IObit Uninstaller 3 review: Free utility competes with a built-in Windows feature, almost wins

There’s something ironic about third-party uninstallers: They make you add another tool  to get rid of the crud that’s already installed on your computer. Windows’ own Programs and Features tool does a good job of letting you browse through installed applications and remove what you don’t need—so IObit Uninstaller 3 needs to work hard to convince users it really is needed.

IObit Uninstaller 3 tries to woo you with pretty looks.

The first piece of good news is that IObit Uninstaller 3 doesn’t need to be installed in the traditional sense of the word—it won’t make you Next-Next-Next through a setup wizard before you can use it. You just need to run it, click through a single UAC prompt, and start removing software you don’t want.

It may feel like you’re running a portable app, but IObit Uninstaller 3 does install itself, in a sense: It adds a button to the Programs and Features tool, which serves as a handy reminder that you have the app installed (seeing as how most people don’t uninstall software on a daily basis).

Inside IObit Uninstaller 3, you’ll find two tabs: Programs, and Browser plug-ins. The former isn’t much different than what’s built into Windows, save for one key point: You can select multiple applications for batch removal. IObit Uninstaller 3 would then sequentially launch the uninstallers for those applications, which means you’ll still have to sit there and click through every uninstaller.

Being able to select multiple applications for removal is a nice bonus.

Once an application is uninstalled, IObit Uninstaller 3 can scan your system for remnants, hunting for both leftover files and registry keys. You can then review and remove them.

The post-removal scan sometimes reveals leftover files and registry keys.

The second tab, Browser plug-ins, is more of a gimmick. You do get a list of plugins, but it doesn’t say which plugin is installed on which browser—not much use in these days of multiple browsers. When you click on a plugin to remove it, you get an alert asking you to “please make sure each plug-in selected is malicious.” That’s a tall order: IU3 does show ratings for every browser plugin, but they’re all empty at the time of this writing. Determining malice is up to you.

You may have lots of browser plugins installed... but for which browser?

The main reasons to try out IObit Uninstaller 3 are its fetching interface and the batch uninstall feature. The price tag (free) doesn’t hurt either. That said, if you’re getting along fine with the uninstaller built into Windows, you’re not missing out on anything important.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Notepad2 review: Syntax highlighting make this utility a good notepad replacement for coders

Notepad2 Line numbering and syntax highlighting are a few of the features that make this notepad replacement especially attractive to programmers.

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At first glance, Notepad2 doesn't have much to distinguish itself from WordPad, the standard Windows notepad. But it offers a number of features that can make it worth the upgrade.

The biggest feature is syntax highlighting. You can have various parts of programming code show up as different colors when code is incorrect, so you can see right away what needs to be fixed. The find-and-replace function really does make WordPad cringe in the corner with embarrassment when you see features here such as match the case, match the whole word and match the beginning of the word only. You can even drag and drop text onto Notepad2, something that regular WordPad definitely won't allow.

Notepad2 offers syntax highlighting, which makes coding much easier.

The one downside to Notepad2 is that it doesn't support tabs, when it comes to opening multiple files. You can open only one file at a time, which is extremely limiting and frustrating.  But when you stack that one disadvantage against all the advantages, tabs are something you can live without.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate to your system.

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BootRacer review: Utility will time your PC boot, but won't speed it up

BootRacer BootRacer is a great tool for monitoring your PC's health over a long period of time, but don't expect it to improve performance.

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There's nothing more frustrating than turning on your computer and watching programs slowly load up. You sit there, not sure exactly how long you're going to have to wait, as all those resource-hogging startup programs take their own sweet time. Well, wonder no more: BootRacer can take the mystery out of your PC start-ups.

BootRacer main menu gives some detailed information about the startup time.

After a free download and install, the program will be ready to time your next PC restart. (BootRacer remains free for personal use, but business users must pony up after trying the program.) Though you can't see it, it starts timing the moment the PC starts the boot-up process. Those who aren't quick at entering your password or logging in don't need to worry. BootRacer subtracts the time it takes for user input to make an accurate assessment at how quick your PC performs.

Once the desktop is up, a small dual timer appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The timer on the top ticks down the seconds until your PC is done booting up the necessary files to be responsive while the timer on the bottom counts up the total time it takes to boot.

Rank your boot time against those of other PCs running BootRacer.

