Applications are the lifeblood of the systems we use, and without properly updated applications, a computer cannot do anything to make your work easier. Every now and then, updates keep coming out for the applications that you have installed in your system. With these updates come new features, as well as more stability to the application. Updates are also meant to plug holes in security that allow hackers and malicious code to get through and harm your system. Even though most application have their own update checker that notifies the user of a pending update as soon as they log in to their computer, there are some applications that require you to manually check for new updates. FileREX Update Checker is a portable application for Windows that automates the process of checking for each application update individually by providing you with a GUI, which scan for the applications installed on your system and checks for any pending updates on its online database. More on FileREX Update Checker after the jump.

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Organizing a large music collection into separate folders and then rename each audio track’s ID3 V1 and V2 meta tag information is arguably a time consuming task, as it requires creating a list of audio tracks that are to be moved to folders, and then manually editing each track’s file name and meta data. If you’re looking for an all-in-one music collection organizer, Mp3 Rename is probably just what you need. It’s lightweight, music library manager that lets you perform a wide range of operations over the music folders including rule-based file renaming, use ID3 info as file name, remove specified characters from file names, make directories according to file names, and change audio tracks’ names by removing directory names and more. The application has specifically been designed for MP3 files, but it provides you with an option to change file extension to seamlessly organize all types of music files. More on MP3 Rename after the break.

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Disk Investigator is a multi-purpose, powerful hard disk tool that lets you find raw data saved on disk partitions, and check unreadable disk clusters and sectors. The application is built to navigate through the disk sectors, while showing the raw data in HEX, TEXT, and Decimal form. This not only helps you identify identical data written on the disk partitions, but also verify the performance of data shredding utilities. If you’ve recently used a file shredder to securely delete data from disk partition, it lets you view the current raw data present on the disk. Moreover, the application gives detailed insight into disk structure, including total logical sectors, bytes per sector, sectors per cluster, cluster size, MFT start cluster, MFT zone clusters and more. Additionally, it includes a simple, yet feature-rich file explorer that lets you view files and folders saved on disk, check raw data (in Text, Dec, and Hex form) of selected file, and check CRC-32, and MD5, Hash, RipeMD, and SHA hash value.

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Developed by Windows Sysinternals, Process Explorer is probably the most feature-rich Windows process explorer that gives in-depth information on each process running in the background. It also allows you to investigate that which application is accessing which files and system/user locations. Back in 2009, we covered numerous aspects of Process Explorer. Since then, it has been updated with quite a lot of new options and features, including svchost’s service host category display, option to restart service, mapping of service names to threads, ability to generate full and minidump process crash dump file, comprehensive network and disk monitoring, detailed memory statistics, separate column to check aggregate CPU usage,  summary tab in System Information dialog to view CPU, Memory, I/O and GPU usage graphs and more. Apart from significant feature improvements, the application has also been deeply debugged to give most accurate system information including CPU, Memory and Network usage, and overall system performance.

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The amount of time your computer takes to start up and become responsive is directly proportional to the number of applications added in your startup. If there are a lot of applications in your startup, Windows tries to load each program as soon as the OS starts, resultantly making your system unresponsive. What you can do to improve Windows load time is increase the delay in application startup time using My Startup Delayer. It allows you to specify the number of seconds between each individual application before Windows initiates it during startup. However, if you want a more comprehensive application to manage your Windows Startup entries, try Startup Master. It is an open source application that lets you optimize the startup and take control of the applications which run automatically on system boot.

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Over time, junk files get accumulated in our PC’s. Downloading, browsing, and creating files leaves remains of redundant files in your computer. It can be anything from temporary files left by application installations, or files left by applications after you uninstall them. It can cause your computer to slow down and feel laggy at times, specially during read write operations when a lot of data has to be located and changed by the system. Moreover, it also clogs up a lot of hard drive space that can used to store other important files. It is always better to regularly clean up your system to avoid crashes or sluggishness. The problem, though, lies in locating these junk files in your system. Finding them manually in their separate folders and deleting them can be very time consuming and tiring exercise. Instead of trying to find the junk files yourself, try GiliSoft Free Disk Cleaner. It is a quick and safe junk file cleaner that quickly locates junk files in you system, and allows you to delete specified content from your system. More on GiliSoft Free Disk Cleaner after the break.

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