Today, we’re going to show you the easiest possible way to clean up your PC and improve its performance.

Delete temporary internet files

The first place you should start your Spring cleaning is with the Windows disk cleanup tool. This wipes out temporary internet files, unnecessary program extensions, and other miscellaneous data that accumulates on your PC when left over time. Deleting temporary internet files is an easy way to boost your computer’s performance.

Uninstall programs you no longer use

The second place you should stop is the Programs list, which can be found under your Control Panel or by simply searching for ‘Uninstall programs’ in the Windows 7 search bar. From here, you can see all the programs currently installed on your computer. If you see any old applications or games that you no longer use, then don’t be afraid to remove them from your system.

Dust out your computer

While cleaning up your computer’s software is one thing, your computer case may also have become clogged with dust over the winter months. Buy a canister of compressed air from any hardware store and drag your computer tower to a well-ventilated area outside. Then, remove the case and spray a generous helping of air on every case fan and dusty spot you see. Sometimes, dusting out the case only has an aesthetic impact on your PC, but other times, it can provide a significant boost to your PC’s performance because your computer no longer overheats.

Laptop users can do this too. Hold the canister of compressed air upright and spray into the intake fans along the sides and bottom of your laptop. Be sure to stand far enough away so that you don’t get a burst of nasty computer dust to the face.

Use WinDirStat to anaylze your hard drive’s space

While you’ve cleaned up most of your computer already, there are still plenty of places where large data files can hide. To perform a comprehensive analysis of your system’s hard drive, check out a free application called WinDirStat, which provides a colorful visual interpretation of your hard drive’s usage of space. You can use this to see which areas of your hard drive need to be cleaned up, as well as which programs are taking up the most space. Users are almost always surprised by the results of a WinDirStat scan.

This update rendered most Windows computers inoperable. Since then, a quick fix has been issued. The Avira update didn’t just attack essential Windows operating system files. It also disabled Microsoft Office applications and harmless programs like Google Updater.

It didn’t take long for Avira’s forums to flood with angry customers. In fact, the company was so inundated with calls and requests that it “ground to a standstill.” Eventually, Avira was able to pull the problematic update and issue an immediate security pack.

While many apologies were issued, Avira’s blunder will no doubt have a permanent impact on its reputation. How did an update like this make it out of the testing phase?

If you want a more reliable form of anti-malware software, why not try out PC Cleaner Pro? As one of the world’s most reliable and dependable computer optimization programs, PC Cleaner Pro does so much more than just rid your computer of viruses; it also speeds up and cleans your PC in hundreds of different ways.

To download your free trial of PC Cleaner Pro, click HERE.

Expectations are high for Microsoft’s next-generation Windows tablets. Some are calling it game-changing and claim that it could completely alter the mobile industry while snatching away market share from Apple and Android.

Major PC manufacturers like HP are more than ready to start developing Windows 8-based tablets, and the company apparently sees great potential in the devices.

Windows 8 tablets sport a number of unique benefits and are sure to appeal to those who are tired of the Android and iOS interfaces. Here are a few of their advantages:

-10 touch interface: instead of being limited to a measly two-point touch system, Windows tablets will have a 10-point touch interface, allowing users to place all ten fingers on their keyboard at any one time. If you need more than a ten-point touch screen interface, then you’re either a mutant or you like pecking away at your tablet with your nose.

-Hybrid tablet and notebook devices: Check out this recently released shot of a Windows 8 tablet PC/notebook hybrid device. I don’t know about you, but I think that looks pretty cool. It also means that users won’t be restricted to a touchscreen keyboard if they have to type up notes at a presentation or in a lecture.

Powerful Intel processor: Windows 8 tablets will feature Intel’s Clover Trail Atom processor. This will be Intel’s first dual-core Atom (i.e. mobile) chip built using the 32nm manufacturing process. A single-core version of this processor will also be seen in Windows 8-based smartphones.

Unique and useful user interface: Instead of copying the UI of iPhone or Android devices, Windows 8 has forged its own path. Its touch-centric interface will appeal to many users, and the colorful tiles that open each app can be arranged to your heart’s content.

Easily run multiple applications: Thanks to Windows 8’s ability to snap apps to either side of the screen, multi-tasking is an absolute breeze. Simply drag a window to the right or left side of the screen to snap it into place.

