MELANCHOLY404 TECHNOLOGY

In one of the motivational talk shows I saw on TED, I learned that freedom to make mistakes helps you to free yourself from all constraints of being perfect and helps you to open yourself to all kind of opportunities and possibilities. This holds true in all walks of life, even when you are working on your computer. As you are working on Windows or Mac, the OS gives you the freedom to work carelessly  with files. You know that there is a fail safe designed called the Recycle Bin that will store deleted files, giving you a chance to restore them if deleted by accident.

However, even after six generations of Android, there is no failsafe yet to tackle such accidents. A file deleted from your phone is gone forever. You can certainly try to recover them using some file recovery tool, but chances of success are thin and totally dependent on your luck.
So today, I am going to introduce you to an app for Android that will give you the freedom to commit mistakes. Dumpster for Android is a free app which brings in the recycle bin feature, just like one you have on Windows and Mac, right on your Android. Also, you don’t need root access for the app to function and works with all the file managers out there.

Dumpster for Android

To get started, the very first thing you will have to do is install the Dumpster app from the Play Store (which is free, btw) and once it’s initialized, simply press the home button and let it run in the background. If you have a built-in Auto Start App Manager, make sure to include this app as an auto start app so that the services are not stopped in case you reboot.

 
Dumpster will now monitor your internal storage and no matter what you delete from any of the file managers, it will be recorded and cached by Dumpster.

The Features of Dumpster

The best part about using Dumpster is that unlike other recycle bin apps available on Android, you don’t need to share files to the app in order to add them. The app automatically monitors the files that have been deleted from the files system. Also, the app works on almost all the file types including images, videos, audio, pdf, zip, mp3, mp4, ppt, doc, avi, mpg, jpg, rar, etc and you don’t need to work on a 3rd party file manager to manage your files.
 
After the deleted files are collected by Dumpster and you now have two options. You can select files and restore them to the original location if you deleted them by accident or you realize later that you needed those files. Or, if you wish to free device storage, you can delete them permanently. In the settings menu, you can choose which of the files you would like to protect using Dumpster and which one you would like to delete directly, as all the files stored by Dumpster are still in the system storage and thus, occupy storage space lest you delete ’em permanently. You can also choose self-cleaning period after which the cached files on Dumpster will be cleaned automatically.
 
There are premium features using which you can get cloud backup along with ad-free interface, but it’s expensive at $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. The ads are not obtrusive and you can work with a free version as long as you don’t need cloud backup for files through Dumpster. This can anyways be done for free using other apps available on the Play Store.
 

Conclusion

That was Dumpster using which you can have a failsafe on Android for files that you might delete by accident. No need to root your device and even Internet connection is absolutely not required. The only thing that it needs is a persistent notification so that its services are not killed by the OS in order to free up some RAM as any file deleted while it’s not running will be deleted automatically. So make sure you try out the app and don’t forget to share your views about it.

We’re just a few days away from receiving the next iteration of Windows 10. The aptly named Anniversary Update. Certain  new features and some design changes are included. But in all these changes one thing is gonna remain the same. The same boring folders and file explorer. Yes, no doubt, Microsoft totally nailed it with the design language of Windows 10. The sleek and minimalistic design are eye pleasing. But, I still find File explorer and folders to be boring in looks. Well, if you feel the same and are a “Tweaker” then let me show you 3 tools that will help you customize the look the folders in Windows 10.

There are many tools available for customization in Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. No specific tools have yet been developed for customizing Windows 10. The below tools are updated versions (compatible with Windows 10) and some are not (but, they work). I’d still recommend you to take a System backup before performing any tweaks. By the way, there weren’t any damaging issues in my usage. So, it’s safe to proceed. Let’s dig in.

1. Folder Colorizer: Add Colors to Your Folders

Folder Colorizer is the tool that you must have used in Windows 7  to add colors to your folders. The tool is not updated for Windows 10 but it still works.



The usage is pretty simple. After installing go to the folder location. Right-click on the folder. Choose Colorize! and select your color.

Now, after you select the color it will do some loading and present you an error. Just hit OK and the folder color should change. Restoring the color back to original works fine. The custom colors option doesn’t work. The dialogue box does show up but crashes after few seconds of opening.

