The Perfect Keylogger claims to log absolutely everything that happens on a computer, without the user knowing.

So if you want to monitor activity on a computer, does it do everything it claims?

And would the computer user know they were being monitored?

The initial installation gives some confidence that no-one will know this program is running unless you tell them. Although it would be a good idea to change the default directory for the program when you’re installing it so that curious users don’t spot the folder “Perfect Keylogger” in the program files directory.

There are also instructions in the help file for how to hide the program entry using Windows Explorer.

As you can see, the default installation option is to make sure the program doesn’t appear on the Start menu. This gets over any issues that Windows Vista may have about programs that run at startup. There are also helpful instructions on making sure that the program logs information, even if people log in on a Windows Guest account.

Once you’ve installed the program, it’s time to configure it. This had me slightly confused at first (but then I can be easily confused) as I’d somehow resized the window and was only given the top menu of the program, making me think that Options wasn’t working. But that was just me being dumb – resizing the window gave all the different options of what to log and how often:

This is the heart and soul of the program.

The options you can see above are the defaults and they’re all quite sensible.

The program doesn’t automatically grab screenshots as this could slow down older systems and could also be a giveaway that the program is running if the PC is busy doing lots of things.

You can change the amount of information that is recorded as well as the location it’s kept in. By default, the program’s default log storage location is in a folder off its own directory but you can change this.

That said, the log files are encrypted. Not too many people are likely to know what a line such as the one below is storing:

²°¯±±¯²°°¹ ±´º²µº³±ÝÛ×éîäï÷ ÃèáîçåäÝÛÒåáäíå¯ÈåìðÝÛ

I’ve blocked out the hot key selection in the above screen shot as when I was testing, I left it at the default and didn’t want to give anything away in this review.

The keystrokes logger logs everything. Even the typos and arrow key movements.

So you can spy on MSN Messenger chats and grab passwords if they were typed in whilst you were recording what was happening. Stored passwords don’t show up on the log, but that doesn’t really matter as you could log in using the password that had been stored on the PC.

The “programs” section shows you which programs have been launched, even down to telling you that a new tab has been opened in a browser, what was searched for and what was shown in the “title” section of the browser.

My log showed the subject line of my emails, the name of any files I’d opened or saved. Even the tool option I chose on my image grabbing program to block out the hot key shortcuts was shown.

“Websites” shows the web sites visited. Clicking on these brings the relevant website up, either in the program’s internal browser or in your default browser. The program also keeps copies of the websites viewed, so you can see them even if they wouldn’t normally be accessible – such as web based email accounts.

Optionally, log files can be emailed to you. The help file that accompanies the program explains the different settings and also what to do if your email provider doesn’t support this kind of email sending. Popular options such as Gmail are pre-set, so you won’t have to do much more than enter your email address and password.

In stealth mode – which is how you’d normally be running Perfect Keylogger – the program removes itself from the Application list that Windows offers.

Verdict

Perfect Keylogger does what it sets out to do: record anything and everything that  happens on a computer, including screen snapshots if you want them.

It’s easy and intuitive to set up. Other key stroke loggers that I’ve used seem to require a degree in computing before you can set them up but Perfect Keylogger worked as promised immediately.

If you’ve got children who are left unattended on computers or employees working for you or even a spouse you don’t completely trust, then Perfect Keylogger is well worth investing in as an excellent spy tool.

You can download a copy of Perfect Keylogger here.

In an ideal world, you’d never need a program like Panic Button Pro.

Of course, the world isn’t ideal and there are times when you need to stop things happening on your computer instantly.

Sure, Windows has an option to “show desktop” and minimize all your programs and browsers to the system tray.

When you first start the program, you’re offered a configuration screen:

But that’s all it does. Panic Button Pro goes a lot further than this and could be worth its weight in gold…

This is where you can:

• Set a password so that only you can change the settings on the program
• Always start the program when Windows starts – helpful, otherwise you can guarantee that when you most need to use Panic Button Pro it won’t be running
• Assign a hot key to the program so that when you press a key or combination of keys of your choice, the program will either pop to the top of your screen or hide itself. It’s really easy to set the hot key – you just click your mouse in the hot key box and press whichever key(s) you want to assign. You’ll get confirmation of these on screen.
• Whether or not you want the program to start “hidden” – you’ll probably choose this, otherwise some people would doubtless ask you what the icon means.
• Whether or not to keep a log file of what the program has done.

The next step is to manage hot key profiles. You can create as many of these different profiles as you like.