Multi-monitor support: Want to hook up your tablet to multiple monitors? With Windows 8 tablet PCs, you can!

And more: Better web navigation, extensive customization options, and a streamlined control panel are also features that will no doubt attract users to Windows 8 tablets. If you’re ready to make the switch, or if you’re buying a tablet for the first time, look for Windows 8 based tablets to hit the shelves this coming November.

If you’re setting up a new PC, then you probably have to install several different programs before you get it running up to speed. You might want to download Firefox, iTunes, VLC Media Player, and other programs, for example. Instead of traveling to each individual website to download these programs, try using a free service called ninite.com, which allows you to quickly and easily manage several different program installations at one time. It will also check for updates for each of these programs. If you’re looking for free time-saving applications, Ninite is tough to beat.

4) Press F2 to quickly rename a file

Want to rename a file but don’t want to go through the hassle of clicking on its name? Simply press F2 to highlight the name and begin typing. It’s that easy. If you want to rename multiple files in the same folder, simply press TAB after renaming.

3) Minimize all Windows with two buttons

If somebody has just walked into the room and you want to minimize all the windows you have open, simply press Windows key + D. This will take you directly to the desktop. Once that person leaves the room, you can press Windows key + D to open up all those windows you just closed. This is great if you’re planning a secret birthday party for one of your friends!

2) Save time with Ctrl+Shift+Esc

One annoying thing about Windows 7 is that pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn’t take you immediately to the Windows Task Manager. Instead, it forces you to  go to a screen where, 99% of the time, you’re not going to click on any option but “Open Windows Task Manager”. To skip this annoying step, simply hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc. This will take you directly to the task manager’s Processes menu, which tells you more information about your computer than the simple ‘Applications’ tab.

1) Save time while filling out forms

Whether you spend all day entering contests online or you’re just filling out boring banking information, knowing how to quickly fill out a tab can significantly reduce the time it takes to input data. Most people know that pressing ‘Tab’ will switch to the next input box. However, even more useful is ‘Shift+Tab’ which navigates you back one box. This is great if you accidentally typed in wrong information.

Why is identity protection important?

There are new identity theft stories being seen on the news every day. Sometimes, it’s a major corporation that has been hacked, revealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive user account files. Other times, it’s a single user’s PC that has been hacked. Whatever the case may be, your information on the internet is never as secure as you think it is.

What does a program like PC Cleaner Pro do to protect my identity?

While PC Cleaner Pro contains a specialized identity protection tool, it also protects your identity in a number of other ways. By cleansing your PC of malware and eliminating unnecessary – or even dangerous – background applications, PC Cleaner Pro comprehensively protects your security and the security of your computer.

Put simply, all the elements that slow down your computer, including a crowded hard drive and unoptimized registry, can also be causes of identity theft. The easier it is for a hacker to infect a file on your computer, the higher chance there is that your identity will be stolen.

You can’t trust every program you download from the internet. There are too many free, low-quality software programs that are designed to steal your identity as opposed to heal your PC. When you download PC Cleaner Pro, you know that your identity is safe and that the program will not try to harm your PC in any other way. When you download other programs from the internet, that is not always the case.

Whether you’ve already had your identity stolen in the past, or you haven’t yet taken steps to protect yourself in the event of identity theft, PC Cleaner Pro 2012 is a required program in this day and age.

First, the Windows Registry loads every time you start up your PC. It contains information that tells your computer how to run certain programs, along with a history of changes made to your programs and operating system over time. Put simply, your programs rely on the registry in order to run properly.

 Since so much data is being processed by your registry, it can become unoptimized if left unchecked over time. The registry becomes bloated with unnecessary data, and often several thousand entries in the registry can be safely removed without harming your PC. Some of these unnecessary files may belong to older programs, for example, while others may have been rendered obsolete by a recent software update.

Whatever the case may be, performing a scan with a registry cleaner can swiftly improve your PC’s performance and security. Problems in the registry, if left unchecked, can lead to annoying computer crashes and program errors. Sometimes, these errors can also expose holes in your system’s security, or they could signify to hackers that your operating system hasn’t been updated lately.

