Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries
Bo Moore, technology editor, and Alan Dexter, executive editor, share their latest tech loves
Being my family’s oncall tech support, I’ve run into my fair share of systems compromised by a pile of bloatware, unnecessary toolbars, and viruses. Most of us know the standard system recovery utilities—CCleaner, Malwarebytes, and their ilk—but there’s an even better option, before going nuclear, and reinstalling the OS.
Tron is an open-source script that automates the full process of cleaning and disinfecting a Windows system. First, it preps your system, creating a restore point, and running tools and scripts that ensure the rest of the process runs smoothly. Next, it runs cleaning utilities such as CCleaner and BleachBit, followed by de-bloating, ditching OEM bloatware, toolbars, and other pre-installed apps (excluding useful stuff such as Calculator and Paint). Disinfection is handled by Malwarebytes, KVRT, and Sophos, while a series of scripts check and repair Windows. Finally, Tron updates and optimizes your system, patching Adobe, Java, and whatever else needs updating.
It’s an impressive list of tasks that should take care of almost any problem. Even better, it’s a single download that, once started, runs itself—though it can take six to eight hours to finish. My smartphone recently decided that it no longer liked my microSD card. I can’t remember if it was after a restart or update, but my screen displayed a prompt saying that the Samsung microSD wasn’t recognized, and would I like to try to format it? An offer that the phone couldn’t deliver on, as it appeared to have been corrupted. Long story short: No matter how many machines, adapters, tools, and OSes I tried, I couldn’t get the card to play nicely again.
A dead microSD card is hardly the stuff of nightmares, particularly as the data that really matters was automatically uploaded to my Google account. Even so, it’d be good to take a look at what’s on the card before I consign it to the big trash bin in the sky.
The problem is that Android 6.0 has changed the way it handles SD cards, so plugging the card into Windows (or Linux) reveals nothing. So I turned to file recovery tools to see what was lurking beneath its seemingly blank surface. One tool that did well, and was free to try, was DiskDigger—a portable app that scans for a selection of files, and allows you to save them off with minimum fuss. It took a while to scan the entire card (30 minutes for 32GB), but did recover a few MP3s and a couple of log files.