For instance, I set up a profile so that I can mute the sound on my PC when I press the F11 key. I often work with music playing in the background and being able to press a key to mute the music when the phone rings is great. It’s a lot quicker than hunting for the Windows Media Player icon, opening the program and then clicking the pause button.

Another option is to hide selected windows. Rather than the “all or nothing” option provided by the built-in Windows clear desktop option.

This is handy in all sorts of situations.

You can doubtless think of occasions when you’d rather other people didn’t see what you were browsing. Sports scores at work maybe? Or searching for a gift for your significant other? Or writing a report about someone’s performance that you’d rather was for your eyes only. Not to mention the occasional screen that you’d prefer your children didn’t catch you browsing.

You can choose as many or as few programs as you want, so you can have a selection of different hot keys to perform different duties for you.

The “enter conditions manually” option gives you even more flexibility depending on what’s in the title bar of the relevant windows.

You can also import and export your Panic Button Pro profiles, so you could use the same profile on your desktop PC and your laptop if you wanted.

Verdict

As I mentioned at the start, Panic Button Pro is the kind of program that in theory you don’t need. But in practice, it comes in very handy.

It’s easy to set up and easy to use. The most complicated part is remembering the hot keys you’ve set up for the different actions you’ve chosen.

It’s available for immediate download and comes with a one month money back guarantee.

You can download your copy of Panic Button Pro here.

If you’ve ever accidentally pressed the “delete” key on your digital camera, you’ll know the heart-sinking feeling that your photo has been lost forever.

It’s almost as if modern cameras were designed to help you lose your favorite photos.

Fortunately, there is an answer to this problem: Photo Saver.

This neat piece of software has just one purpose in life: recovering photos from your camera’s memory card.

Even if you’ve deleted them or accidentally formatted the drive or (even worse) the card has become corrupt.

The program is simple to use.

Just link up your camera to your PC or put the memory card in the appropriate slot.

Then run the software.

Because photo memory cards work in much the same way as computer hard drives, your photos haven’t actually been deleted when you press the delete key. Instead, the space is marked as OK to re-use.

Which is good news most of the time. (Of course, if you really did want to delete a photo forever, you need to use Photo Eraser to make sure it really can’t be recovered.)

Photo Saver asks you where you want to save your newly recovered photographs and then runs through your camera’s memory card, retrieving all the photos you thought were lost forever.

With the size of today’s memory cards, chances are this will include photos you took weeks or months or even years ago.

Verdict

Photo Saver is an inexpensive, simple to use, program that does precisely what it sets out to do.

If you’ve accidentally a photo or are suffering from a corrupt memory card, it’s well worth downloading and running.

You can download a copy of Photo Saver here.

When you press “delete” on your digital camera, the photo isn’t actually erased.

Deleting photos on your camera works much the same way as deleting files on your hard drive – for speed, the space is marked as available for re-use. But apart from a small indicator that shows the photo up on the available list, it’s really still there.

Which isn’t normally a problem…

Unless you’re a spy, you maybe don’t care what photos are left on your memory card.

But there are times when you don’t want everyone in the world to be able to see the photos you’ve taken. And all they need is a simple program like Photo Saver to be able to retrieve them. Even if you’ve formatted the card.

For instance, if you’re selling your camera and memory card, you’d want to use this program before handing it to the new buyer.

And with the size of the memory cards you can get nowadays, where even the cheaper cards can store hundreds of photographs, it pays to take a bit of care to delete every trace of your photos once you’ve transferred them to your computer, a CD or wherever else you store your masterpieces.

Photo Eraser is very simple to use. If your camera is plugged in to your computer with a USB lead, the software will recognize that and will let you browse to that drive. If you’ve got a card reader, it works much the same way. Just navigate to the correct place.

Then just press the “Next” button. The program will immediately go to work erasing all trace of your photos from the card. So obviously you need to make sure you’ve copied any photos you want before you start this process.

The program then sets about removing all trace of your photos, movies and any other information stored on your camera’s memory card.

Once it’s done, you’re taken to another screen that tells you the process has finished.

Verdict

Photo Saver is a simple to use program that does exactly what it sets out to do.

It’s easy to use and does exactly what it sets out to do.

The program works on all Windows computers and all memory cards.

You can download Photo Saver instantly here.

The Windows Registry is the dark heart of Windows. A bit like the boiler room in horror movies. And at least as scary.

