We give a comprehensive study of strong uniform attractors of non-autonomous dissipative systems for the case where the external forces are not translation compact. We introduce several new classes of external forces which are not translation compact, but nevertheless allow to verify the attraction in a strong topology of the phase space and discuss in a more detailed way the class of so-called normal external forces introduced before. We also develop a unified approach to verify the asymptotic compactness for such systems based on the energy method and apply it to a number of equations of mathematical physics including the Navier-Stokes equations, damped wave equations and reaction-diffusing equations in unbounded domains.