The way USB disk devices are handle by the operating system have always been a bit odd and the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ function is the Windows solution but it’s never been the greatest at handling the sheer array of different devices you can plug in to your PC. Sometimes if you have several devices, it can be difficult to identify the one you want, other times the device cannot be removed, and even the safely remove icon can, on occasion, not show up at all. Identifying and managing card readers is also not handled in the most effective way.

Many of you already know that usb devices have an option in device manager to ‘Optimize the device for quick removal’ which will disable the write caching on the device, but even that might not save your data or USB drive from becoming corrupted if it is unplugged before the writing to the drive has finished.

There are times when you are using your computer that the screen gets completely clogged up with open windows simply due to the number of applications you might be using at the time. This can get pretty confusing which could lead to you closing down windows you didn’t want to, and possibly losing any work that has not been saved. It can all start to look a bit of a cluttered mess. Maybe you you are at home or work and have an application or window open that you don’t want someone else to see for privacy or security reasons.

There are lots of utilities around which will quickly hide all your windows with a few keystrokes, or the ‘Boss key’ as it’s known. But there’s much more that you could do with this type of program apart from close or open everything. That’s where a little tool called Clicky Gone could be useful because there’s a lot more function to it. This program can hide your opened active application window quickly or separate windows one at a time with a hotkey and mouse click or just the keyboard alone. There’s also a fancy transparency effect available for inactive windows.

The ability to send emails and receive them is a big part of being online and a real time saver if there are a lot of people you wish to keep in contact with. It’s a real money saver too, as a few years back a lot of people didn’t have computers, and contact was either with a phone call or a letter. These days, just about everyone who has a computer has an email account and in a lot of cases several of them.

One of the minor drawbacks of emails is you need a way to send and receive them which can either be through clients like Windows Live Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird, or logging on to web services like Hotmail or Gmail. Whichever way you choose, it does mean somewhere down the line you will have enter your username and password and this becomes a security and privacy worry if the machine you are currently at isn’t yours.

A large proportion of the software installed on a computer these days requires some form of internet access, whether it’s for registering, activating or just for updates, even if the software itself has no need for a web connection during normal usage. Unfortunately, malicious software will use your internet connection in a similar way as well, although what it sends is far more likely to be your personal data and what it receives could be more malware code. Sometimes there just might be a process connected to another piece of software that you really don’t expect or want to have access, but often you won’t even know this network activity is going on behind the scenes.

With so many programs periodically going online to do their tasks, it can be difficult to stay totally safe. What you need is something to give a you picture of what is going on with your internet connection and what software is actually trying to use it. There are utilities around to do this and sometimes there will be some sort of similar function in security software, but there’s a tool called Proc Net Monitor which aims to be easy to use, but also offer some very useful options.

While installing or running programs on your computer, the chances are very good you will have encountered a window that pops up telling you “This program might not have installed correctly“. There was a new feature introduced in Windows Vista and 7 which is supposed to actively monitor and detect the known compatibility issues with older programs when you try and run or install them. If it detects any potential issues, it will throw up the not installed correctly window. You will then have a choice whether to try to reinstall with the recommended settings, which is usually detecting issues with User Account Control or trying to run the program as an earlier version of Windows in compatibility mode. Or you can simply tell it there was no problem and carry on.

Computer is supposed to help make things easier for us. One simple example is to delete lines from a text file that doesn’t contain a specific keyword. This task is a no brainer but very time consuming and tedious. Recently I have spent some time in compiling a list of websites that has copied and published articles taken from this blog to their website. Although Google does a pretty good job in determining the original publisher, it is still a robot based on a bunch of constantly changing algorithm that can and has made mistakes. Searching for websites that has copied the posts from here is very time consuming, so I have used Copyscape Premium to automatically perform a batch scan on all 2000 articles on this website to track down plagiarism of the content from this blog.

Copyscape Premium finished scanning all 2000 posts in just 10 hours and I was able to export the results to a CSV file for further investigation. There are over 20,000 URLs in the list and I want to categorize the websites based on the domain names. Not all websites from the list are copycats but most of the websites hosted in free hosts such as blogspot/blogger/wordpress are either scrapers or copy paster. Once the URLs are categorized, I can concentrate on filing a DMCA complaint to Blogger, then followed by WordPress instead of jumping back and forth.

On the whole, just about everybody who uses it, would say Windows 7 is a great operating system all round and a big improvement over Vista and XP. The visual additions and enhancements to the taskbar is something that helps give Windows 7 a clear edge over it predecessors.

Why then, after all the work on these extra visuals, did Microsoft feel the need to take the network activity icon in the system tray, and make it look so bland and lifeless? Although they said it was to make things look less ‘noisy’ in the tray, I like the old one, because you can see if something like a download has finished in the background, or there’s activity on your network when you think there shouldn’t be. It’s also useful at watching for activity on laptops. To me, this is one of the minor annoyances of Windows 7 where it wasn’t already broken in XP and Vista as well to some extent, but Microsoft decided to try and fix it anyway.