It holds all sorts of information – program settings (Microsoft’s programs and other  ones as well), hardware settings (think hard drives, CD/DVD writers, graphics cards), most all of your user settings (it remembers where that window should open and what size it should be for instance).

And it’s not unheard of for  the registry to get confused…

Uninstall programs often don’t tidy up properly after themselves. I’ve had to go into the depths of Regedit to fix problems occasionally and crossed my fingers before I made any changes. Anyone that has fought the registry before will have seen the dire warnings that if you get things wrong, your system could break, possibly horribly.

In fact, the registry gets messed up seemingly as a matter of the natural course of things.

Which is where registry cleaners come into their own.

There are lots out there and they all make much the same promises: you’ll make your system work better and faster; you’ll experience less unexepected and unwanted crashes; your PC will get faster again because the registry isn’t hunting through hundreds of obsolete – or just plain wrong – entries.

Ultimate Registry Cleaner makes much the same promises as the other programs.

It runs a scan on your computer – you can run the scan for free, buying the  software only if you want to fix the problems it will almost certainly find.

I keep my machine fairly tuned but by the nature of testing things, I do install and uninstall programs.

Ultimate Registry Cleaner took a couple of minutes to run andgave me a list of all the errors it had found. All 325 of them, split up into headings such as shared DLLs, program shortcuts, obsolete start menu items, file extensions and a heap of other things.

Because the registry is so important to the working of Windows, you should always make a backup before making any actual changes. Just in case the worst happens. Ultimate Registry Cleaner offers both backup and restore options and it’s definitely worth making a backup before applying the changes it suggests.

Then when you’ve done the scan and backup, it’s time to press the “repair” button.

And if you want to be sure that the program has cleared all the errors it found, scan your machine again.

I’ve done that with some registry cleaners I’ve tested in the past and they always seem to find at least one error in the time it took to fix. Which – being cynical – led me to question how much they were telling the truth about their numbers. But in the case of Ultimate Registry Cleaner, it gave a clean bill of health with no errors found.

Verdict

Ultimate Registry Cleaner works well.

It does what it sets out to do quickly and efficiently.

Most of the competition isn’t upfront about the cost of their program – always assuming you can find the price before you’ve downloaded the free scan and given away your email address. The prices I found for similar products ranged from $30 (renewable annually) to around $50.

Which makes Ultimate Registry Cleaner a bargain even if you pay the price on the main page.

But there’s also a discounted price which you can get here, making it an absolute bargain – half the price of the cheapest competitor I found and with lifetime updates included. These links will take you directly through to the purchase page, so check out the other links to see the features if you want to.

Computers are great time savers (at least sometimes) but there are times when they take short cuts to keep themselves running quickly and efficiently.

One of these shortcuts comes when you delete a file.

You likely already know that deleted files get sent to your recycle bin and can be undeleted from there with just a mouse click.

But what happens after they leave your recycle bin is a bit scarier if you’ve got confidential information that you’d rather keep secret.

When Windows “deletes” a file it really only puts a marker in its file allocation system to say that the space on your hard drive can be re-used.

So anyone with a bit of computer savvy – or a file undelete program such as File Saver – can retrieve the file with little or no hassle.

Not good if your hard drive has confidential information about yourself, such as your passwords and credit card numbers, or about the company you work for.

Which means that you need to think about how to securely delete any files that you’d rather stayed permanently deleted. Especially before you give away your out of date machine to someone else  or even just loan it to somone while their machine is being fixed.

The best way to really, really, really delete a file is to overwrite the space it occupied lots of times. Which is boring and difficult to do on your own.

It’s much better to use a computer program specially designed to do the task.

Secure Delete does exactly that.

All you need to do is drag and drop the files that you never want to anyone to see again to the program.

Then press the “delete” button.

The space occupied by the file is overwritten 42 times. Which is double the US Government’s recommendation for deleting their confidential official documents.

It takes a second or two for the program to delete a file forever, never to be recovered. Or you can delete complete folders with a right mouse click from My Computer, Windows Explorer, etc.

Verdict

Secure Delete works simply and efficiently.

It performs its intended task of securely deleting files exactly as intended.

If you ever need to banish files from your hard disk forever this is a simple, inexpensive solution.

You can download a copy of Secure Delete instantly here.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to save afile in Microsoft Word, Excel or Access and protected it with a password “just to be safe” and then forgotten the password, you’re not alone.

Meeting up with password protected Microsoft Office files happens all the time. Usually at the most inconvenient moment.

Fortunately, Password Studio is a simple to use piece of software purpose built for this kind of problem.

