Useful Programs

[buttsie]

A work in progress

"The 2009 Defrag Shootout, and all the defragmentation utilities I can find

The 2009 Defrag Shootout is now under way, and results are posted as they come in. It takes time to get these results, because testing is done on Windows XP, Windows Vista 32-bit and Vista 64-bit environments, and numerous tests are carried out. Windows 7 testing will be added only once the final product actually ships"(October 22/2009)

http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/...otout-all.html

previous freeware winner september 2007
http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/...efrag-v38.html


Another up to date list of the best freeware
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best...fragmenter.htm

[Darth Incubus]

Duplicate Cleaner
For Windows 98,ME,2000,XP, Vista

I find Duplicate Cleaner to be a must for removing duplicate files. The program is by DigitalVolcano and is unlimited freeware.

Download Link

Here's a quick summary of my evaluation of the program:

• Images
  You should probably always search by content (CRC) for pictures but can choose to limit that to those with the same file name or open it up to any file name. Multiple folders can be selected to be scanned.

• Clips
  For video clips, I find screening with a search by size only is the best (and quickest) way to make sure the latest file I downloaded isn't a duplicate of one I already have on my external hard drive -- but a quick check of the first few seconds of the clip is a must. I've yet to find a program that allows matching by clip duration -- so limited as it is this is the best screen I've found.

• MP3
  It can also scan mp3 files by title, artist, and album and any combination thereof. You have to be very careful with generically named files, but I've found matches that have specific names to be reliable.

• Selection Assistant
  The most valuable part of the program to me is that it has a file selection wizard to choose the member(s) of each duplicate pair (or set) in which you can select by part of the path string (with * as a wildcard you can often use just a single word) or part of the filename (same wildcard options).

NOTE: If anyone has a program that would facilitate sorting clips for duplicates when they are not exact duplicate files, I'd love to hear it. Right now I do that the old fashioned way -- by viewing every clip in a given folder. A freeware duplicate finder that has a context menu link would be killer too.

[Darth Incubus]

Link200
For Windows 98 / ME / 2K / XP / 2K3 / Vista

I have bookmark folders that date back to the 1990's, so there are frequently a lot of errors to be found. To cull those I've found that Link200 is both easy and fairly thorough. The program is by a web design company called Veign is unlimited freeware.

• Running the Program
  The whole process of identifying and deleting dead links is wizard driven. The program makes two passes to double check links that failed the first pass -- this takes a good bit of time but runs O.K. in the background. I do go over the list to be sure that there aren't any false positives. I also keep any that are really important so that I can update them later. The rest go in the trash.

• Firefox 3.5
  The comments on Download.com include one user who claims that it doesn't work with Firefox 3, but I'm running Firefox 3.5 and it has been quite stable for me.

• Internet Explorer
  I've had intermittent problems with accessing IE8 favorites, but the most recent update of IE8 and IEPro7 remedied the problem.

• Empty Folders!
  Unfortunately the program does NOTHING about empty bookmark/favorite folders. For IE I use a (non-freeware) utility program that detects and deletes empty folders. For Firefox I use an experimental plug-in detailed below.

Download Link for Link200

NOTE:
For Firefox 3.5 I use an experimental plug-in called CheckPlaces by Andy Halford which catches the dead links that Link200 misses and lets me delete any empty bookmark folders.

I can't recommend it for anything other than folder deletion yet as it generates a bit more in the way of false positives than Link200. Unfortunately it does NOT run well in the background like Link200 and even hangs up at the very end sometimes. Fortunately, if you cancel the scan you still get the results generated to that point and can select which ones you want to delete. I'll be posting CheckPlaces plug-in in the The Firefox and Extension Thread as soon as it is no longer experimental.

RE: Duplicate Cleaner

Originally Posted by mvasilj

Fantastic find Darth Incubus, Just tried it and managed to find just over 2 gig of duplicate files. I'll recommend it to anybody that is running out of HDD space, well done Darth Incubus

It's clean reinstall time for the laptop and the desktop in Inky's House of Tatoos, so I'm cleaning out a lot files as well as downloading updated versions of my favorite programs. Do you think a thread on how to organize one's collection would be a good idea? Finding duplicate pictures, clips, and music files come to mind right off the bat, and I've found some decent programs for each -- but a good portion of them aren't freeware and thus don't belong in this thread.

I just haven't been here long enough to be sure such a thread topic is appropriate.

[Sandy Claws]

DVD Flick is a free program that converts most files into dvd format, and gives title screens and menus from 6 different templates. If you know a little bit about what you are doing you can change the templates in any way you like to make your own style of titles and menus.

DVD Flick:
http://www.dvdflick.net/

Guide:
http://www.dvdflick.net/guide/index_en.html

[bsluub]

Nice simple piece of freeware not unlike previously mentioned Audacity.Use it to clip join *change pitch and add reverb to sound files - a great little tool.

http://download.cnet.com/Wavosaur/30...-10632135.html
http://www.wavosaur.com/

[Jism Jim]

Recent versions of Virtualdub accept plugins to open more file formats, like WMV, Mpeg2, Flv or Mov:

http://www.virtualdub-fr.org/

[spitalhouse]

This is a little-known patch designed mainly for convenience and for those who don't feel comfortable making manual changes to their computer's registry.

As those of you who use DVD43 will be aware, once installed it loads itself at start-up and runs continually in the background even if you don't need it to. You can of course exit the program by right-clicking on the system tray smiley, but it will still load again at next boot. This patch gives you the option of preventing DVD43 from running automatically.

Just click on the dvd43disableonstartup.reg patch to apply it to your system. Once applied the patch will allow you to launch DVD43 manually - the smiley icon will then load in the system tray as usual. To end the program right click on the system tray smiley and choose Exit from the context menu.

There is also a patch included - dvd43enableonstartup.reg - which will undo the changes made by the original patch.

I hope you will find this useful.

Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=3...e6ba49b5870170

Regards.

[Shirtfull]

On the subject of backups, here is a catologuer that helps keep track of files on dvd backups.
MyLib
http://linesoft.org/en/downloads/

[Sebastian Weetabix]

Debut Video Capture Software - excellent (and free) piece of kit.

Download from:

http://www.nchsoftware.com/capture/index.html

[prof_derzshowitz]

Originally Posted by zushiomaru

have this, hate it's guts(so to speak),i want CBR back!!
that's ComicBookReader, for all my Hentai & not-so-legal comic downloads..

anyone has a link or RS link?

Thanx in advance,
can't do any reading without...

Here is a link to the SourceForge website for CDisplayEx (http://cdisplayex.sourceforge.net/), a free, open source .cbr and .cbz reader based on the original CDisplay program.

In order to view a .cbr comic book archive, simply double click on a .cbr file, and it will open in the reader (i.e. CDisplayEx). To create a .cbr containing a set of images, create a .rar archive of the pictures, and then change the 3 letters of the newly-created archive's file extension from ".rar" to ".cbr".

It is also possible to sequentially view the jpegs contained in any regular folder (i.e. without having to create a .cbr archive) by launching the program, right clicking anywhere on the grey screen which appears, selecting "FILE", and then selecting "Open Folder" (at which point you would browse and open the folder containing the images you wish to view).