utility

There's one thing you can do to avoid being the victim of identity theft: follow this 10-step PC security plan.

Encrypt your network connection Most popular sites offer HTTPS connections at least some of the time. In Gmail, click the gear icon in the top-right corner and select "Always use https" under the General tab.

To select Facebook's HTTPS setting, click the down arrow in the top-right corner and choose Account settings. Select Security in the left pane and Edit in the Secure Browsing section of the main window. Check "Browse Facebook on a secure … Read more

The folks at IObit have just released version 5 of their highly rated Advanced SystemCare program, and it still packs a punch.

Now compatible with both 32- and 64-bit systems, and dressed in a slightly improved user interface, Advanced SystemCare 5 is a great all-in-one PC utility that can scan, repair, and optimize many aspects of your system. Choose between Quick Care and Deep Care modes, depending on how invasive you want to get (and how much time you have). Also, optimize performance with the improved Turbo Boost mode.

New to version 5 is the Active Boost function, which monitors … Read more

Advanced SystemCare Free 5 uses its powerful arsenal of optimization tools to keep your PC feeling fresh and clean. It also includes a couple of features that could help boost performance for either gaming or work purposes--your choice.

Advanced SystemCare's Quick Care option includes the ability to clean your registry, perform a rudimentary malware scan, fix and remove broken shortcuts, delete junk files, and erase browsing tracks. It works in a flash, requires almost no user input, and to make things even easier, can be configured to run on system startup.

The Deep Care option, on the other hand, … Read more

Teachers these days need all the help they can get. Totally Free Teacher Tools is a suite of five tools that can be useful to teachers and plenty of other people, too. Although none of the tools are must-haves, they're not bad to have around just in case.

Once Totally Free Teacher Tools is installed, users have the option to download each individual tool one at a time. This is useful if you don't want to clutter up your computer with unneeded programs, but a bit of a pain if you want to try everything out. We started … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions on preserving an intact preferences file for restoring if the working one becomes corrupt, using an alternative e-mail account with iCloud, an unrecoverable filesystem error showing in Disk Utility, and why not download PKG installer files directly. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

NOTE: The "contact us" box for e-mailing us will hopefully … Read more

Growl, a widely used open-source notification tool that lets Mac OS X applications tell users about events such as incoming instant messages, is no longer free.

And not everybody is happy about that.

Starting with version 1.3, Growl became a $1.99 purchase. Growl developer Chris Forsythe described the changes this way yesterday:

Growl as a paid application allows for good changes. We now have people working on Growl full time. Money earned through purchases in the App Store go directly to benefiting Growl...Without changing to this paid Growl model, Growl would have died off and would no … Read more

FAssistant is a free multiuser personal finance tracking and reminder application. It also analyzes your finances, generating useful reports that give you both a "Big Picture" as well as deep details. You can set up multiple user accounts, each with multiple financial or information accounts for FAssistant to keep track of.

FAssistant's installer creates a database, and we had the opportunity to import data during the setup process, which many users will appreciate. Once our database was created, we needed to set up an account, which can be either an Application User or Admin User, though the … Read more

As freeware system cleaners go, Magix PC Check & Tuning Free offers a good balance. Some such tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible and give you few options and not enough information about what they're doing to your system. Others overwhelm beginners with options and detailed scan reports, and they often make it too easy to delete the wrong things. The freeware version of PC Check is designed to be easy to use yet useful to people with widely varying skills, yet it also lets you perform cleaning and tune-up operations separately as well … Read more

Glary Utilities is one of the most consistently recommended freeware system maintenance suites, and our experience with it suggests such confidence isn't misplaced. It combines a Registry Cleaner, Shortcuts Fixer, Startup Manager, Temporary Files Cleaner, Tracks Eraser, Spyware Remover, and much more in one compact interface. Glary Utilities Portable is a full-featured portable freeware version of Glary Utilities. It can run for portable drives on any compatible Windows PC, making it a great addition to portable PC toolkits.

We extracted Glary Utilities Portable and clicked the executable file, which ran the program without requiring an installation process. A simple … Read more