Wallpaper of the Week

This week's wallpaper is a picture of bare trees with snow capped branches in
an ice blue pond. It's a great composition in ice blue, white and gray. Well
worth checking out.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/snow-pond-wallpaper-week.htm

How Fast Is Your Hard Drive?

Here's a Windows utility that gives you a readout of the speed of your hard
disk. If you're wondering about the performance of your hard drive, perhaps
to compare it with a friend's SSD or to check whether your new drive really
is faster than the old one, this utility comes in handy and it's portable.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-fast-your-hard-drive.htm

Protect Your Online Privacy with This Terrific New Extension for Chrome and Firefox

Are you concerned about all the tracking that goes on while you surf the
Internet? Users of the Chrome and Firefox browsers have a new weapon against
the invasion of their privacy. It is an extension called PrivacyFix just
launched and makes it really easy to configure the privacy settings for
Google, Facebook, and many other sites. If you try it, let us know what you
think.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/protect-your-online-privacy-terrific-new-chrome-extension.htm

Updated: Best Free GIF Animator

Creating an animated GIF image file is much easier than you would think with
help of a GIF animator. You take a couple of images and put them in sequence,
the animator helps you to do the rest. There're many free animators around
but not all are the best. If you think that Photoscape is too big a program
for just a GIF animator, then why not try out other simple solutions
recommended by our editor Sahil Waste in this updated article.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-gif-animator.htm

Mask My IP 2.3.1.6

Mask My IP, a Free utility, hides your IP address and prevents your online
surfing habits and activities from being tracked by hackers or other cyber
criminals. With a user-friendly interface, it is incredibly easy to use, and
safe to run.

Registry Optimizer Free 2.4.8.6

Registry Optimizer Free is quite robust in scanning registry, locating and
removing current errors and potential threats, so as to speed up your system
and protect your personal information, with tools of effective scan, fix and
optimization.

Use This Nifty Utility to Find Out What is Accessing Your Hard Drive

Have you ever noticed your hard drive churning away and wondered what it was
doing? Every now and then my hard drive takes off and starts whirring. I used
to go look at Task Manager to try to see what was going on but that wasn't
always obvious. There are also various other ways to check what is causing
the activity. However, none make it as simple as this free utility. Try it
and the mysterious churnings of the hard drive won't be so mysterious
anymore.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/use-nifty-utility-find-out-what-accessing-your-hard-drive.htm

Create And Track Your Own Shortened URLs

Modern web sites often have incredibly long addresses (URLs) especially if
you go to a specific item on the site. It's far from ideal if you're sending
the address or link to a friend in a text message over the phone, or simply
writing it down for reference. Bit.ly is probably one of the best-known URL
shorteners, but JotURL is a good alternative which allows you to track how
many times your shortened URLs have been clicked. All the core features
you'll ever need are free.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/create-and-track-your-own-shortened-urls.htm

Do You Know How Many Apps Have Access To Your Google Account?

The web is full of great free services. To save you having to create a new
username and password every time you sign up, many of them allow you to
optionally sign in with your existing account. But over time, you tend to
forget just how many of these services you have tried. In the case of Google,
check this out how to review and deny access to any of those with a single
click.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/do-you-know-how-many-apps-have-access-your-google-account.htm

Finds of the Week

- Play the original Minecraft Classic, solo or with friends, for free! -
Learn To Code: 10 Free And Fantastic Online Resources To Hone Your Skills -
How to enable built-in PDF Viewer in Firefox 15 - Lock Google Safe Search to
Protect Children Online - Jetstream: Online Weather School
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/finds-week-play-minecraft-free-learn-code-google-safe-search-online-weather-school-enable-pd

System Speed Booster 2.9.6.6

System Speed Booster offers the free scan and removal of system's obsolete
registry entries and junk files, to protect your personal information and
optimize the system to the best condition, with its multiple, solid features
and sleek interface.

This $49 Excel Add-In Is Still Available Free. And It's Better Than Ever

ASAP Utilities has more than 200,000 users in 90 countries, and boasts more
than 300 new features which it adds to all versions of Excel from 2000 to
2010. The most recent update to the system was just last week. If you use
Excel, at whatever level, give this program a try. It really does promise to
make your life a whole lot easier.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/49-excel-add-still-available-free-and-its-better-ever.htm

Finally a Free, Flexible YouTube Download That Works

The web is awash with programs that claim to be able to download YouTube
videos and convert them to various formats for offline watching and viewing.
In my experience, though, most of them don't work too well. So, for a change,
here's one that's actually rather good and very simple to use. Not only can
you download videos, but you can also extract the audio in MP3 format so you
can listen offline.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/finally-free-flexible-youtube-download-works.htm

Wallpaper of the Week

This weeks wallpaper shows a globe lantern lit softly from within, adjacent
to two unlit globes. The globes appear to be made of paper. There's a good
amount of texture in this image, while its low contrast and overall dimness
work well with most desktop icons, especially in the darker areas.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/globe-lanterns-wallpaper-week.htm

Comparing TrueCrypt and AxCrypt As The Best Free Encryption Utilities

As for the encryption, both TrueCrypt and AxCrypt do their job well, using
industry-standard secure algorithms. So you can be confident that any
information that you encrypt will be pretty secure. So are there any
differences between AxCrypt and TrueCrypt, to help you decide which one to go
for? Thankfully, yes. There's a major difference. Read more here.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/comparing-truecrypt-and-axcrypt-best-free-encryption-utilities.htm