System and Security

When we published our analysis of tools to keep your software up-to-date, many of you mentioned Ninite and their products. Therefore, I decided to try them and learn more about how to use the Ninite Updater or the free Ninite service to keep your software up-to-date. Here is what I learned.

I bet very few of our readers have heard about the Credential Manager, let alone know what it is and how to use it. I did not know that much either, even though I was aware of its existence. That's why, this tutorial tries to demystify the Credential Manager, show how to use it and explain why it is important to your Windows computing experience.

During the early days of Windows, the operating system was the direct target of most malware creators and Microsoft has worked a lot on hardening the operating system, creating and delivering security patches to its users as timely as they possibly could. Today, Windows is a more secure operating system and the malware creators’ focus is now on finding and using vulnerabilities for popular Windows applications. Therefore, keeping your applications up-to-date has become very important for having a secure computing experience. But... how do you keep your applications up-to-date, without manually searching for updates once very few weeks? This analysis aims to answer this question and propose some good tools for this task.

Have you ever needed to know when an NTFS partition was created or when a drive was first initialized by Windows and available for use? Check out this article to learn how to find this information by yourself.

One of the least known troubleshooting tools in windows is DirectX Diagnostic Tool (dxdiag.exe), which can be used to solve problems you have with hardware used by multimedia applications, such as audio players or video games. This tutorial presents this tool in detail, shows how to launch it and use it to get the information you need.

I don’t think there’s anyone who’s never needed help with Windows. Since the DOS days, Microsoft has included Help in all its software. Luckily for us, the Help included in Windows 7 seems to be more versatile than ever. Let’s discover how it works, how to make it even better and use it to get information on how to work with Windows programs or to get help in solving problems.

A few weeks ago, some of our readers asked us to recommend the best programs for managing the Windows startup. We decided to listen, do some thorough testing and share our recommendations. If you asked yourself: "Which startup manager should I use?" don’t hesitate to read this analysis.