It works in a very similar way to it’s cousin, PDF Password Recovery.

After you’ve downloaded the software, you select the type of file you want to recover the password from – Access, Excel or Word.

Then you select the actual file that has been protected by a password.

There are then two different options:

1. A dictionary using one of the two dictionaries supplied with the program. If you’re reasonably positive that your problem file has got an “easy” password then this is a good option.

2. A brute force attack. This is best when you know the person who saved the file was likely to have set a difficult-to-crack password. You can then select the character sets to use: upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, symbols and spaces. Most passwords set by humans are likely to be letters and numbers. Sneaky passwords set by computers or sites like the random password generator could contain anything.

The dictionary attack is the quickest one to run and will get results most of the time. I found that the advanced dictionary gave me best results.

That said, it’s also very easy to set the program to test for every possible password combination using the brute force attack with your PC left running over lunch. Your choice, but by definition the brute force attack will recover your lost password without fail.

Verdict

With luck, Password Studio isn’t the kind of program you’ll need to use often.

But when you encounter an Access, Excel or Word file that stubbornly refuses to open without a password then this is a simple to use, affordable, password cracker program.

It’s available for immediate download and it cracked my test files in just a few minutes.

Download your copy of Password Studio here.

File Saver is an easy to use file undelete utility.

If you’ve ever accidentally deleted a file and discovered to your horror that it isn’t in your recycle bin, this could be the answer to your problem.

If you find yourself in this situation, you need to run a file recovery program as soon as possible.

You may or may not know that when you delete a file, Windows “cheats” and doesn’t really delete it. Instead, it marks the space on your drive as being available for re-use.

Over time, this means that your hard drive gets messier and messier, but that’s another story.

The important thing to do if you need to recover a file from your hard drive is to get hold of a program such as File Saver as soon as possible. Ideally, you should download it to a different computer to reduce the risk of overwriting anything.

Once you’ve got the software, all you need to do is select the drive that contains the files you want to retrieve and click the “scan” button.

The process runs quickly – much quicker than searching for a file in Windows Explorer, for instance – and you get given a long list of files that you can recover together with a few details about them.

Probably the most important of these figures is the condition figure. Your ideal for this is 100% as it means the file should still be able to be retrieved completely.

When you select a file to restore, the File Saver software asks you where you want to restore it to. Ideally, this should be a different drive from the one containing the deleted file. A network drive is ideal for this.

If your machine isn’t on a network then a USB flash drive is another good alternative. I used one of these for my tests and it worked fine.

Another useful feature of the software is for any deleted images is the preview option – photos copied across from your camera tend to have pretty meaningless names, so it’s useful to be able to click the preview option before restoring an image.

If you’re in a hurry you can use the filter option to narrow down the list of files you’re looking for. This allows you to search for partial file names as well as selecting by date, file size and file attributes (for things like hidden files).

The software works on hard drives, floppy disks and camera memory cards.

Verdict

File Saver is simple to use and does exactly what it promises.

It is quick and simple, which is good news as (with any luck) you shouldn’t be using it too often and don’t want to be learning how to use it.

It’s also cheap to buy, so if you’re the cautious type then it’s not going to break the bank “just in case”.

But for us normal people, the most likely time you’ll need it is when you’ve just deleted an important file and need to recover it fast.

You can download a copy of File Saver software from here.

You probably know that your internet browser keeps track of what you’re doing on your computer.

Most of the time, this internet history can be useful. Things like storing your favourite sites, what you were looking at the other day that you forgot to bookmark, that kind of thing.

But there are times when maybe you’d prefer to delete your internet history.

There are lots of reasons for doing this – you don’t have to be paranoid to want to do this – anything from getting rid of surfing history on a shared home or office machine through to getting fed up with all the stuff that’s slowing down your machine.

And, let’s face it, Internet Explorer can get really slow and grouchy if you haven’t cleaned out your temporary internet files in a while, even refusing to open things like Notepad when you try to get under the hood and view the source code of a web page.

Of course, you can use the menu options to get rid of your history.

And a reasonable person might think that once you’ve cleared your history from Internet Explorer, it’s gone.

After all, you asked Windows to clear it and it says it’s done so.

But it doesn’t tell you about a hidden file called Index.Dat which also stores your browsing history and – worryingly – isn’t cleared at the same time.

Kind of makes you wonder what the programmers were thinking or maybe it’s a leftover from when they were testing things.

Whatever the reason, there’s a lot of data lurking on your hard disk. Most of which is well hidden.

