Free USB Guard is an interesting little tool that prevents your system from shutting down if a USB drive or other type of removable drive is still attached. It gives you the opportunity to safely remove the drives or leave them attached and shut down anyway. You can also restart your system or cancel the shutdown. It’s portable freeware that can autostart with Windows.

Free USB Guard checks for updates automatically the first time you run it and every time thereafter, unless you uncheck that option in the program’s system tray menu, from which you can also check for updates whenever you like.

The first item on the menu is the list of monitored drives. By default, all our removable drives were selected, including our card reader, though none had media. It also listed our internal hard drives by volume, though none was selected. Free USB Guard only detects external hard drives if they’re plugged in after the software is running, so we plugged one in, as well as a standard USB thumbdrive. Free USB Guard displayed the external hard drive with the option to deselect it from monitoring. Perhaps unusually, the program didn’t let us deselect the USB drive or any of our other monitored drives.

Nevertheless, we shut down the system. Windows 7 displayed the open program warning screen. We clicked Cancel to cancel the shutdown and return to Windows. Free USB Guard displayed a warning pop-up that had buttons we could use to cancel or proceed with the shutdown. We safely removed the drives and proceeded with the shutdown. Our PC shut down normally.

If you always mean to remove a USB drive or other removable drive before you shut down your PC but always forget, try Free USB Guard. It’s a simple trick, but one that can really come in handy.

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Everybody knows that the files and folders you delete in Windows aren’t really deleted from your hard drive, at least not right away. Even when you empty the Recycle Bin, the files aren’t overwritten until Windows needs the disk space. You can download many free utilities that offer secure file deletion, such as My Portable Software’s Free File Wiper. It’s portable freeware that offers multiple secure deletion methods, context menu integration, and drag-and-drop simplicity.

Free File Wiper is so simple that it opened the first time with its Help file displayed just so we’d know something happened (or so it seemed, though maybe the developers were just being helpful). We had to look in the corner by the System Tray to find the program’s icon, a small blue trash can. Right-clicking the icon produced a menu with many options, including deletion method, transparency, startup behavior, and the ability to integrate the program with the Send To menu in Windows Explorer. This option is selected by default, and it proved a quick way to purge files without having to deal with emptying the Recycle Bin. The program pops up with a warning that deleted files will be unrecoverable. Free File Wiper offers four levels of wiping with between 1 and 7 passes: Quick, Normal, Secure, and Maniacal. The Maniacal method didn’t seem to take any longer than the Quick method, at least with typical file sizes. Larger archives took longer to delete, no matter which method we tried, but that’s to be expected. No trace of our deleted files remained.

With simple, compact, and free tools like Free File Wiper available, it makes no sense to compromise your safety and security by failing to delete the files and folders you thought you were deleting. Think of it like a paper shredder for your PC: any documents containing personal information you’d like to keep personal should be destroyed. Free File Wiper runs from any location, including USB drives, so it can protect you on the go, too.

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It’s extremely reassuring to see that hard drive activity light flashing to the beat of moving data. But suppose you have no activity light? With no LED, how will you know if everything’s okay with your PC’s HDD? Easy: Try Free HDD LED and see the light. My Portable Software’s freeware displays the activity of your system’s disk drives, including portable drives, in three places: a flashing system tray icon, a desktop gadget, and even your keyboard’s scroll lock LED. It also monitors disk space and can even issue warnings when free space is running low.

The first thing we did when we ran the fully portable Free HDD LED was to click Customize in the system tray and change Free HDD LED’s options to Show Icon and Notifications. This made the icon sticky since an icon that flashes to show HDD activity is no good if you can’t see it! But we had another choice, a draggable desktop gadget that displayed all our disk drives, including portable drives, in a compact row of activity indicators that also displayed each drive’s capacity when we hovered our cursor over it. That’s not the end of Free HDD LED’s options, either. Right-clicking the tray menu or gadget opened an extensive menu of settings, including Autostart with Windows, HDD refresh rate, disk space tool, transparency settings, and updates. A pop-up warned us that enabling the blinking scroll lock feature might cause “some strange collateral effects,” but we tried it anyway. We didn’t notice anything strange (at least, not with our system) and it’s definitely a valuable option.

PCs used to have real HDD LEDs on their case fronts, but Free HDD LED is actually way better because it not only saves energy by eliminating another LED but also monitors disk space.

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