A summary screen appears when the PC is completely done booting to review your time and score. Digging deeper, you will see a breakdown of what section of the boot-up took the most time and a star rating compared to other PCs that upload their results. You can choose to submit your own results to both claim your global rank as well as help improve future versions of BootRacer.

Options are scarce. You can choose whether you want BootRacer to run every time you boot-up or only single tests, if you want the timer to show, and what statistics to record. A history page will give you every previous boot results and the change in time from the previous boot. You can add notes to each result or upload them to the global rankings.

A detailed history of your startups can show computer degradation over time.

BootRacer is great for testing just how the decisions you make with your PC affect your start-up time in the long run. PCs tend to slow down as registries and programs begin to muck up the works, and now you can track it. However, that's where BootRacer's usefulness ends. There is an option to "Speed up!" but it just links you to SpeedUp 2013, another program that claims to fix everything slowing down the start-up process. (PCWorld hasn't reviewed SpeedUp 2013, but 2012 received a middling review, partly because the $30 program performed tasks that free programs handle just as well.) BootRacer doesn't do anything to fix an issue itself.

You get the green light once your PC is all ready to go,

For the PC enthusiast who loves to monitor every aspect of their computer's health and performance, BootRacer is a must-have. For those simply trying to speed up their boot times, installing this will probably be more depressing than anything. It won't do much to help, but it will confirm you do indeed have glacial boot-up times.

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Disk Investigator review: Find deleted files and more with this free utility

Disk Investigator doesn't simply help you find lost files. It also helps you uncover plenty of information about the contents of your hard drive. When you launch the free application, it quickly analyzes your disk and presents you with a list if information about its size and contents.

The information will likely fly over the head of anyone but the geekiest of geeks: It's all about clusters, cluster size, zones, and more. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as the main window displays strings of letters and numbers that are completely indecipherable to most humans.

This information is valuable to anyone looking for lost files because of its very nature: Disk Investigator bypasses the operating system and reads the "raw drive sectors." This allows you to enter a search string and have Disk Investigator comb your drive for that missing file.

Disk Investigator's scans are thorough, and as such they take a long time—in some cases, several hours. And the results can be just as difficult to decipher as the rest of the information the application presents. But digging through those results can be worth your time, as Disk Investigator proved capable of finding some valuable files. It managed to track down both a video file I'd deleted and an email attachment I'd edited and forgotten to save.

Disk Investigator can be confusing to use and time-consuming, but in the end, its results are worth it.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
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FreeUndelete review: Confusing utility not worth the time investment

FreeUndelete FreeUndelete helps you track down missing files, even those deleted from the Windows Recycle Bin...but it's not always effective.

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From the moment you launch FreeUndelete, you see that this utility is all business (and in fact, it's not free for businesses—just for individuals). FreeUndelete 2.1.36867.1 features a spartan interface, with no cutesy graphics and little in the way of color. And you won't find much in the way of instruction: If you want to use FreeUndelete, you're going to have to figure out how to do so on your own.

Luckily, it's pretty intuitive. On the left side of the interface is a panel where you select which drive you'd like to scan; what's odd is that FreeUndelete presents Drives C through H as options, but only allows you to scan your C drive. You use the Filter to narrow down your search, but FreeUndelete doesn't present any advanced search options, such as document type or modified date.

Understanding FreeUndelete's results is even more confusing, as it simply presents you with a list of locations where your file might be found, but doesn't actually direct you to the file in question. The locations where shown as lists of folders, and when I tried to browse through the folders, I found no way to go back to the beginning list. To do so, I had to start the scan all over again.

Even worse: The application failed to track down either of my missing test files. In the end, this program proved too confusing too much of the time.

The most appealing thing about FreeUndelete is that it's free for personal use. Since free/donationware Recuva was more successful (though still not perfect) at performing the same tasks in my tests, Recuva is a better choice if you don't have the cash for a paid program.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Review: Active@ Boot Disk 7 is a jack-of-all-trades repair and imaging utility

The more things change, the more things stay the same. For Active@ Boot Disk 7.1, that means continuing as one of the best of breed Windows repair toolkits. A jack-of-all-trades, it boots on its own, manages and recovers data and partitions, creates backup images, changes passwords, wipes disks, and more. And it's competitive with the rest of the industry at all those tasks.

