View Your Hard Disk's Hidden Hoards With TreeSize Free

Getting a new computer is a bit like moving into a new house: At first, there's plenty of room for everything. Then, a few months or years go by, and you find yourself surrounded by random clutter, wondering where all that free space went. I may not have much advice on de-cluttering your house, but if it's your hard drive space you're looking to reclaim, TreeSize Free can provide you with the answers you need.

TreeSize Free shows drive contents as a list sorted by size, with simple and clear bars indicating relative size.TreeSize Free is as straightforward as software comes. You don't even have to install it if you don't want to: Maker JAM Software offers an official portable version at the company website. To compile an accurate report, TreeSize Free must have access to all files on the drive you're scanning. For this reason, it launchers under an Administrator account by default. Once you're in the application, just pick a drive to scan, and let TreeSize do its thing. It took about a minute to scan a 465GB drive with 207GB of occupied space spread across 195,000 files. Free competitor SpaceSniffer took roughly the same amount of time to scan the same drive.

While scanning time is comparable, TreeSize and SpaceSniffer use very different interfaces. SpaceSniffer visualizes disk space using something called a treemap, which is a grid of nested rectangles of varying sizes reflecting folder or file size. TreeSize opts for a more utilitarian approach, arranging folders as a list sorted by size. Its only touch of visual flair is a gradient bar displayed behind each item on the list, showing the relative amount of space that item occupies. It even lets you pick the colors for the gradient. The interface is generally responsive, except for the Scan menu, which lagged for over twenty seconds every time I clicked it.

The list format lends itself well to printing, and TreeSize Free includes an option for generating a nice printed report. This report is more comprehensive than the on-screen display, because it includes all metrics for every folder: Size, allocated space, number of files and folders, percentage of parent, and change/access times. The on-screen display lets you access all of this information, but only one metric at a time (i.e, you can show either the size or the percentage, but not both at once).

TreeSize Free is a lean utility that does just what it's supposed to do. I only wish the Scan menu were as snappy as the rest of the interface.

--Erez Zukerman

If you're finding your 10GB hard drive is starting to strain at the seams, you're not alone. This utility accounts for the girth of your burgeoning data, helping you figure out where it could use a nip or a tuck. Open the program from a context menu of a folder or drive to learn the size of the folder and all its subfolders. You can watch the results appear before your eyes. The wasted space can be written up in a printable report, giving you some idea of a pattern for the necessary alterations.

Note: The Pro version, which is also available at PCWorld.com, offers fuller reporting capabilities, compression rate information, and other useful features.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Hidden Math Flaw Jeopardizes Millions of Online Transactions

Undone by Arithmetic

The encryption schemes with the biggest flaws, the researchers found, were those based on the RSA 1024-bit algorithm, which uses two large prime numbers to generate a public key and a private key. As with all public-key encryption schemes, someone wishing to send a secret message to a recipient uses the recipient’s public key to encrypt the message, which can be decoded only by the recipient’s private key.

Using the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid’s simple but effective method of factoring numbers, Hughes and his fellow researchers proved that two out of every thousand RSA-1024-bit-based public keys shared one large prime number as a factor — far more than would occur if the numbers were truly random.

“We stumbled upon 12,720 different 1024-bit RSA moduli [out of 6.4 million studied] that offer no security,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Their secret keys are accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to redo our work. … 1024-bit RSA provides 99.8 percent security at best.”

“Some people may say that 99.8 percent security is fine,” Hughes, who participated independently in the research from his home in Palo Alto, Calif., told the Times.

Not Good Enough

But 99.8 percent security is definitely not good enough for online transactions. Let’s assume that a major online retailer processes half a million purchase transactions per day. If one out of every 500 of those transactions were hijacked by cybercriminals, that would amount to roughly 10,000 compromised sessions — in which credit-card and personal data could be stolen — every single day.

“The lack of sophistication of our methods and findings make it hard for us to believe that what we have presented is new, in particular to agencies and parties that are known for their curiosity in such matters,” wrote the authors of the paper, which they half-jokingly referred to as a “sanity check.”

The researchers, who apart from Hughes were based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, found that encryption schemes based on the 2048-bit RSA algorithm were also affected by the lack-of-randomness flaw, though to a smaller degree.

However, encryption schemes based on the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, which uses only one randomly generated number, were not affected by lack of randomness.  Hence the paper’s odd title, “Ron was wrong, Whit is right.”

Ron Rivest, along with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, formulated the RSA algorithm at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. (The three went on to found the RSA security company, which is still based near Boston.)

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

Q&A: Restoring Hidden Icons, Okay to Uninstall Visual C++ Versions?

Last night my sister-in-law called me, just about in tears. Something had happened to her laptop and everything seemed to be gone: all her desktop and Start menu icons, and, even scarier, all her data. It was like aliens had abducted her desktop. Not aliens: hackers. Her system had been infected by a virus, and it took me a few sweeps with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to get rid of it. (Here's a great malware-removal tutorial from PCWorld's Eric Geier.)

Just one problem: Removing the virus hadn't restored all my sister-in-law's icons and data. The hard drive still showed nearly full, meaning nothing had actually been erased, but for all intents and purposes, the stuff was still MIA.

Fortunately, I found a utility that worked a seemingly major miracle: It brought everything back.

It's called UnHide. This free, self-contained utility is available via BleepingComputer courtesy of a user named Grinler. Just download and run the program, then be prepared to wait. On my system, it took 10-15 minutes to restore everything.

But restore everything it did: desktop icons, the Start Menu, and all the seemingly vanished data.

This was a first for me; I'd never encountered a virus that made almost the entire desktop disappear. Scary stuff!

If you find yourself in a similar situation, don't panic. I think it's the rare virus that actually does wipe out data. That said, this is probably a good time to remind you to make regular backups--not just to an external drive, but also to the cloud. Better safe than sorry!

Reader Don posed this excellent question: "I use Revo Uninstaller. Under Programs Present I see many different versions of [Microsoft Visual] C++. Can I delete some of them without messing up my PC?"

I'm a Revo user, too, Don, and I've seen firsthand what you're talking about. Of course, even running Windows' own program uninstaller can reveal multiple instances of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable, often with diffferent years and version numbers.

On my system, in fact, I count 13 of them.

It's logical to think that Windows probably needs only one of these versions--the most recent. And it's also logical to think that by clearing out the older ones, you'll reclaim some hard drive space and maybe lighten the Registry's load a bit.

My advice: leave those C++ installations alone. The reality is that they're small, usually no more than a couple megabytes, and different versions may be linked to different programs you've installed. It's darn near impossible to know which one is associated with which, and deleting one might render a program inoperable--a hassle you definitely don't need.

I totally get the appeal of sifting through your uninstaller in search of programs you can send packing. However, when in doubt, don't throw it out.

Instead, if you're looking to optimize your system, free up some drive space, etc., try a utility like Advanced SystemCare 5 Free. It works pretty well, and it's less likely to delete something you'll need.

If you've got a hassle that needs solving, send it my way. I can't promise a response, but I'll definitely read every e-mail I get--and do my best to address at least some of them in the PCWorld Hassle-Free PC blog. My 411: hasslefree@pcworld.com. You can also sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

From PC World. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here