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Keeping an eye on the hard drives of a computer system ensures to receive notifications about imminent drive errors or other critical events that may affect the data on those devices. Modern hard drives usually support the SMART technology, which software can use to display information about a drive’s health. Acronis Drive Monitor is a free hard disk monitoring software that uses SMART information and the Windows event log to display important events to the system user. The program is pretty basic, which is surprising considering its size of nearly 18 Megabytes. On startup a summary is displayed, which displays disk problems, backup information and critical events. Disk problems are directly linked to SMART parameters, and the program will either report that all disks are working normally, or that problems have been encountered. acronis drive monitor Critical events taps right into the Windows event log and displays high risk events of the system’s storage devices. Backup fin

Microsoft is probably not the first company that comes to mind when looking for a screen capturing tool, but the latest version of Microsoft Expression Encoder might change that. The completely free standard version of the tool comes with a ten minute recording limit, which should be enough for most screencasts and uses. And there is still the possibility to record additional screencasts with the tool easily and merge them later with video processing software. The program is surprisingly easy to use. The screen capture tool is accessible separately from the encoder. The Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Screen Capture displays a lightweight interface. Here it is possible to configure various capturing settings, including the output directory of the screencast, recording frame rate, bitrate and quality, utilization of the webcam, audio settings for recording audio, and starting the recording. The quality settings require further inspection. The frame rate can be set to a value be

Standard PC keyboards have three visual indicators for Num lock, Caps lock and Scroll lock states. That way it is possible to see the state of the three locks immediately and react if they are not set correctly. The most used locks of the three is probably the Num lock state, which turns the numeric keypad on and off on the keyboard. Less useful and probably not used at all by most computer users are the Caps lock and scroll lock keys. Especially the wrong caps lock state can be problematic. Back when i worked in the IT of a big corp we had lots of users who locked themselves out of the system by entering the wrong password because the Caps lock key was active. Experienced users may have spotted the wrong state of the caps lock key eventually, if they were not working on a laptop or another mobile device. The majority of laptops does not have indicators for these three system states on the keyboard, which means that it becomes harder to find out in which state the keys are. Unl

Many Windows users have at least some files on the computer desktop. I for instance like to place temporary text files on it for fast access. Other users may place program shortcuts on the desktop or other files that they access regularly. The shortcuts and files become inaccessible if a window is on top of them. Microsoft tried to find a comfortable solution for this problem and came up with several options in Windows 7 like Aero Peek, but they all require some sort of interaction. Desktop Tray Launcher offers a in many cases better solution. The program basically scans the computer desktop on start and adds all shortcuts and files to a list. This list is then made available by clicking on its icon in the Windows system tray. A very ingenious and comfortable way of loading files and opening programs on the desktop. Simply right-click the program icon in the system tray to display a list of all shortcuts and files on the desktop. A left-click on any item in the list will open i