1. Active@ Boot Disk runs under the Windows environment and includes top-flight recovery tools.

Active@ Boot Disk was one of the first recovery toolkits to employ the Windows Pre-installation Environment (PE) which is still largely unique in allowing you to load drivers at boot time. This allows it to handle odd-duck devices such as tape drives, cartridge drives, etc. Linux covers most of those devices now, but it's still an undeniably handy capability.

Appearance-wise, not a lot has changed with Active@ Boot Disk since version 3. There's the same blue desktop and start menu, but it supports the latest technologies such as SSDs, UFS, Ext4, etc. There's full support for burning images and backing up to optical, as well backing up across the network. The boot disk creator that's installed under Windows now creates bootable flash drives as well as discs.

Other features of Active@ Boot Disk are a disk monitor, which will tell you the current S.M.A.R.T. info, and a file explorer. The latter was the one module I had some issues with. It would quit unexpectedly with an error message when deleting certain files didn't go correctly.

Disk imaging and restore are fully supported by Active@ Boot Disk.

All in all, however, everything worked quite well. The only items on my wish list are the ability to run a drive's S.M.A.R.T. self-diagnostic tests and creating images in the Windows VHD format so you can easily mount and recover the contents without using the boot disk or installing the free Lite version of Active@ Disk Image (or the full pay version of course).

Acitve@ Boot Disk is also available in a $70 DOS edition for those who need to work on slower or memory-challenged systems, or systems running Windows 9x. You can purchase the DOS and Windows-environment editions bundled for $110. No matter the package, you'll be getting one of the industry's leading repair and recovery products.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
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Review: Xmind Pro mind mapping utility has good intentions, but poor execution

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Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Being able to put down your thoughts in writing can lend them powerful clarity. Doing it in graphical form, as a mind map, can add to the process by exposing relationships and allowing a bird's eye view of a large subject. XMind Pro is a $99 tool that wants to help you do this, and it also has a free version available. Both the free and Pro versions support many chart types other than mind maps, such as organizational diagrams and "fishbone" diagrams showing cause and effect relationships. The Pro version adds export capabilities, a Gantt chart view, brainstorming and presentation modes, and more drawing tools.

At 29MB, XMind Pro is a larger download than both the svelte, tiny Blumind mind-mapping utility (750KB) and TheBrain, a powerful personal mind mapper (16MB). Then again, these days you don't have to download anything to get started with mind mapping: Online tools such as MindMeister and SpiderScribe offer powerful mapping capabilities right in the browser, using Flash (SpiderScribe) or HTML5 (MindMeister).

XMind Pro comes with many templates featuring different diagram types.

Starting your first diagram with XMind Pro is easy, thanks to its many helpful templates. At first glance, the XMind Pro interface is bursting with tools and options, but these are often encumbered by interface idiosyncrasies making them difficult to use. For example, you can choose between different color themes for your mind map, but you must double-click the button for each theme for it to work.

XMind Pro's interface is detailed, and can be overwhelming if you're not familiar with it.

Another case in point is the Map Shot tool: This tool lets you quickly take a screenshot of your mind map. I clicked it in the menu, but it seemed to do nothing, so I clicked again, hoping for a dialog or a message. That failed, so I clicked a third time, and then gave up and kept working with the application. A few moments later, when I tried dragging a node in the mind map, I realize my mouse can only draw selection frames now. Once I drew a selection frame, XMind Pro popped up a file save dialog–and only then did I realize what happened: The tool took effect but was waiting for me to pick an area for the screenshot, without telling me about it first. Since I clicked the tool three times, XMind Pro did the same thing three times, and I had to abort the action three times.

XMind Pro handles revisions seamlessly, letting you roll back the clock to an earlier version of the mind map.

One last example: Each mind map can contain several sheets, represented by tabs along the bottom of the window. There is a powerful Outline view that lets you see a nested list of all nodes, including those on other sheets. But clicking a node in another sheet does nothing: XMind doesn't take you there.

This version of XMind Pro introduces map revisions: Saving your mind map is non-destructive. Every time you save it, a new revision is added on top of your previous saves, and you can then flick between revisions, visually inspecting differences. This is similar to MindMeister's excellent timeline strip, but again, it's held back by the interface: The map preview is shown at 100% zoom, and there is no way to zoom back out. This means you'll have to do a lot of panning to see the differences when comparing two versions of a large map.