By running a free scan with PC Cleaner Pro, you can heal your registry to a more optimized state. Whether you’re a PC expert or a complete rookie with computers, all it takes is a few mouse clicks to get your PC back and running with its highest possible level of performance.

With individual hacking attacks on the rise and more and more computers being targeted every day by malware and phishing schemes, there has never been a better – or more important – time to purchase software that protects your PC.

One of the best ways to protect your PC is to use a firewall and antivirus combination. A software suite like this packs a one-two punch in terms of virus fighting effectiveness. Not only will it prevent dangerous malware from seeping into your system and monitoring your activity, but it will also prevent individual hacking attacks from breaking through computer’s wall of security and wreaking untold amounts of havoc on your life.

What can viruses and hackers do to you?

A lot of people think that viruses and hackers will never affect their lives. It’s easy to read about PC security in your local newspaper or hear about them on TV and believe that they will never affect you. The truth is that people who think they can’t get infected rarely take precautions to defend their computer. As a result, they are the group most likely to come under attack from a virus.

Once your computer becomes a target, everything you do on your computer becomes compromised. Whether you shop online, bank, or simply send emails online, it only takes a few seconds for hackers to gain access to your accounts and steal your identity.

But I already have Windows’ built-in Firewall. Why do I need another firewall?

As powerful as the Windows Firewall may be, it still poses a threat to your system’s security. Why? Well, when hackers want to access your Windows-based computer, they will assume that you have the Windows Firewall installed. For that reason, they will design their attack specifically to get around that Firewall. There are very few Firewalls that cannot be broken by a team of hackers, and if hackers know that you’re running a specific firewall, their job becomes a lot easier.

When you install a third-party firewall, you throw off these hackers. Instead of seeing your computer as an easy target, they’ll move on to another user who is stuck using the default firewall. Congratulations, you have just protected your PC from a dangerous security threat!

Conclusion

For all of these reasons, it’s important to invest in an antivirus software plus firewall combination. This one-two punch will prevent your computer from coming under attack in so many different ways and will provide you with the security you need for years into the future.

Not all antivirus programs come with firewalls, but the ones that do usually offer a higher level of value – assuming that the firewall does its job properly. To download your free trial of PC Cleaner Pro 2012 and improve your PC’s security, click HERE.

The Flashback virus hijacked iOS-based computers and transformed them into a massive botnet. Using this botnet, a team of hackers was able to perform all sorts of evil deeds. They could crack encrypted servers using the combined processing power of the infected computers, or they could utilize its bandwidth in order to upload illegal files online without being personally responsible.

Ultimately, Flashback has destroyed the misconceived notion that Apple computers are immune to viruses. Fortunately, antivirus software companies have leapt in to bolster Apple users’ lost faith.

Today, several major antivirus manufacturers are working hard to develop antimalware tools for the Mac operating system. This can include anything from Flashback removal tools (which are freely available from Apple) to complete security suites and firewalls. While free antivirus software has been available for Macs for a little while, the operating system has yet to see a complete suite of top-quality security tools.

Whether you’re using an iOS-based computer or a PC, users can no longer rely on free antivirus software to do the job for them. Instead, they’re going to need to invest in high-quality antimalware removal tools that can effectively protect their computers from today’s malicious phishing attempts, code injection applets, and other types of dangerous applications.

Put simply, the internet is an incredibly dangerous place for everybody. However, that risk if magnified a hundred times if you don’t use good quality antivirus software.

To download your free trial of PC Cleaner Pro (which includes a powerful malware removal tool), head back to the front page and click on ‘Download’

Despite nearly 20,000 of the listings being duplicates, this leak illustrates how powerful hackers are becoming in their fight against social media.

Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom: Twitter took quick action against the accounts listed on the Pastebin leak. Instead of simply watching its users’ accounts get hacked, it forced password resets on all of them.

The full details of the leak are featured on CNET.

While Twitter was able to act fast against this leak, thousands of social media account passwords are being leaked onto the internet every day. If you value your Facebook or Twitter accounts with your life, and don’t want to explain to your friends why your account was hacked, then you need to protect yourself online.

