System and Security

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.

Do you know how awesome the System Configuration (msconfig.exe) tool is? I had an idea but, until doing a complete research and lots of testing for this article, I wasn’t aware of all its great functionality. I’ve discovered some great configuration options and you should read this tutorial to learn about them.

One fact of life with Windows is that, every once in a while, your computer will slow down or freeze, or a program won’t work the way you expect it to. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way of finding out what had gone wrong, and why — whether it’s CPU use, memory use, a program behaving badly, or something else? Yes, it would definitely be nice to know all these things, and more. And that’s why the Resource Monitor exists. This tutorial will show everything you need to know about this great tool and how to use it.