Here is the story. A few weeks ago, my brother asked me to re-partition his new laptop’s hard disk. It is a Dell Studio laptop. At the beginning, I tried to use the popular EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition since it received a lot of positive reviews, but unfortunately the laptop is running on the 64 bit version Windows 7 Home Premium and EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition works only on 32 bit Windows. Then, I tried GParted Live USB, a Linux based partition editor. Again, it was not a success because GParted gives me error whenever I tried to re-partition the hard disk. I don’t exactly know what caused the problem but I can see there is a Dell Backup Utility partition and maybe it had caused the error.

After searching for the alternative, I found Partition Wizard Home Edition. Partition Wizard Home Edition is a free partition manager software for Windows. It is free for personal/home use and the best thing is, it supports the 64 bit version of Windows. Basically, Partition Wizard will let you perform partitioning actions such as create, format, convert, explore, resize, move and copy a partition, like any other partition managers. Partition Wizard is very simple and easy to use.

Because it is free, it is not as powerful as other paid partition manager such as Partition Magic. For example, Partition Wizard only supports FAT, FAT32 and NTFS partitions. This means you cannot use Partition Wizard to create, resize or move Linux EXT2 or EXT3 partitions. As you can see from the image below, the partition (1) is actually a EXT2 partition, and it is shown as other in Partition Wizard.

There are various tools available to help you encrypt and protect your personal private files. On-the-fly-encryption (OTFE) is one of the popular methods used by disk encryption software. This method allows the data to be encrypted just before it is written to disk and decrypted after it is read from the disk transparently on the background.

R-Crypto is an easy-to-use disk encryption software for Windows to protect your personal and private data, in fact, it is very easy to use. R-Crypto can protect your personal confidential files by creating encrypted virtual disks and each disk is a single file-container. This virtual disk is protected with password. A user can only access the files inside the virtual disk when the correct password is provided. After a user provides the correct password, the virtual disk can be mounted and the user can use the encrypted virtual disk just like a normal drive.

To use R-Crypto to protect your personal files, you must first create a new R-Crypto encrypted disk. R-Crypto encrypted disk is a container file which can be mounted as virtual disk. The container file is stored on your system just like a normal file.

1. In R-Crypto Management Panel, click ‘Run new encrypted disk creation wizard’ [1] and click ‘Next’.

2. Specify the name of the container file [2] and choose the location where you want to store the encrypted disk container file [3]. Choose the size for your encrypted disk [4] and click ‘Next’.

If you are using Windows, you probably ever encounter error message saying that a file is being used by other person or program when you are trying to delete, move or rename a file, or ejecting a USB drive. For example, if Windows Explorer is viewing the thumbnail of a video, then the video file is likely being locked by Explorer.exe. Before this, I use Unlocker to force the delete and move operation of these locked files, or when trying to eject a USB drive with opened files. Unfortunately, I can’t get Unlocker to work on Windows 7, even on the 32 bit version of Windows 7.

LockHunter is a similar tool to Unlocker. LockHunter allows you to release a file or directory that being opened by other application. LockHunter integrates itself to the right-click menu just like Unlocker. LockHunter also allows you to kill or even delete the process that is opening the file that you want to delete.

Keeping software installed on your Windows system up-to-date with the latest version is important. One of the main reasons to keep software updated with the latest version is because the latest version usually come with bug and security fixes. Security fix is very important because unfixed security flaws in the software installed on your system may lead your system to be compromised by hackers. Keeping software with latest version will also allow you to use new features that came with the latest version of the software. Checking each software that installed on your system manually for latest the version is a tiresome thing to do.

While Linux operating system have their own package manager that connects to software repository that allows users to keep the installed software on their system up-to-date with the latest version easily, Windows users don’t have this. Update Notifier is a small utility that checks if there are updates available for the software installed on your system and display the updates to you in a simple way. If update is available, you can click the download button and you will be directed to the download page for the software. Then, you can download the latest version of the software using your web browser.

Update Notifier is easy to use and straight forward. Update Notifier can be installed as portable application.

Standard keyboard has 3 main light emitting diode (LED) which are used to monitor if you activate the ‘Num Lock’, ‘Caps Lock’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ function. If you feel like changing these LEDs function into something else, you can use it as a network traffic network indicator. Talking about the good old Windows 98 dial-up tray icon days =)

A small tool called Network Lights will allows you to use your keyboard LED as network traffic indicator. When there is download or upload network activity, Network Lights will make the ‘Num Lock’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ LEDs blinking. You can impress your friends with your new cool network activity indicator LEDs. Network Lights also works on laptop’s keyboard LEDs (tested on my friend's Compaq Presario v5000).

Network Lights is small, version 1.1 is less than 100KB. When you run Network Lights, it will sit on the system tray. The program uses around 1.3MB of memory. Network Light is freeware and available for Microsoft Windows operating system.

[Download: Network Lights via Raymond.cc]

Recently, 3 of my friends asked me how to burn a DVD image (the ISO file) to a DVD. Basically, a CD/DVD image (ISO) file is a archive file just like 7z, RAR or ZIP. Unlike normal archive file, a CD/DVD image file sometime contains boot code and it is usually a complete sector-by-sector copy of a CD/DVD.

(source)

In this post, you will find out how to properly burn a CD/DVD image. I will use the Ubuntu 9.04 CD image as the example. Latest disk burning software should support ISO burning to disk. The keywords to burn ISO file to disk usually sounds like ‘Write image file to disk’, ‘Burn ISO image’ or ‘Burn image’. You can use your favourite CD/DVD burning application as long as it supports burning from CD/DVD image. In this post, I will use CDBurnerXP, a free CD/DVD burning application for Windows.

In my previous post I've mentioned on how to monitor bandwidth usage and download/upload transfer rate with NetLimiter 2 Monitor. In this post, you will find a similar software to show the report and monitor your bandwidth and transfer rate usage, and this software is simpler and it has a portable version. Networx, developed by SoftPerfect, is a simple and free, yet powerful utilities that allows you to monitor your bandwidth usage. You can use Networx to monitor your Internet bandwidth usage or other network connections.

With Networx, you can view your daily, weekly and monthly bandwidth usage statistics. Networx also have a small graph that will show you your current transfer rate. If your internet service provider (ISP) limits certain amount of bandwidth usage per month on your internet connection, you can use Networx to notify you when you are about to reach that limit. There are 4 useful small tools included in Networx; traceroute, ping, netstat (shows you the connections made by programs on your system) and speed meter (measures your network throughput).

The most secured way to protect your login informations on various websites is by using different and secure passwords for different accounts. A secure password usually consists of combination of random letters, numbers, symbols, difficult to be guessed, complex, and lengthy password. So, you use a password generator to generate passwords for your logins, and your password for website-a.com is 'OtDaSOe9P2', and website-b.net is 'rRYp9UyRcxK8'. Obviously, we are not a computer to remember such passwords, unless you got an eidetic memory. If you are looking for password manager, KeePass can securely help you to store and manage your passwords.

KeePass (KeePass Password Safe) is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. One of the best thing about KeePass is it is portable, so you can bring your password anyware securely in your USB stick. In this post, I will review the latest KeePass Professional Edition 2.07 beta.