Applications & Utilities
| Driver | Comments | Version | Size | Available |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| System Restoration / Integrity Verification | ||||
| Ad-Aware SE Personal | Ad-Aware is one program that I consider almost essential for any user. It removes uneccesary spyware from your computer like tracking cookies and software that, once installed, starts downloading and installing more junk. The other popular free alternative is Spybot Search and Destroy but I have not had any personal experience of this program so I'm unable to comment on it's effectiveness. However, Ad-Aware has always impressed me and helped to keep my computer cleaner! | 1.06 | 2.7 MB |  |
| Antivir | Antivir is an anti-virus program but the difference is that it is completely free for personal use. It supports all the popular versions of Windows. Don't be fooled by its sometimes amateurish look. It is a solid anti-virus program and I personally think it is better than some of the bigger commerical packages like F-Secure. I've never had any problems with it conflicting with other software and it is updated regularly. I have not made the program available from this website since it gets updated frequently. I would also like to say that I would usually recommend AVG Free, however Antivir, on this occasion wins out because I'm led to believe that it can be run without installation (Although you will have to install on at least one PC to be able to copy the files you need) | 6.32 | 8.45 MB | |
| Black | Black allows you to lock out your PC to other users. Once run the program will display a black screen, a screen capture of the current screen or a picture of your choice. The PC will then be unusable until the correct password is given. Neat utility, very easy to use and better, in my opinion, than using the windows screensaver. This program is probably unecessary for those who use Windows NT, 2000 or XP since those versions of Windows already have a built in "Lock Workstation" feature. | 1.16 | 155 KB | |
| Clonespy | CloneSpy is a program for finding and removing duplicate files on your computer. One common application I've found for this is if you have a digital camera and are as disorganized as I am then you may find that you download the same images from your camera multiple times then rename them. Not only can CloneSpy find files with the same name but it can also find duplicates with the same content but different names. There are also other search patterns and the program is highly customizable. I have not tried any alternative programs so I can't really recommend any alternatives. | 2.11 | 608 KB |  |
| Disk Cleaner | This is a handy program to delete all manner of temporary files from your system. At its most basic of functionality it will delete temporary system files, temporary internet files, internet cookies and recent history information. A cool feature regarding the cookies is that you can specify certain cookies that should not be deleted which means that for some website the username text box is left in-tact with the username you entered before. Although Windows usually lets you delete these types of files, most of the time you have to go to several different locations to peform the job that Disk Cleaner does in one click. Great program for keeping your computer tidy and free of junk files that just take up space. One final point worth mentioning is that the program's cleaning capability can be expanded by writing an easy text-based plugin for a given application. | 1.5.7 | 363 KB | |
| Memory & CPU Observer | MCO, as it is dubbed by the authors, is a simple tool for monitoring processor, memory and network usage. Furthermore, if your motherboard supports it, MCO can also monitor the fan speeds and temperature of your computer (among other things). This is a nice compact program that does what it is supposed to with the minimum of fuss. As an aside the program alsoa number of visual customizations (I wouldn't quite call it skinning but close). I think this program is portable (i.e. it doesn't store settings in the registry) but if you don't care about that sort of thing and need a tool to monitor your system then I highly recommend StatBar as a alternative. | 2.3 | 360 KB | |
| Orphan Remover | Although the name is slightly cryptic you can probably make a good guess as to the purpose of this program. It is to get rid of all those eroneous shortcuts that get left behind when you remove software. This isn't going to turbo boost your system but at least it will make your menu's as stream-lined as possible. A similar program called, Start Menu Cleaner is also equally as good at this task but I prefer Orphan Remover simply because it is actively being developed. As far as I know, this is not the case with Start Menu Cleaner. | 1.7 | 697 KB | |
| RAMpage | RAMpage is useful for Windows versions 95, 98 and ME, which are notorious for poor memory management. Some people have reported that it also works well for Windows 2000 and XP, but my experience of those operating systems is that they do a much better job at memory management. However, for earlier incarnations of Windows, it is often the case that when you open and close applications, if they do not release the memory they were using, neither does Windows. This program will attempt to free up memory that is being needlessly consumed. It can be done either on demand or on the basis of some threshold/limit e.g. if the level of free memory falls to 5 megabytes then attempt to free x amount of memory. I have found two excellent programs that do this really well (Rampage being one of them) and the other is Rambooster. The only reason that I favour RAMpage over Rambooster is because of an option that you have of running RAMpage completely invisible from the user and fully automated. This consumes slightly less memory and other resources and thus makes it more efficient. Additionally, if you feel the need to run such a program in the first place then chances are that your computer is constantly running low on resources anyway, so naturally you want to minimize the amount of resources being taken up by extra programs. Despite this very minor advantage of RAMpage over Rambooster, both programs are truly superb at what they do so the choice is purely personal preference. As a small aside, Rambooster has recently (end of 2005) been updated to version 2 after a couple of years of seemingly no activity, which is encouraging. | 1.06 | 169 KB | |
| RegSeeker | I use RegSeeker primarily for the registry cleanup feature although it does
offer other usual tools. For example it allows you to modify some of the hidden
settings for Windows like whether or not Windows remembers the state of the numlock
key, which might not sound like a great deal but I use the numeric pad a lot and it's
just plain annoying to have to press the numlock key every time Windows loads... now, thanks
to RegSeeker I don't have to. RegSeeker can also show you other useful information like
what startup entries there are in the registry (i.e. what programs load automatically
when Windows starts up). Another, comparable registry cleanup tool is
TweakNow, which has the nice feature of
highlighting potentially dangerous to tamper with entries, so that you can avoid
fatal disasters. Finally, a very nice cleanup program in general (which, of course,
features a registry cleaner) is EasyCleaner
and it is also free. I've heard good things about it although I've never really tried it myself.
