Jed, my friend, every morning is a coffee morning!

Rolling out the RITS and this is about the first day I’ve had to breathe in and out without having to gasp!

Last week I mentioned an additional menu item I find on my computers when I right click on my Recycle Bin in Windows.  The one I told you about last time was Icon Restore and this week the menu item is “Erase Recycle Bin”.  The program that provides this feature is called “Eraser” (http://bbs.heidi.ie/eraser/).  When you right click on your recycle bin or any folder or file you can choose to eraser them so that they can not be recovered later.

I have talked before about how your computer deletes a file by changing the file’s name, which in turn makes the file undetectable to you. It also tells the computer that the space the file occupies on the hard drive may be used to “write” other data on top of whenever the space is needed.

If a file is deleted and no other information has been written over the old file, it is still there and could be retrieved using one of the many file recovery programs out there.  If another file is stored on that “empty” space over and over again the file will most likely be unrecoverable sometime in the future.

To delete the file permanently you need a program like Eraser. What permanent deletion programs do is to write over the deleted file once too many times.  Again once, an overwritten file will be made unusable and more importantly for security purposes, unrecoverable. There are many of these types of programs on the market.  I have used “Eraser” for several years and it seems to work very well so I recommend it; however, as with all software downloads proceed at your own risk.

“Eraser” will allow you to choose how many times you want the files over-written, either 1, 3, 7 or 35 times. The U. S. Department of Defense suggests three to seven overwrites to render a file unusable. Peter Gutman, magnetic storage specialist at the University of Auckland reports that, “…it is effectively impossible to sanitize storage locations by simply overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written.”

Having read that you should know that the 35 times overwrite is called the Gutman recommendation for secure file deletion.

Also note that it can take quite a while to overwrite large files 35 times so plan ahead.  The many spy movies that you may have seen show computers’ hard drives being deleted in a few seconds are not true. So if you choose to delete your entire hard drive you may need to plan anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days to perform a total erasure.

Keep in mind that that is sometimes possible to recover a file by very high end programs no many how times it is overwritten.  So if you are a spy hiding things from an evil government watch out, they may still be able to retrieve your secret files.

@thegizwiz sure is excitable, but hey it is @leolaporte!!!

When I receive emails from readers with some great column ideas I copy them to my desktop and save them on the right side of the screen.  Later when I restart my computer I know where they are and can get right to them.  However, I sometimes have an issue and that is they may be where I left them!

Once you expertly arrange icons on your desktop and the system is restarted you most likely find that they have all moved to line up in a neat orderly list.  The list is neat but not where you want them.  I want emails and all of my other icons to stay where I put them not where Bill Gates folks want them.

Enter, Icon Restore (http://users.rcn.com/taylotr/icon_restore.html)!  “Icon Restore” allows you to keep all of your desktop icons where YOU want them.  Warning, “Icon Restore” is recommended for Windows 95/98/ME/XP/2000/NT4.0.  Nevertheless, I have used it on my new Vista machine and have had no problems with functionality,but as with any program use it at your own risk.

Once this safe little program has been installed you are back in control of, at least, this one issue.  “Icon Restore” adds two options to the menu that appears when you right click a folder or the Recycle Bin.  They are “Save Desktop Icon Layout” and “Restore Desktop Icon Layout”.

You have probably already figured out how to use it but here it is - quick and easy.

First, right click on your desktop in an empty place, i.e., not on an icon.  Touch “Arrange Icons By” and make sure that “Auto Arrange” isn’t checked.  If it is checked, click on “Auto Arrange” to uncheck this feature.

Now arrange the desktop icons exactly where you want them.  Now right click the recycle bin icon or any other folder on the desktop and choose, “Save Desktop Icon Layout”.  You will hear a little “ding” sound and see a message indicating that the layout has been saved.  That’s all.

The next time your icons area is messed up, right click on the recycle bin or any folder and choose, “Restore Desktop Icon Layout” and they will magically return to where you want them…slick!

This reminds me (since I just saw it when I right clicked) of another application that I wrote about a couple of years ago named, “Eraser”.  From the emails that I have received from several of you recently I think that I will revisit that app next week.

A friend of mine emailed me about a great little application this week that really appealed to me so I am hoping some of you will get the most out of it too.

First, a scenario.  You go to the video store, discount store, drug store or whatever store you visit and notice that they have the latest comic book character movie DVD on sale for a really good price.  You tell your wife how really neat it would be to have that movie to watch at home and she says, “Yeah, great idea.”  So you get it and when you get home you find out that you thought it was a really good idea to own that movie once or twice before.  So you now have multiple copies of it.  OK, that really happened to my wife and me one day a few months ago.

The program that Rick told me about last week is called, “Libra” and can be downloaded for free at getlibra.com.  The slogan at Libra is, “organize your stuff, beautifully.”  OK, I don’t know about the beautiful part but it really does organize your stuff.

I am an avid DVD collector and have way more than I really need but it’s better than some other nasty habits I could have.  This program will organize your Books, DVDs, Games and Music collections.

