Dan Sommer, Richard Baguley

Moving and copying files and folders can be a tedious business, but PowerDesk 6 can make it easier by providing a better-designed interface than Windows Explorer. This handy little utility allows you to easily sort, move, and otherwise manipulate files by showing you two directories in one window: you can select the files then copy or move them with a mouse click. That?s a lot easier than all that dragging and dropping you have to do with Windows Explorer.

It can also compress files using Zip compression, securely delete files and kick off other utilities (such as Regedit and a command prompt).

Although it is designed to act as a demo for the $40 commercial utility PowerDesk 6 Standard, it's a useful program in its own right, and runs without time limitations or restrictions. The commercial version has a much wider range of features, including the ability to rename groups of files at once, plus the ability to batch convert groups of files at once from one format to another.

Note: This review addresses v4.0 of the software.

Think of it as being the Windows search applet on steroids: CloneMaster will search your hard drive, network drive, and removable drives (such as floppies, CDs and USB thumb drives), analyzing the files and pointing out any duplicates. It doesn't do this comparison just on the basis of filename: It looks inside the files themselves, so it can pinpoint different versions of files that may have the same name.

An increasing number of people are connecting their PCs to HDTVs for watching high resolution videos or gaming. But you need to tweak a lot of settings to get the best image quality, and you don't get easy access to them with the software that controls your graphics card.

PowerStrip is a free program that provides access to hundreds of settings which let you to do things like: create the non-standard resolutions required by some HDTVs, change the gamma settings, and customize how colors are displayed for more accurate color. It's not for the feint of heart, though as there's not much explanation of what the technical terms it uses mean, and if you use the wrong settings, you could damage your monitor.

There's a good chance that you have more than one copy of many files on your hard drive. And unless you intend the duplication, you're wasting space. DoubleKiller is a free program that can deal with this problem, searching for and alerting you to any files that are in more then one location.

The program doesn't just look at filenames; it compares the filename, size and does a quick scan of the files to find the real duplicates. And once you've found them, you can either delete the files or move them to another location, freeing up the space with a couple of mouse clicks.

However, be careful: on a typical system, this program will find hundreds of duplicates, but that doesn't mean that you should delete all of them: some are useful (such as programs that install files into the Windows directory, but keep a copy in their own directory as well). So, only remove the duplicates you are sure that you don't need. This is the free version: There's also a Pro version which does more sophisticated searching, scans faster, but costs $20.

If delete a file, it isn't really gone because Windows just marks the space they occupied as being available. And anyone with a program such as Restoration could probably recover them, meaning that personal data could get into the wrong hands. The author of Sure Delete says that this free program deletes the file, then wipes and removes the data left over. The author has stopped updating or supporting the program, but it appeared to work fine in my informal tests. I was unable to recover several test files that I deleted with it. The program has three deletion methods: a quick wipe (which overwrites the file 4 times, a Department of Defense method (which overwrites the file 7 times with random data), and a Super Secure mode which overwrites it an impressive 24 times.

--Richard Baguley

Your PC uses a number of memory caches, where data that is likely to be needed next is kept at the ready--because it's most efficient to read from or to write to memory. There are caches for the hard drive and for your CD-ROM drive that are different from the drives' built-in buffers. In addition, there's a cache that holds the names and locations of files. Cacheman aims to help to optimize these caches, make the most efficient use of them, and control how big they are. For the hard drive cache, for instance, you can choose what type of system it is (a file server or one that runs applications), and the program claims to manage the hard drive cache appropriately for the fastest access. It can also try and free up memory in a way similar to FreeRAM, minimizing the amount of memory that programs grab and unloading memory-hogging DLLs that aren?t needed anymore to keep your PC running as speedily as possible. The program is fully functional, but the developer asks for a $10 registration fee if you like it or are a commercial user.

--Richard Baguley

Note: This file is no longer unsupported by the vendor and has been removed from PC World's Downloads library.

