Utilities Registry Cleaners “Enjoy up to 300% Faster PC & Make Slow PC Run Like a New One!” This is an actual ad by IObit, a manufacturer and marketer of PC utility software. This particular statement is about Advanced System Care, their registry cleaner product and it is a bold faced lie as are any other statements of this type by other companies selling these products. And if you install and run them they report outlandish numbers concerning the number of problems and issues found on the system in order to get you to buy their product. The truth is that an aggressive cleaner is more likely to slow down or even break your system than improve it by destroying necessary links and registry entries. This is not to say that cleaning the registry isn’t a good thing. All systems have broken links and outdated entries caused by the deletion or moving of files, alterations to the file system, the removal of applications, and artifacts left by web surfing. And removing these entries from the registry will speed things up but only by 1% to 5%. Unless the system has never been cleaned and it is at least a couple years old you probably won’t even notice a difference in performance. That being said, Piriform’s Ccleaner is a free cleaner that does a reasonable job removing unused entries from the registry and temporary files from the system. It is conservative in its approach and I have never seen it attempt to delete necessary data or files. Video Converter and Player So you have a library of videos and you want to convert them to either a different format or load them onto your smart phone. Handbrake is a free video converter that will do the job. Its default settings cover Android and Apple phones as well as standard conversions without needing any technical knowledge but does allow for setting alterations for those with the skills. It is available for Apple, Ubuntu, and Windows platforms. Windows Media Player does not cover every video format out there and will, on occasion, not play a video. Conversion is one option but if it is a one off viewing, the time it takes to convert the file is a waste of time. VideoLAN offers VLC, a free video player that can handle pretty much any format that is thrown at it. It is available for Apple, Linux, and Windows. CD, DVD and Blu-ray Image Creation and Burning An image file is different from standard disc copying. Copying burns data one file at a time until all the files are copied. An image file copies the tracks on a disc without regard to the file structure or organization. This ensures all content of the disc are saved and restored. However, some copy protected discs may use techniques that do not follow the International Standards Organization (ISO) 9660 standards for track creation and an image of these disks will fail. For unprotected disks ImgBurn is a free program for creating image files of disks onto local storage and then burning those image files onto blank media. An ISO image file can also be created from scratch using a selected group of files from the local and/or network drives. Key Finder This is a category of software that most people don’t ever think about until they need the serial number for their copy of Office or Windows and have lost it. Magical Jelly Bean will retrieve the serial from the installed product so you can save it and probably loose it once again.