useful freeware

[michael scuffil]

Hi

Here’s a list of some favourite Freeware which you may or may not know about. (I only found out about most of them by chance, so I thought I’d pass them on.)

GoAway
is an alarm-clock. You set the time you want, and a window will appear on your screen (with or without an acoustic signal, as you dictate) telling you it’s time to go.

SpaceMonger
provides a chart of whatever drive you specify, showing graphically what’s taking up how much room on it. It’s an easy way of discovering (and deleting) clutter. Only the earliest quasi-obsolete version is free, but that’s the best one. Later versions try to do too much, and cost money.

Audacity
records whatever is going through your sound card (irrespective of the source), and allows you to edit it. In this way you can create DIY podcasts, or record short bursts of music, or whole tracks, or whatever.

PhotoFiltre
is the best and easiest-to-use of the amateur photo-processing programmes. It doesn’t have everything, but then none of them do.

FolderSize
allows you to adjust the display in Windows Explorer to show not only the size of files, but also of folders both in terms of total bytes and of number of files.

KeyTweak
allows you to assign different functions to keyboard keys from those they have by default. Thus you can assign uses to otherwise otiose keys. (In the case of my ancient cast-iron keyboard, I was able to give it the Winkey it didn’t have.)

PDFCreator
does precisely that, create a pdf document from something else (web page, Word document, screenshot or anything else that’s printable). It acts as a virtual printer: you use it by selecting it as your printer for the particular task in hand. If like me you have no other printer, all you have to do is click on the print icon.

and talking of PDF:

Foxit
is the best pdf reader, much quicker at loading than Adobe Acrobat (milliseconds rather than 15 sec), and much quicker at searching a pdf file. A word of warning: it is probably best not to have both Acrobat and Foxit installed. Also, your browser may need to be told how to handle pdf links. (Ask if you want more info.)

talking of browsers, I can’t imagine anyone’s still using Internet Explorer, but if you are, there are much better ones around:

Firefox and Opera are very similar, but Opera is more reliable in my experience (fewer glitches). And the new Google Chrome beta is the quickest and has the least cluttered screen (and apart from a minor issue with pdf links, I haven't found any problem with it yet). All three use the same bookmark toolbar, which is much superior to IE or Safari. They all use tabbed browsing, but I can’t get this to work properly on Firefox.
(Incidentally, don’t uninstal IE, that might cause problems as it’s integrated into the Windows system. Simply ignore it.)

Sorry I haven't given you links, but all the above names are googlable and will take you to a download link.

[Vièr Bliu]

Irfanview
http://www.irfanview.com
Graphic viewer/management program, Very useful for batch resizing/renaming, simple editing, cropping etc.
Wouldn't be without it.

CoffeeCup Free HTML editor
http://www.coffeecup.com/
Not bad for a simple editor. I now do most of my basic HTML coding in CoffeeCup (I use another program for some specialised twiddly bits)

[Ajarn Philip]

From someone who knows whereof he speaks (not me)...

It changes rapidly and not always easy to get an unbiased review but I spent half a day trawling through the reviews last month and Bitdefender was consistently the best in benchmark tests.

Avoid the all singing all dancing internet security suites.

The best free AV packages were Avast and Antvir, which both came in ahead of many of the traditional favourites. They both have good malware detection built in.

Here is a recent survey result http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2008/09_02

Norton I'm afraid is way down the list but I read an article that stated that Symantec have recognised its bad reputation and have addressed all the problems in the 2009 edition which has just been released. As you will see though the user rating is poor so far.

You can get a 15 day trial from

http://www.download.com/Norton-AntiViru ... 92477.html

Avast from http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

Antvir from http://www.free-av.com/en/download/index.html

They both have slightly annoying interfaces but you get used to them.

[J.R.]

As I have stated on another thread, we have gone over to Avast.

[Vièr Bliu]

Aaaarrrrr! Cap'n J.R. be right, he be, mateys. Avast do make scurvy viruses walk the plank.

[michael scuffil]

I recommend SyncToy, too. It synchronizes selected folders across different storage media. The way I use it is as follows.

I have an external hard drive on which I keep a copy of all my own files. I keep it in a quite different place from my computer and update it weekly. However, "My documents" contains about 20,000 files. So I either have to copy all of them, which takes ages, or remember what I have changed, and copy them individually, which also takes ages and is unreliable. The first option has the additional disdavantage of hanging when it encounters a defective file; then you don't know what's been copied and what not, and you have to start again.

SyncToy compares the source folder with the target folder, identifies new and changed files, and adds only them (ie adds new ones, overwrites changed ones). In my case, about 150 a week instead of 20,000. Also, if a defective file is encountered, it simply ignores it and tells you that files XYZ couldn't be copied.