Sometimes you just need to do a simple thing--like making a hard-copy printout of your screen. But if you hit the Print Screen key in Windows, it won't actually print the screen to a printer. Instead, it will copy the screen into the clipboard, from where you have to paste it into a graphics-capable program and then print it.

The impressive Alienware Area-51 7500 delivers strong performance and excellent features. At $6007 (as of July 11, 2007), it's the most expensive quad-core model we've tested thus far. You get a lot for your money, though. Our review system carried 2GB of 800-MHz DDR2 memory and Intel's 2.66-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor, overclocked by Alienware to 3.2 GHz and kept stable with liquid cooling. It's the first overclocked Area-51 7500 system to come through the PC World Test Center. Alienware began overclocking the line only in March 2007; the company previously reserved such CPU tweaks for its premium ALX machines, in which pricey extras like liquid cooling and 1066-MHz RAM are standard. Alienware's adjustments helped the Area-51 7500 to a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 125, a mark on a par with those of other overclocked gaming PCs and just four points behind the fastest PC we've tested to date, CyberPower's Gamer Infinity Ultimate.

The Area-51 7500 uses two 768MB EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics boards in SLI mode, providing plenty of muscle and Direct X 10 gaming capabilities under its preinstalled Windows Vista Home Premium operating system. The Area-51 7500 averaged 165 frames per second on our Doom 3 test, versus the average of 143 fps set by the rest of the gaming PCs we tested. It averaged 187 fps on our Far Cry test at the same resolution settings, tying with the Gateway FX530XT but falling well behind the 202-fps result of the Dell XPS 720, which was equipped with a 768MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX board.

MasterSplitter takes large files and chops them up into handy little chunks, ready for sending over e-mail. If you're the cautious type, Mastersplitter can even double-check its work, comparing the split file with the original to make sure it hasn't been damaged during the chopping process. (This is something that the free file, The File Splitter, can't do). It can also automatically format removable media (like CD-RW discs) and create a batch file that whomever you send the disc to can use to reassemble the original file without needing the full program. The downloadable version is fully functional, but it comes with a nag screen that appears when you run it until you register it, which costs $13. Versions are also available for every version of Windows from Windows 3.1 and up; useful if you want to send files to people who are still in the computing stone ages.

--Richard Baguley

Here's the problem: You have a 10MB limit on e-mail attachments with most services. But you have a larger file that you have to send. So, how do you send the file? One simple option is to split the into smaller chunks, a task that The File Splitter handles easily. You tell it which file to split and how big you want the chunks, and it chops the file up into pieces that you can e-mail.

At the other end of the process, the recipient runs the program that The File Splitter creates, and it automatically "glues" the chunks back together to reform the original file. The program lacks some of the features of MasterSplitter, described below. However, it also lacks the annoying nag screen and $13 price tag.

--Richard Baguley

BootitNG is an extremely powerful program for managing your hard disks, creating, deleting or otherwise manipulating the different partitions that appear to Windows as separate drives.

It can even change the size of a partition while preserving the data on it, but we strongly recommend that you make a backup copy of all of the data before you do that: If it fails, it will delete the data completely.

Fortunately, BootitNG can create the backup too as it can take an image of a partition and store it another drive, or on DVD. BootitNG doesn't run from within Windows. Instead, it creates a bootable floppy or CD-ROM that runs the program. When used properly, BootitNG is an incredibly useful program. When used improperly, it's a data destroying nightmare.

We've all done it: accidentally deleted a vital file a few minutes before an urgent deadline--and then couldn't find it in the Recycle Bin. Fortunately, there's no need to panic, yet.

Restoration is a free program that can scan your hard drive, floppy diskette or USB thumb drive and find files that have been deleted (Windows doesn't actually destroy files that you delete: it just marks the space they occupy as being available). It can then recover any recently deleted files it finds with a single mouse click.

You can filter the results if you know the name of the file you are looking for, which is much easier than wading through the list of the hundreds of deleted files it usually finds (including temporary files, cached Web files, etc).