Power Castle battery packs a good back-up plan for cellphone charging

External battery packs should make everyone happy, especially those who have dropped their land lines and rely solely on their cellphones.

The PC12000, at $29.99, is not much bigger than an iPhone 6 and, per the name, has 12,000 milliamp hours of capacity. Basically, it could charge an iPhone 5S battery almost eight times. Its case is aluminum, and the power gauge has blue LED numbers. There is one regular port and one for fast charging. This is a decent choice for its small size and power.

The PC13000 ($29.99) and PC15000 ($39.99), as the names suggest, provide more power. The PC13000 has one fast-charge and one regular port; the PC15000 has two fast-charge ports. Both have a single LED flashlight that's turned on by pressing the power button twice. (Watch out — it's easy to turn on the light by mistake.)

These batteries also have a digital power gauge and feature SmartID technology to give connected devices as much power as they can use. They're a bit heavy, but they provide the fast-charging needed on the go.

DALLAS MORNING NEWS

A hard drive is prone to as much clutter as you can dump on it. When a new program is installed, it may include companion software you don't want and probably don't need. Even if you uninstall the unnecessary programs, they will leave behind little reminders in your system registry just to let you know they were there.

So it came as a surprise when System Mechanic, an otherwise praiseworthy PC maintenance program, installed a handful of lesser utilities — the kind of programs you're trying to get rid of. Otherwise, System Mechanic competently frees up disk space after software installations and a day of Internet browsing; deletes snippets of registry code that can slow your computer or do it harm; and more. Most important of all, it tells you whether your PC is in good health — and what to do if it isn't.