Category: System Tools

Change is great, but it can also be disruptive. While there has been a lot of excitement about Windows 11, some of the changes and design choices made by Microsoft also upset a lot of people – particularly when it comes to the Start menu. This is something that Start11 aims to address, making it […]

Fragmentation is caused by creating and deleting files and folders, installing new software, and downloading files from the Internet. Computers do not necessarily save an entire file or folder in a single space on a disk; they’re saved in the first available space. After a large portion of a disk has been used, most of […]

Unless you download Windows 10 or 11 apps from the Microsoft Store, most installed software still won’t auto-update. Web browsers will notify you of a new update, your security software will auto-update and so will Windows itself, but most other tools sit happily on your system and you might never know when a key update […]

UCheck is a portable tool which helps you install popular applications and missing software updates. The program only supports around 40 packages, but the list does include some big names: 7-Zip, CCleaner, Chrome, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, iTunes, Java, LibreOffice, Malwarebytes Anti-malware, OpenOffice, Opera, Skype, VLC Media Player and more. UCheck scanned our system, and listed […]

If you’re the kind of person who regularly finds themselves switching desktop resolutions, or needs to boot into Safe mode for troubleshooting on a regular basis, it can be incredibly annoying finding all your carefully arranged desktop icons have gone walkabout. DesktopOK is a powerful – and portable – tool that can store up to […]

The VirtualBox Extension Pack adds useful new features to this popular virtualisation package. It includes a USB (EHCI) controller, for instance, which should allow you to get better performance from your USB devices. You’ll probably need to enable the controller manually, though, as well as add filters for the USB devices you’d like to use […]

OCCT is a powerful and free (for personal use) PC monitor and stability checking tool. Launching the program on our test PC immediately displayed useful PC and GPU-related system information, alongside with a series of graphs plotting how our system temperature, CPU voltages, RAM usage and other details are varying over time. And if these […]

PhraseExpress is a clever text replacement tool that adds productivity-boosting features to almost every Windows application. It can automatically expand commonly used phrases, for instance. Type “adr” and the program can replace it with your address; enter “sig” and it could be expanded to your regular signature. You’re able to create as many phrases as […]

Navigating files and folders in Windows has – it’s true – become easier with each successive release, but there’s still one major problem that’s never been addressed by Microsoft: the single folder view. Despite the existence of the Favorites Bar, copying or moving files from one folder to another usually involves opening two separate folder […]

SysGauge launches much like any other PC system monitor. Choose one of the usual counters (CPU usage, memory usage, disk activity, disk transfer rate, network transfer rate), its current, average and minimum values are displayed, and a line graph shows how your counter is changing in real time. What’s interesting is that these aren’t the […]