back and forth from menus to ribbon whenever you want. Free; $13.50 for businesses vista Start Menu www.vistastartmenu.com Vastly improve the look of the Start Menu in Windows and get faster access to just about all aspects of the OS with this replacement menu tool. It’s also accessible from the system tray. Free; Pro edition, $19.99 Winroll www.palma.com.au/winroll Right-click the title bar of any window and you can roll the window inside of it, and do the same to all open windows at the same time. Free
BAckup/Sync Carbonite Carbonite.com Carbonite monitors important files and backs them up online for future restoration, should you need it. It also provides remote file access, so you can access your data from any computer. $54.95 per year for unlimited space Cucku Backup www.cucku.com Why back up to extra storage or online when you can stash files with friends? This social-backup tool sends encrypted files to storage you share on your buddies’ PCs using Skype’s file transfer abilities (without Skype, Cucku handles only local storage). You, of course, should share back. Free DriveImage XML www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
This utility will create a disk image even 50 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION JULY 2009
while the PC is in use (using Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Services feature). Later you can restore a drive entirely, or browse that image to retrieve select files. Free DriverMax www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax Use it to back up hardware drivers, then restore them after a fresh nuke-and-reinstall of Windows. DriverMax will even check for driver updates. Free Dropbox www.getdropbox.com The darling of the world of online sync is Dropbox: Put all your files in the My Dropbox folder and they’re immediately stored online; set up the software on other computers (even Macs and Linux PCs) and the files synchronize whenever changed. Free for up to 2GB; Pro plan, $9.99 per month or $99 per year for 50GB hDhacker dimio.altervista.org/eng On start-up, your PC looks for the master boot record (MBR), typically the first sector in the first partition of the disk. The MBR reads the partition table that tells your PC where the OS is—it’s essential to booting properly, in other words. Make sure your PC’s MBR is backed up so the PC is always bootable. HDHacker will back up and restore the MBR instantly when you’re in Windows. Free Mozyhome mozy.com/home Running completely in the background, MozyHome monitors folders you specify, and when all is idle on your PC, it backs up