I have only tried the Books (to see how it works for you) and DVDs (for me to use in real life) and they both work very well, as described on the Libra web site.

Starting with Books I found that if I enter the ISBN of a book, either the old ten digit version or the new 13 digit version, the book would be found right off.  Libra uses Amazon to find all of the data on each item so I guess if the item isn’t online there you won’t find it.  However, it found all of my 12 books and 149 DVDs (I told you had too many) without any problems.  I did notice that on some of the older books I needed to enter the title and find it that way.  For movies the UPC and/or ISBNs only worked about one time in every ten or so tries, so I stuck with movie titles to find them.

Once you finish finding everything you want you can view your Library with all of the available information (again at Amazon) loaded into the database.  So basically you click the picture of the book or DVD cover and it gives you all of the related info about the media, even with the next step.

The last neat thing about this program is that you can then export your data to different formats.  Pick from either an Excel workbook, a text file or my favorite, a Web Export.  I exported them as a Web Export and then loaded them to my website.  Go check out my book collection at http://DoubleClicks.info/libra.  Also there is supposed to be a colorful background on the website; however, it broke when I posted it to the web, but hey, it is free.

Let me know what you think about Libra.

WOW Jed is following me…I’m honored! See you in the War Room one day soon, I hope.

A friend of mine emailed me about a great little application this week that really appealed to me so I am hoping some of you will get the most out of it too.

First, a scenario.  You go to the video store, discount store, drug store or whatever store you visit and notice that they have the latest comic book character movie DVD on sale for a really good price.  You tell your wife how really neat it would be to have that movie to watch at home and she says, “Yeah, great idea.”  So you get it and when you get home you find out that you thought it was a really good idea to own that movie once or twice before.  So you now have multiple copies of it.  OK, that really happened to my wife and me one day a few months ago.

The program that Rick told me about last week is called, “Libra” which can be downloaded for free.  The slogan at Libra is, “organize your stuff, beautifully.”  OK, I don’t know about the beautiful part but it really does organize your stuff.

I am an avid DVD collector and have way more than I really need but it’s better than some other nasty habits I could have.  This program will organize your Books, DVDs, Games and Music collections.

I have only tried the Books (to see how it works for you) and DVDs (for me to use in real life) and they both work very well, as described on the Libra web site.

Starting with Books I found that if I enter the ISBN of a book, either the old ten digit version or the new 13 digit version, the book would be found right off.  Libra uses Amazon to find all of the data on each item so I guess if the item isn’t online there you won’t find it.  However, it found all of my 12 books and 149 DVDs (I told you had too many) without any problems.  I did notice that on some of the older books I needed to enter the title and find it that way.  For movies the UPC and/or ISBNs only worked about one time in every ten or so tries, so I stuck with movie titles to find them.

Once you finish finding everything you want you can view your Library with all of the available information (again at Amazon) loaded into the database.  So basically you click the picture of the book or DVD cover and it gives you all of the related info about the media, even with the next step.

The last neat thing about this program is that you can then export your data to different formats.  Pick from either an Excel workbook, a text file or my favorite, a Web Export.  I exported them as a Web Export and then loaded them to my website.  Go check out my book collection at http://DoubleClicks.info/libra.  Also there is supposed to be a colorful background on the website; however, it broke when I posted it to the web, but hey, it is free.

Let me know what you think about Libra.

This week I am going to mention one site that I wrote about recently, Picnik. It allows you to make some basic to fairly advanced edits to your photos. Photos either stored on your local hard drive or online, say at Picasa (check the URL once there and see if you can figure out who owns this one?), Flickr or others.

I will not get into the details as the only reason I mention this good graphics site again so soon is that it has a competitor…from the big boys - Photo Shop. They are both capable online photo editors with, in my opinion, a slight advantage going to Photo Shop. Give them both a try with your photos and see what you think.

Next on the list is a site that you could find very useful especially if you have a rather large file you need to get to someone else. Occasionally computer users will have a large file, like the great American novel you just wrote, that you need to get to a friend to proof read. Email is out as most email accounts will not allow extremely large files to be sent online. It really bogs down speed. However, now you can use online programs like Wikisend or Drop. These two sites are very similar. They allow you to upload that large file(s), set a password to the file so that others, when armed with that password, can download your file to their own local system. So there are no large emails that won’t take an hour to download without the receiver knowing what is going on.

Finally, today a site that I do not go to that often, since you really only need the site to download the program once. This application does much better than the similar one that comes with Vista. It is called, “Desktop Sidebar” and works great in all the versions of windows I have ever tried. The application will place a bar on the side of your screen (hence the name) where you may add different panels. For instance, with mine I have a clock at the top of the screen, the local weather below that and it is then followed by all of the programs on my computer grouped by topics that I create. I can move around within Desktop Sidebar much more quickly and accurately than using the Start Menu in Windows. I don’t run any of my computers without this great free addition.