I tested a copy of Internet History Cleaner on my machine…

My main browser is Firefox and it found:

• 6 items of saved form information – probably stuff that means I don’t have to retype my name every time I meet a form.
• 30,749 items in browser history. Yikes! I’ve only asked Firefox to keep 14 days worth.
• More saved passwords than I’m going to admit to. Way, way, way more than I ever thought possible. Literally thousands of the things!
• My most recent 1,270 downloads. Even though I clear the download form regularly.
• 705 cookies. Some of which I’ll be aware of but lots will have been set on my behalf by a helpful website.
• And 51.5Mb of cached data, clogging up my hard drive.

Then onto Internet Explorer. Which I only use very occasionally, so it’s not my main browser by a very long shot.

• 875 visited URLs and associated history.
• Another 843 cookies.
• 233.9 MB of cached data. Where on earth that’s all come from, I’ve no idea.
• 4 auto complete things.
• 25 items in my address bar history.

Now, if Internet History Cleaner stopped there and just cleaned those things out (or the ones I wanted – every one of those items has a check box to say yes or no to the deletion) that would be fair enough. But there’s more…

All the stuff Windows likes to keep:

Temporary files, “run” history (the nerdy things I type into the Windows Run option), my recycle bin that I never really recycle, my most recent 1,873 documents I’ve opened, files I’ve searched for in Windows Explorer, some Windows temporary files, what I’ve clicked on in the Start Menu – 1,939 items there, when I’ve changed the order of stuff in the Start Menu and an item in the clipboard.

Not to mention 128 items from the Google toolbar.

Any or all of those items are erasable with Internet History Cleaner with a single click.

Even if you knew where all these weird and wonderful things are stored, it would take you an age to remove and delete each of them individually, so this tool is a major time saver.

There are other tasks you can perform with Internet History Cleaner. You can set it to start every time Windows starts, you can ask it to clear Internet Explorer and Firefox history each time you close them.

You can also schedule the program to run on a regular basis.

On top of that, there are various deletion options. These range from regular (which means they can probably be restored using a program such as Undelete Now) through some reasonably secure deletions (overwriting the data 3 or 7 times) right the way to the “even the NSA couldn’t recover it” Guttman method which scrubs the file remnants 35 times.

You can also set files not to remove using the configuration option.

All in all, this is an easy to use program that will clean up your internet history quickly, simply and reliably.

And if you’ve read this far, use this link to get a discount on the program’s price. There isn’t a coupon code or anything, it just goes through to a discounted payment page.

USB flash drives are portable. Which makes them easy to keep with you but unfortunately also makes them east to mislay.

The solution to protecting your USB drive depends on what you need to do and how much of the drives contents you need to protect.

If you only want to protect a handful of files on your USB flash drive then it’s probably simplest to save them with a password. Programs like Word and Excel make it fairly easy to do this. Before saving your file, go to the Tools menu. Choose Options and then click on the Security tab. You’ll be given the option to enter a password to open the file. Although the box only asks you to enter the password once, you’ll be asked to type it in again before you can exit from the Options dialog box. But once you’ve done that, you’re on your own. So make sure you can remember the password otherwise you’ll have to resort to a program to recover passwords before you can open it again!

For many people, this will be enough protection. After all, those photos of beautiful looking scenery from your recent holiday probably don’t need to be stored securely.

If you need to store lots of data securely on your USB drive then it makes sense to password protect the complete drive.

For instance, you wouldn’t want other people to be able to get hold of your company’s data if your drive went astray, would you?

If you don’t mind splitting your USB drive into multiple “volumes” (kind of like virtual disk drives) and providing the files you want to protect aren’t too large, you may want to check out the free program Cryptainer LE. The biggest snag is that the maximum volume size is 25Mb. So if you’re dealing with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, you’ll be fine. But if you’re looking at Access databases and the like, it’s likely that you’ll soon run over this limit. It’s also a pain in the neck to have to continually swap drives, so remember that when you’re considering this program.

The best compromise I’ve found is a neat piece of software called Securestix which lets you password protect specific folders on your USB drive. This is a good solution – you can leave those holiday photos for all to see whilst making sure that your backup copy of your login passwords and your company data are securely locked away.

Securestix even comes with a password hint option (you don’t have to use this, but it’s there anyway) so that you can remember long forgotten passwords in much the same way that web sites let you get back a password from their secure servers.

The program is very simple to use and very affordable.

You can download your copy instantly from this link.