Also, there are few things to note:

• The sub-folders of the customized folder will also change their colors.
• The thumbnail view of the folder icon won’t show the preview of files that are stored in it.

2. Folderico: Completely Customize the Folder Icons

Folderico has full compatibility with Windows 10 and works perfectly. With this tool, you get the freedom to completely customize the look of the folder icon. You can add custom color, images, and overlays.

Open the tool and browse to the folder which you’d like to customize. Now, you can replace the icon with an image or else add a color and overlay to it.

You can use any PNG or JPEG image as an overlay. Here I’ve used the Counter-Strike logo. You can also add color to the background. If you think you want to use the icon again with other folders then you can even save it by clicking on Save to User Icons. Also, there are some preinstalled icons that you can use.

3. Windows 10 Skins

One of the way to completely change the look and feel of the file explorer and the folders is to install skin packs. There are many cool themes and skins available for Windows 10. Skins for your favorite games, metro themes, and Android themed skins.

I recommend you to download skins from skinpacks.com. I’ve been using their skins since Windows 7. There’s also a Skin Pack Creator and IconPack Creator to create your own custom skins. One thing to note here is that the whole Windows UI will change not only the file explorer. If you don’t want to change the whole UI then you can use the SkinPack creator to create your own customized skins for file explorer and folders.

Few Other Add-ons

In the past, we had shared a tool that gives Chrome-style tabs in the file explorer. Also, if you know the file explorer doesn’t show folder size in details view. So, in order to quickly view the size of the folder, you can use this tiny tool called Folder size.

Ever since I started using Windows 10, every time I opened the Task Manager in detailed view, the disk usage activity always touched the mark of 100%. If not a century, it was always above 90% which was quite odd. For the first few days, I thought that it might be because of the heavy video rendering that I did on my PC for our YouTube channel related work. But after a few weeks I realized that even while my system was idle with no major background processes running, it was hitting the 100% mark just for disk usage. The CPU state was mostly idle, going from just 2 to 10%.

It was enough to convince me that it’s not the workload that’s causing my PC to be slow all the time with obnoxious disk usage. It was time to find a solution and after hours of online research, I managed to find out some working tricks. These tips solved the issue on my PC and now my computer shows decent disk usage with a significant improvement in performance.
So if you too are facing similar issues on your Windows 10 computer, here are the 4 things that you should check on your PC.
Note: If you are not sure what your disk usage in Windows 10 is, right-click on the taskbar to open up Task Manager and here enable the detailed view. In the Processes tab, you can see the CPU, Memory, and Disk Usage on your computer.

Disable Windows Search

The first thing you must check out is the Windows Search services which are kind of buggy and cause Windows 10 on your computer to enter a search loop. Once Windows 10 enters the search loop, it starts indexing files over and again which cause the high disk usage with minimal CPU and Memory usage. I am not sure when Microsoft is going to take care of this bug, but the only option you can go with is to disable the Windows Search Properties permanently. To get started, open up Windows’ Run box and execute the command services.msc.

Once the Services window opens up, look for Windows Search and double click on it to open up the properties page. Here, the first thing you should do is click on Stop to immediately stop the service and then change the Startup Type to Disabled. That’s all, save the settings and after some time, you should notice an improvement in the disk usage activity. But if you still have the issue, don’t worry, there are still a few things you can try.

Disable Superfetch Services

The next thing you can try is to disable Superfetch services from services.msc window itself. Superfetch service caches data to RAM so that it can be immediately available to your application. Unfortunately, the service is not  always right about which software you’re going to use and can keep your hard drive busy for minutes after booting and closing applications.

While disabling the Superfetch service, make sure you stop it first and then change the Startup Type to Disabled.

Disable Windows 10 Tips

Disabling the above two services did the trick for me, but if you still are not seeing any improvement, you can try a tip I read on Reddit. A few users suggested to open Windows 10 settings and then navigate to Notifications & actions. Here turn off Show me Tips about Windows and that’s all. It should just take a minute or two before you see the results.

I haven’t tried this myself, but from the comments on the Reddit page, it looks like that the trick is working for users and is definitely worth a shot.

Conclusion

Those were the few tips you can try to get the Windows Disk usage to behave. If none of them works for you, I am afraid it might be because of some malware on your computer and you might have to disinfect the Windows 10 or clean install from the scratch in a hope that the issue is fixed.