Three Free Utilities Missing From Windows 7

TrueCrypt

Anyone can snatch your laptop these days. Why, last year, someone took mine in the split second I paid for my Mocha Frapuccino at starbux! Windows Ultimate and Enterprise editions offers BitLocker for encrypting volumes and thereby securing your important data. This isn’t the case if you have Windows Professional. Too bad for you if a miscreant gets hold of your financial data! There’s no bitlocker there.

But if you have TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org) you can smuggle a hidden partition inside a file, encrypt entire disks including flash, and easily obscure a hidden volume within another TrueCrypt volume. The real-time encoding occurs in RAM without slowing down your system. It’s uber portable and deploys AES-256 encryption. With this, your Windows 7 Home is more secure than Windows 7 Ultimate with bitlocker.

7-Zip

Are you pleased with Windows’ Compressed Folders Extraction Wizard? This decrepit app doesn’t recognize many of the brand new archiving formats these days. Nor does it handle nested zips with dexterity. I wish Microsoft created something more useful like 7-Zip (www.7-zip.org), which can undress practically any compression format, from TGZ to RAR. It’s so savvy, it even flicks the buttons off image files like ISO and UDF. Then for road warriors, 7-Zip pops out self-extracting ZIP archives that can take a trip on your thumb drives.

Secunia PSI

Sniveling malware writers take great passion discovering security flaws in software. While many firms quickly plug their code to guard against breaches, end users aren’t always quick to install these updates. If you’re lapse with updates, you want Secunia (http://secunia.com) which reveals unpatched and exploitable programs in their naked glory so you can get them up to date.

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