All in all, XMind Pro offers a powerful, rich environment for visually plotting ideas, but only if you can get over its often-clunky interface.

Note: The "Try it for free" button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition Review: Partitioning Utility Is Great for Home or Business Use

Partitioning utilities were once mysterious, geeky, and expensive. No more--witness Aomei's Partition Assistant Home Edition 4.0, which is highly competent, and free. Aside from being a nice upgrade from the integrated Windows tools provided by Microsoft, PAHE is probably the easiest-to-use partition utility I've encountered.

Partition Assistant Home Edition doesn't deserve its "Home" designation, which frequently appears in software names as shorthand for "feature-deprived." The program can resize, move, split, extend, copy, create, delete, format, wipe, and hide partitions--mostly within Windows, and without a reboot. There's not a lot else you can do with partitions. The program can also copy entire drives, but it can't copy to an image file--a feature that would have made this program well-nigh perfect as a disk utility. Even the paid editions of Aomei Partition Assistant don't offer copying to image files, though.

Simple, straightforward, and effective, Partition Assistant Home Edition's interface is all it needs to be.PAHE's interface is utilitarian in the best sense of the word. My favorite feature is the list of pending changes at the bottom of the tasks pane on the left side of the main window. As that description suggests, you can stack changes and then apply them all at once so you don't have to wait around for each operation to finish. The app is simple to use and its help file is well written. When I wanted to check on dynamic disks, however, I did miss the search function found in most help files.

As it turns out, the app doesn't support dynamic disks. But it was flawless in my testing with normal partitions, performing every operation in fine style on both GPT and MBR disks. Aomei's Partition Assistant Home Edition has won an extended stay in my toolkit: It's easy, effective, and to the point. Pros can opt for $36 Professional Edition (for workstations) and $139 Server Edition that handle dynamic disks and (in the latter case) will run on a server operating system.

--Jon L. Jacobi

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Free Utility Roadkil's Disk Wipe Just Wipes Disks--And That's Enough

You've gotta love a program that's as small, simple, easy to use, and straightforward as Roadkil's DiskWipe. Download it, unzip it, run it, and use it to overwrite the data on your disks. The program lets you select a drive--including removable drives--and write the entire drive with zeros or random numbers. You may also run multiple passes if you're really paranoid.

Interfaces don't get any simpler or easier than DiskWipe's.DiskWipe leaves you on your own recognizance for selecting drives, though it does present the removable media at the top of the list. But it will not stop you from overwriting your system drive, so... Don't do that. It's much like a loaded gun that relies on its owner to point it in a safe direction.

You could pay for more impressively-styled software, but there's no reason. The program worked for me, it most likely will for you as well. By the way, if you find it handy, Roadkil will accept donations at the Web site (though the donate button in the About dialog did not work for me).

--Jon L. Jacobi

Securely erases the contents of a disk replacing it with random data or leaving the drive completely blank. Numerous passes can be performed to ensure data is totally unrecoverable. Program works on hard and floppy disks as well as USB/Flash drives.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate for your system. This file is donationware; it is free to use, but the developer accepts and encourages donations.

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Customize Your Desktop With Open-Source Utility Rainmeter

Microsoft's user interface designers face a tough challenge when deciding what Windows would look like. There's just one look and feel, but it must cater to the needs of occasional users, kids, elderly people, and power users who spend sixty hours a week in front of their computer. Windows 7 came out great, but it's not perfect for everyone. With Rainmeter 2.2 (free), you can craft your very own desktop environment that feels just right.

Rainmeter ships with the simple Illustro skin which you can easily customize.Rainmeter is a system resource monitor. Its job is to present the information you want to see in the format that works for you: Think of it as a customizable dashboard. You can use Rainmeter to monitor CPU and memory load, the current time, the weather, your Facebook or Twitter feeds, your Gmail, and more.

Rainmeter calls these various bits of information "measures." Your current CPU load is a measure, and so is the current time. Measures are displayed using meters. You could use a bar meter to represent the current CPU load, and a string meter to show the current time (or a quote of the day, or any other textual information). The end result often looks like a semi-transparent overlay of data on your wallpaper, filled with stylish graphs, circles and numbers, much like something out of a good sci-fi movie.

