If you’re like most people I know, backing up the important data on your hard drive is something you know you should do but you’ll get round to it some day soon, honest – Carbonite Backup solves this problem.

Same goes for your cell phone. You probably only back it up when someone else has lost their phone. I know I’m usually embarrassed at how long there is between backups on my cell phone.

And backing up my hard drive? Well, I kept meaning to get an external drive and use that. But somehow it never happened…

Then I heard about Carbonite Backup…car

It’s one of many available programs that work behind the scenes to backup the important parts of your hard drive without you really doing anything.

If you keep your important files in the “My Documents” section on your computer, this program really is as close to totally automatic as you can get.

The default is for the program to archive off all your files and then keep watch for any changes, archiving these off as necessary.

If, like me, you also store important files in other folders on your hard drive, backing these up is easy too.

All you need to do is open Windows Explorer or My Computer, navigate to the files or folders you want to backup, right click your mouse, choose the newly added Carbonite option on the menu that appears and then select “Back this up”.

It’s a lot quicker to do this in real life that it is to read about how to do it.

Carbonite won’t automatically backup everything on your hard drive. Which is fine as most of the stuff is likely to be Windows system files and programs you’ve installed. It’s easier to reinstall these from the regular setup options they offer.

But it does backup the important things. The files that you’d be upset to lose.

And because it’s not backed up to an external hard drive in your house but is securely stored on Carbonite‘s servers your data is protected even if the worst happened and your house burned down or was robbed.

The first hard drive backup takes a while.

This is because your internet connection is more geared to downloading files than uploading them.

So your first backup is likely to take several days to happen. Once the initial backup has taken place, the program is likely only a few minutes a day keeping your precious files backed up.

Another good thing about Carbonite is that they dpn’t impose a storage limit on the files you backup.

Many of the other companies I checked who were offering remote backup had restrictions on the amount of data you backed (let’s face it – do you know how much data you’re likely to need to store online? I know I didn’t until Carbonite calculated it for me).

Verdict

Remote backup of your important files is something you should strongly consider.

It’s a cheap form of backup and covers all sorts of eventualities such as hard drive crashes (the mean time between faults figures for these always seem to be a work of fiction), theft and disasters such as fire and floods.

And if you’re in the habit of accidentally deleting important files, chances are they’ll be in your backup as well.

Carbonite is highly recommended for the peace of mind it offers. It’s cheap and efficient. After the initial setup, you don’t have to do anything: your files will be backed up automatically.

Click here for a free 15 day trial of Carbonite Backup.

If you’re 100% organised, there’s a chance you may not need to to use a PDF password recovery program.

I’ve got a lot of PDFs scattered over my hard drive and some of those have a password attached to them.

Usually I rename them so that the file name tells me what the password is. But occasionally I don’t do that and then need to hunt through emails or MSN chats to find what the password was.

Other people I know get sent password protected PDFs at work and they either have to add to their collection of Post It notes or find somewhere else to store the password.

How to go about PDF password recovery

Then there are occasions when you or someone else has password protected a PDF with a “memorable” password that then escapes everyone.

So, what can you do to retreive a lost PDF password?

If it’s a file you created yourself, the obvious route is to try all your usual passwords. (Go on, you can admit it, you usually use one of a handful of passwords!)

If it’s a file someone else created, you can try guessing what they may have used.

Sometimes you can get lucky with those techniques.

And sometimes you can’t.

Which is where PDF Password Recovery comes into play.

It’s a program that does the hard work of recovering PDF passwords for you.

The program’s interface is simple, which is good news as it’s not something you’re likely to use often and you wouldn’t want to spend time working out what to do.

You select the PDF file, choose whether you want it to perform a “dictionary” attack using one of the two dictionaries supplied with the program or – if you think the person setting the password has been good at their job – with a “brute force” attack.

If the PDF has been protected with a simple password such as a common word then the dictionary recovery works well.

If it’s been better protected – for instance, if someone has set their password to a good length and has used numbers, letters and other characters – then you’re in for a longer wait…

If you’re not using the computer that’s doing the password recovery for much else, you can set the program to high priority. So if you’ve got a nasty password to crack, you can click this option and leave your computer on overnight.

There’s also a pause option if you find that your computer is slowed down too much. It’s unlikely you’ll need this on a modern machine unless you’ve set the high priority option and you need to do another processor intensive task.

One of the bonuses that comes with the software is a password generator. This works OK and will give you passwords that aren’t easy to crack. Although personally I use this online random password generator. It’s the place I go to when I want to get a reasonably strong password that won’t get cracked easily.

To test the software, I gave it a PDF file with a 7 letter, non-dictionary word.

Although I knew the password’s length and that it was only a mixture of letters, in real life I wouldn’t have that kind of information.

So I ticked all the boxes for possible things the password could contain and asked the program to check all lengths from 2 to 8 characters, using a brute force attack.

As is fairly normal for me, I was also running several other programs on my PC at the time and had about a dozen tabs open in Firefox plus my email program, MSN and Skype. Which meant Windows was reporting 100% CPU usage.

The PDF password recovery software checked about a thousand potential passwords  per second (actual figures were between 789 and 1164 if you really want to know).

It also told me how far through the test it was out of the 33 million possible combinations that it might have to check.