How to prevent your social media accounts from being hacked

There are a few ways that social media accounts get hacked. Here are the best ways to protect yourself from each method of hacking:

-Phishing scams: Some hackers phish for your information by sending you fake emails or directing you towards malicious websites. In many cases, these malicious websites will look exactly the same as Facebook or Twitter, or will at least have the same color scheme. This tricks users into wilfully giving up their username and password information. Once that occurs, the hacker instantly has your information.

To protect yourself from phishing schemes, never enter your social media account username or password any place other than the official Facebook and Twitter sites. Use a secure connection (https) to be extra careful, and always check the address bar before entering your information to ensure that you’re at the correct URL. If an email looks suspicious, don’t click on it! If you suspect that your information has been stolen, change your password immediately.

-Using the same password on other sites: The most common way in which social media accounts get hacked is through hacking into other sites and stealing their data. While Facebook and Twitter have incredibly secure servers, other sites do not have the same security and protection. For that reason, hackers will target the weaker sites and then steal user information from there.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you’re like most people, then you use the same password for all of your accounts. While this is convenient, it’s a very bad idea, and it has landed a lot of people in hot water. In the past, dating websites have been hacked, revealing the user information of hundreds of thousands of social media accounts. By extracting the email address and password from this information, it doesn’t take long to gain access to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Preventing this security leak is simple: use a different password for each one of your accounts. This may not be a big deal for major websites like Facebook or Twitter, but it might be a good idea to have a unique password for “low-security” websites. For example, if you need to sign up to some shady email list in order to gain access to a certain page of a website, then you might want to use a secondary email address that is not connected to your other accounts.

While this may seem like an unnecessary amount of precaution, it’s what you need to do if you want to comprehensively protect your social media accounts.

The third solution

Of course, if you don’t want to follow all the painstaking tips listed above, you can simply rely on good antivirus software. This will alert you whenever somebody is trying to gain access to your computer, and good antimalware programs will even prevent you from traveling to malicious websites that will steal your password information.

In many cases, antivirus software relies on a database of malicious websites that users have reported to be dangerous. By blacklisting these websites from your computer, a good antivirus program protects your PC and ensures that your social media accounts stay 100% safe.

What is a targeted cyberattack? Well, when a hacker wants to gain access to information, they often focus in on one weak leak in the chain. For example, even organizations with the most airtight PC security may have a few uneducated computer users. By emailing these users, or targeting them in other ways, hackers may be able to get their foot in the door of some of the world’s most protected computer servers.

Hackers are increasingly targeting human resource departments of major corporations. With access to nearly every employee in the system – as well as their sensitive personal information and other documents – the human resource department poses an attractive target to somebody with malicious intent. When the people working in human resources aren’t educated in PC safety, it can pose a serious risk to a corporation’s security.

In 2011, one of the most popular forms of attack was to email a worker in a major corporation. Attached to this email would be a virus (often in the form of a .rar file to mask its malicious nature). Even experienced PC users may have accidentally opened a malicious .rar file at some point, and once the computer is infected, it can bring down an entire network. Since many corporate emails are freely available online, hackers can target thousands of workers in just one sitting, increasing their chances of somebody taking the bait.

Every day on the news, there seems to be another story about how a major government organization or corporation was hacked, exposing hundreds of thousands of sensitive user documents. This tarnishes the reputation of any organization, and many people have been fired because of their inability to stop computer viruses from entering a protected server.

With individual attacks on the rise, PC users can no longer afford to rely on their company’s tech support to bail them out. Instead, you need to educate yourself on how to protect your computer. Whether they’re going after your company’s assets or your own personal identity, individual attacks are set to increase throughout 2012, and you need to do everything you can to prepare yourself for the onslaught.

Attacks against Mac users will increase in 2012 and beyond

Some of the biggest computer security news of the year has come from an unexpected source: Macs. Tech giant Apple has faced criticism from tech industry experts for the way it handled various security crises throughout the year, including the notorious Flashback virus that infected nearly one million Mac users before Apple was able to patch the security flaw (something that Windows and Linux had already done several months earlier).

Conclusion

Whether you own a Mac or a PC, there has never been a better time to download good antimalware software. PC optimization programs like PC Cleaner Pro can contribute heavily to your PC’s security, and most computer experts agree that a clean computer is a healthy one.

For all of these reasons, check out our free trial download of PC Cleaner Pro today.