Fortunately, you don't have to get so technical to use Rainmeter. There is an active community of fans and developers who constantly create and share new skins for Rainmeter. A single skin could be as simple as a desktop clock just showing the current date and time. These are often combined into suites, each containing several skins that share a uniform look and feel and can be toggled on and off (so you can use the clock part of the suite, but not its Twitter part).

The Rainmeter website recommends getting started with one of three comprehensive skin suites, each containing many different skins. There is also a Rainmeter group on art website Deviantart, a hub for designers to share their creations, with a "Skin of The Month" competition.

Skins are very easy to install, but you should use discretion when downloading them. A skin is not just a passive resource file: It can contain executable components, and so could potentially be malicious. Stick with recommended sources of skins, such as the Deviantart group. You could also read more about malicious Rainmeter skins on the forums at Rainmeter.net.

What if you see a skin that is almost perfect for you, except for the choice of font or color, or the fact that it displays the time in a format you don't like? Worry not: You can just download the skin and edit its configuration (INI) file to change these parameters. Beware: Once you realize how customizable skins are, it is easy to become addicted to changing and tweaking them endlessly. This could take hours, and result in a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind desktop. You've been warned.

--Erez Zukerman

Rainmeter is a desktop customization platform. Through Rainmeter, you can enhance your Windows computer at home or work with skins: handy, compact applets which float freely on your desktop, much like Windows Sidebar gagdgets, or dashboard widgets for the Mac.

Rainmeter skins provide you with useful information at a glance. It's easy to keep an eye on your system resources, like memory and battery power, or your online data streams, including email, RSS feeds, and weather forecasts. Many skins are even functional: they can record your notes and to-do lists, launch your favorite applications, and send your tweets to Twitter - all in a clean, unobtrusive interface that you can rearrange and customize to your liking.

The Rainmeter developers invite all users to visit the Rainmeter Forum.

This file works on 32-bit and 64-bit OSs.

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Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2012 Review: A Middling Antimalware Utility

Check Point's ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2012 ($80 for one year and three PCs as of January 25, 2012) rounds out the top ten in our 2012 roundup of security suites. Like several of the other lower-ranking products we tested, the suite isn’t bad, but it’s merely very good while the top performers are great.

ZoneAlarm fully blocked 92.3 percent of live attacks in our real-world tests, which help determine how well a security suite can stop brand-new malware. That isn't a bad showing, but it does lag slightly below the average for the suites we looked at. It detected 99.17 percent of known malware samples; although that result would have been strong one year ago, this year it's merely average.

This suite wasn’t especially good at cleanup, either: Despite detecting all infections on our test PC, it disabled only 90 percent of them. A year ago, that would have been a great outcome, but most products we tested this time around successfully disabled all test infections. ZoneAlarm removed all malware components just 40 percent of the time, too, tying for last in that test. Fortunately, it didn't flag a single safe file as being potentially malicious.

Even though ZoneAlarm had a moderate impact on system performance on the whole, it added a staggering 24 seconds to our PC’s shutdown time (compared with how long the system took with no antivirus software installed), easily landing at the back of the pack in that particular test. It was also one of the worst performers in our app-installation test--it added 72 seconds to the completion time, which is about 28 seconds longer than the average.

Scan speeds were mixed: ZoneAlarm required 2 minutes, 53 seconds to finish our on-demand test, which shows how quickly a suite can complete a manually initiated scan of 4.5GB. This showing was second-slowest result we saw in the 2012 test group. Its on-access scanner took 3 minutes, 45 seconds to plow through 4.5GB of data, which was the third-best result we saw this year. Since the on-access scanner runs when you open or save a file, it's a little more important than the manual on-demand scan, so we were happy to see that ZoneAlarm performed well in this area, at least.

Check Point did reasonably well on the interface. The main screen gives you a good idea of whether your PC is protected, and sections are nicely arranged and fairly easy to use. It has slider controls that make it easy to toggle features on and off, as well. The settings screens are decent, but inconsistent at times. One in particular--the Antispam settings window--looks like a holdover from an older version of ZoneAlarm software, and it doesn't work the way the other panels do.

On the plus side, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security comes with a few extra features, such as credit report monitoring, which you may find useful. At the same time, though, it lacks some features that are common in other suites, and its support options appear to be scant.

If you already use ZoneAlarm products and like them, you should upgrade to this newest version. Otherwise, while ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2012 is a good all-around package, you should consider some of the higher-ranking suites first.

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