Easily Eject a Specific USB Drive Using a Free Tool

We have previously written about how to create a shortcut and a keyboard shortcut for quickly accessing the Safely Remove Hardware dialog box . If you often use the same external USB drive and you want to be able to quickly eject that specific drive, we found a freeware tool called USB Disk Ejector. We downloaded and tried a beta version that has more features than the latest release. It seemed to work fine, so we recommend you try it.
This two-part post shows you how to use USB Disk Ejector to eject your USB device using either the graphical user interface (GUI) or the command line and how to set up shortcuts with shortcut keys for quicker ejection of your USB drives.

Download USB Disk Ejector from
http://quick.mixnmojo.com/usb-disk-eject-1-2-beta-4-last-beta-before-release-hopefully.
Unzip the file you downloaded.

Use the USB Disk Ejector GUI to Eject a USB Drive

Using the USB Disk Ejector GUI to eject your USB devices is very simple. Simply double-click on the .exe file to open the program.

Recover License Keys for Installed Software

We have previously written about a method for recovering the license keys for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office programs using a tool called Keyfinder (see our post, Recover Your Lost Windows XP, Windows Vista and Microsoft Office Product Keys). Keyfinder also allowed you to recover the license keys for some other programs, but the list was limited.
We have found another free tool, called LicenseCrawler, that recovers license keys by crawling through the registry to find all the license keys and serial numbers for all software installed on your system.

Download LicenseCrawler from
http://www.klinzmann.name/licensecrawler_download.htm.
NOTE: We chose to download LicenseCrawler from FreewareFiles. Softonic has an extra download process you must go through to get the file.
You will get a .zip file from FreewareFiles. LicenseCrawler does not need to be installed. Simply, unzip the file you downloaded and double-click the LicenseCrawler.exe file to run LicenseCrawler.

Recover Text from Corrupt MS Office Files

As if hard drive failures or virus attacks are not devastating enough on their own, these electronic catastrophes often corrupt valuable files, rendering them useless, and leaving us at the mercy of expensive software which might or might not recover data from the files.
If your lost files belong to the MS Office suite, your hopes of recovering your data without going into debt are significantly higher thanks to S2 Services Software’s Corrupt Office2Txt freeware.

Corrupt Office2Txt works for damaged or corrupt Office file types, including doc, docx, xls,, xlsx, ppt and pptx, as well as Open Office’s odt, ods and odp files. The information recovered is text only—you will need to reformat the document after recovery. But, this is still better than losing the information completely.
To start, click the download link on S2 Services’ Web site. The freeware downloads in a 10 MB zip file.