Transporting information on portable hard drives and USB drives is a very convenient way of getting information between home and work. However, if you lose that drive then it is possible that someone else who finds the drive may gain access to your personal information stored on the lost drive. A good way around this issue is to encrypt the contents of the portable drive. TrueCrypt is a free encryption program which also has a handy “Portable Mode” allowing TrueCrypt to run as a standalone application on a portable hard drive, requiring nothing to be installed on the destination computer in order to decrypt the drive contents (although you do need administrator rights on the destination computer). TrueCrypt is available for free download from www.truecrypt.org .

One of the questions this week relates to tracking down programs and processes which could be slowing down the startup time of Windows and also slowing down the operation of the computer. Using the default Windows Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) is a good place to start looking for resource hungry processes, but often you will want more information than the Task Manager can provide. There is a free utility on the Microsoft website called Process Explorer (technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx). This provides you with much more comprehensive information about the processes currently running on the computer, including other files folders which particular programs or processes may have opened, the historical CPU usage of the program or process, and a facility to search the programs and processes. If you are interested in exactly what is running on your computer then Process Explorer is a very useful utility. Be aware, given the large amount of information it presents, you may initially be somewhat overwhelmed so take your time to understand what each piece of information is representing.

Users of Windows XP may be aware that this operating system has built-in CD burning capabilities, but does not have the ability to burn DVDs or ISO files. Fortunately, there is a very good free utility available called CDBurnerXP which performs all these functions plus more. CDBurnerXP is available for free download from: cdburnerxp.se .

Readers of today’s column may notice that in the last question I mention a handy utility known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke. This is a very good utility for people who are disposing of a computer. Darik’s Boot and Nuke (more commonly known as DBAN) will wipe the contents of the hard drive and then write random data over the drive for a specified number of passes, thoroughly hindering the recovery of data off the drive. DBAN comes as an ISO which you can burn to a CD or DVD and then directly boot the computer from the CD/DVD to commence the wiping process. Be aware, this will completely wipe all data from the specified drive so make sure that you backup any data you wish to keep before running this utility! DBAN is available for free download from www.dban.org.

A well-known tip in Windows is to right-click on a file or folder and then select “Send To”, to send that file or folder to a particular destination. In Windows 7 there is a hidden extra tip for the Send To menu. By holding down the SHIFT key when right-clicking on a file or folder and then opening the “Send To” menu, a whole range of new items will appear allowing you to send the file or folder to other destinations, such as special folders (e.g. My Pictures, My Documents) on the computer.