And it found the password, which is obviously the result I wanted.

Verdict

A PDF Password Recovery tool is the kind of program that you won’t need often but when you do, you want something that works quickly and efficiently, with as little interaction from you as possible.

The price is good – if you choose the download option, the $14.95 is very reasonable. The competition I found was between $29.90 and $60.

Click here to download your copy of this PDF Password Recovery tool.

PC Secret Formula is a report that claims to be able to speed up any PC.

Using its recommendations on my personal PC, I shaved an impressive 44 seconds off the boot time. So if you want my quick review: it works. Buy it!

It’s not the usual “buy this registry cleaner” or “buy this defragmenter”. Instead, it’s full of solid advice you can use to speed up your computer.

What’s in PC Secret Formula?

The report is logically laid out and goes through 5 techniques that can tweak your computer’s performance without running the risk of harming it.

You’ll have to download some software to do this but the good news is that it’s all free to download and use. I’ve been involved with PC’s now for well over a decade and had only come across one of these utilities before, so I’d definitely agree that they’re well kept secrets.

It will probably take you about half an hour to run through the main “meat” of the report, including downloading the software and running it.

Some of the tools require you to reboot your PC as that’s the only way you can tidy up some of the stuff that Windows leaves in its wake. But everything is fully explained with screenshots. If you prefer to watch things happening, there’s an optional upgrade to a set of videos and a tool that automates things for you. I didn’t go for this but then I’m used to messing around with computers. If you want some extra hand holding, the videos Kris produces are easy to watch and explain things logically.

If you want to speed up your PC, you should download this report and follow the instructions.

Set aside a bit of time to run through everything and then look forward to a leaner, meaner, faster computer without the cost of hassle of an upgrade.

Click here to get a copy of PC Secret Formula.

Just a brief post to say that I’ve added an extra thing for my comments as I was getting fed up with the amount of spam comments.

I’ve already installed Akismet but that still means having to go through the comments and check that a real one hasn’t been trapped.

Peter’s Custom Anti Spam Image Plugin for WordPress works a treat. It’s easy to install and there’s an extra “captcha” word to type in that a real human will have no problem with. You can add your own words to the list, just being careful to make sure that they’re not too long (no more than 6 or 7 letters).

The only thing missing is an audio equivalent so that visually impaired people can get the word spelled out for them. I’ll be on the lookout for that.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, this is a “must have” plugin. Get it for free from here.

If you’ve ever had to convert a batch of doc (or rtf or html) files into plain old text files, you’ll know it can be a hassle so the idea of using a piece of software to convert doc to txt is definitely appealing.

You either have to open each one manually (which is fine if you only have a few to convert) or you end up searching the web for a tool that will convert doc to text.

These tools are around but they’re expensive. Most of the ones I found cost hundreds of dollars. Which wasn’t a figure I had planned on spending.

I thought I was going to have to resort to recording a macro in Word. Something I’d never had much success with to be honest.

Then I chanced on a neat little program that is designed purely to convert word documents to text files. That’s all it does in life. It doesn’t convert PDFs or spreadsheets or anything fancy. Just Word doc files, RTF files and HTML documents.

And it does it fast! My machine converted 149 files a minute. That’s faster than I could have done with a macro. And that was on my old machine. My more recent computer works even faster although I haven’t been sad enough to run another time test on it when I’ve used it to convert doc to txt. I just know it works more than fast enough for my needs.

So if you need to convert word doc files to text files, this neat little program is a “must have”.

Click here to convert doc to txt now.

Finding pages with high Page Rank and getting backlinks from them is probably every marketer’s holy grail.

If you’re good at mangling search engine queries, you can probably dig down and find blogs that Google, Yahoo or whoever think are relevant to your topic.

Then you’ll need either the Google toolbar or a Firefox add-on (ideally one that regularly keeps up to date with all the latest updates). You’ll then be able to spot the higher PR sites.

After that, all you need to do to get a high PR backlink is place a comment.

Comment Hut is a piece of software that takes the hard work out of finding the relevant blogs. All you need to do is fire it up, type in your keyword phrase and it will then go off in the background (while you get on with all those other important tasks) and find stacks of relevant pages. Another click of your mouse and it will filter the list by a page rank that you decide.

With Comment Hut you can choose a minimum PR value. Anything from 1 to 10, although it’s unlikely you’ll find too many relevant blogs at the top end of this range.

After that, all you need to do is either export the list you’ve just created and work on them at your leisure or pick them off one at a time from the software by double clicking.

Comment Hut deliberately doesn’t store any “pre-canned” responses. It’s far, far better to go to each page, quickly skim the blog and then post a comment that’s in the same style as the blog. That way you’re much more likely to keep the links you’ve created.

Comment Hut works with 5 major blogging platforms or you can download an evaluation copy that works just with WordPress blogs. Doing this will give you a good chance to see whether the full edition of Comment Hut will be worth spending your cash on.

If you’re looking for a quick fix “comment on hundreds of blogs in seconds” answer, then Comment Hut is most definitely not for you.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a piece of well supported software that works dependably and does the boring bits of work that computers enjoy doing, then Comment Hut is highly recommended.

To find out more, or to download a trial copy of Comment Hut, click here.