and other malicious software. And they are of course, correct. Malicious keylogger trojans are one of the more common pieces of code that sneak their way onto a computer and log the users actions, such as typing in password or financial details, and sends that information to a remote location. But using keylogging on your own or a friend or relatives PC and having good intentions, with the aim of prevention or education, is more acceptable.

Spyrix Free Keylogger is one such application that is expressly designed to log a number of activities at regular intervals. User tasks such as keystrokes, applications and windows opened and clipboard activity are all monitored. These actions are also automatically captured and stored as a series of screenshots.

Every time you attach a piece of hardware to your PC, whether it is a USB stick, a new graphics card or a keyboard/mouse, the drivers get installed for that device to become usable by Windows. This is perfectly fine but a problem arises when the device is not going to be permanently connected and may be something you plug in once and never have to again. Unless you specifically remove the driver by uninstalling through any software which accompanied it, the chances are there will still be an entry for that device left in Windows long after it was removed. Windows will still try to look for and start these devices when booting and although the difference may be tiny, hundreds of them could affect booting time and system performance, especially on older machines. Issues when installing new hardware might also be caused by an old driver conflicting with a new one.

Although they aren’t needed anymore, these unused devices then become hidden, or ghosted, meaning you can’t ordinarily see them unless they are specifically looked for. The easy way to look for them is going to ‘Device Manager’ and selecting ‘Show Hidden devices’ in the View menu. You also need a system environment variable called ‘DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES’ and set it to ‘1’. The ghosted devices will display with a lighter grey than connected ones and can be individually uninstalled.

It comes as no great surprise that an increasing amount of people are becoming more concerned about their data files. With so many different pieces of important or private information stored across multiple files, having any of this exposed to the wrong person could pose a major security risk. Unfortunately, it isn’t just who might use your work or home computer after you who might have access to this data, but other users on a local network or malicious software from the internet can also possibly view this information.

Whether you are someone who wants to keep private and confidential data at your business or place of work, or simply want to keep your personal files away from other users on the same computer, protecting these files is highly desirable. This where utilities come into play that can password protect these files so nobody else but the user who encrypted them can access the information inside.

When it comes to encryption software, there’s a lot of it around. As password protecting important files is something everyone should be able to do, having a simple to use piece of software is a good thing. Encoding Decoding Free is a very easy tool to encrypt private and personal files making the task something even the more technically challenged can do without problems.

As you know, whenever you install a piece of software it will install several files and probably registry entries on the system in order to work. And this is fine while you’re using it. When you choose to uninstall the software, you simply use the programs dedicated shortcut icon or go through ‘Add/Remove‘ or ‘Programs and Features‘ in the Control Panel.

Unfortunately, as is the case with just about all versions of Windows, quite often this doesn’t completely remove all traces of the files, folders and registry entries used by the software and these get left on your system. While this might not be a major problem at the time, it can cause potential issues down the line. This is especially true with system utilities and security software or software which installs a large amount of information and data. It’s possibly expected that sometimes a file or two or a registry key is left behind, but sometimes there are literally hundreds or even thousands that remain which isn’t good news for an efficiently run system.

The majority of users will no doubt know about third party uninstall tools like Revo Uninstaller and IObit Uninstaller, a couple of programs I keep in my USB toolkit. These programs and others like them are especially designed to remove leftover registry information, files and folders after uninstalling a program which the Windows built-in tool doesn’t touch.

Geek Uninstaller is another free utility to enter this area. The program is an entirely portable standalone executable (after unzipping) so is ideal for a pen stick. Apart from its clean and easy to use interface, it also supports 30 different languages and has a ‘Force removal’ option to uninstall software that refuses to go through its own uninstaller.