NOTE: I no longer recommend or have available for download the RegClean program from Microsoft. According to Microsoft themselves the program is no longer supported, nor available for download from their website. I read somewhere (and for the life of me cannot find it) that Microsoft ditched RegClean because it created more problems than it fixed! I kid you not. |
1.45 | 344 KB | |
| System Info for Windows | This is one of the most comprehensive system information tools you could ever wish for. What it doesn't include isn't worth mentioning, in fact there might not be anything that it doesn't include. You can view various information about hardware and software, including registration keys of certain programs like Windows itself. It also has a few built-in tools like CPU usage, network usage, Windows password file cracker and a password revealer (for passwords behind asterisks). This is an amazing portable tool (No installation required) and one of the best of its kind. At first I didn't realize that WinAudit offers the same sort of information since it is billed more as a software auditing tool but it also displays information on hardware. As far as I'm concerned it's not as complete as SIW but it is good never-the-less. One tool that is more aimed at software auditing (although it still features some hardware information) is Belarc Advisor and it is free for personal use. | 1.55 | 1.22 MB | |
| ZoneAlarm | ZoneAlarm is a firewall which basically manages and restricts Internet traffic to and from your computer. In this day and age of identity theft, virii and general digital anti-social behaviour a firewall is considered a must, even for those using dial-up connections. I've been using ZoneAlarm for years without any issues, it does what it is supposed to do with the minimum of fuss. Although Windows XP has a built-in firewall, many people claim that it is pretty lax and would recommend using an external firewall, which gives you greater control over what your computer sends and receives over the Internet. There are some alternative free firewalls but I've never used any of them. The name which pops up most frequently is probably Sygate Personal Firewall from Symantec but it seems that they are discontinuing this product. The only other half decent alternative I could come up with is SoftPerfect Personal Firewall, which is currently freeware. | 61.737 | 10 MB | |
| Data Preservation / Recovery | ||||
| CD Check | Both CD Check and CheckFolder serve one purpose; to check the integrity of files and folders. Commonly, you will use this on CDR/RWs that you've burnt to check that they are ok. This isn't the sort of tool that I use every day but it's pretty handy to have lying around. | 3.1.9.0 | 1.37 MB | |
| Freebyte Backup | Freebyte Backup is yet another great piece of software from FreeByte Software. As the name suggests it's a backup tool, with its strength in ease-of-use and portability (no need to install the program just run from its current folder). On the downside it doesn't seem to support zip the archived files which means that you cannot reduce the overall size of your backup. Essentially, you will just be making a copy of your files. If this suits your needs then go ahead and download it, but if you want a more comprehensive tool then I would suggest the excellent Syncback Freeware edition, which not only performs backups but also true sychronizations of multiple locations. Although that you should note that SyncBack is not portable. | 2.4 | 381 KB | |
| Restoration | Restoration is a handy tool to undelete files that you acidentally deleted. It can recover files that I have been removed from the Recycle Bin or even files that have bypassed the Recycle Bin (with a SHIFT + CLICK). It is important to note that the success of this tool depends on disk activity since the target files were deleted; the more activity the lower the chance of a successful restoration. I've used this program once to recover a document that I accidentally deleted and it worked great; another disaster averted! I've also found another similar tool called DataRecovery. It even has a very similar graphical user interface! | 2.5.14 | 162 KB | |
| Data Transformation | ||||
| Freebyte Zip | This is a simple zip/unzip utility with a straight-forward graphical user interface. If you don't like the idea of adding entries to the Windows Explorer shell context menu (right click menu) then this could be the tool for you. I find it interesting that although Windows XP has built-in support for Zip files most people still prefer to use a separate application. FreeByte Zip is portable and has all the standard features you'd expect. I don't actually use FreeByte Zip, I prefer to have a more extensive tool that has support for multiple formats like rar, arj and the increasingly popular 7-zip. For that I reason I like to use Izarc, which doesn't seem as unecessarily bloated as some of the commericial compression tools. Another tool that shows promise is QuickZip, although I haven't personally tried this one. | 2.3 | 351 KB | |
| FreeCommander | FreeCommander is a replacement for the standard Windows Explorer but boasts a whole host of useful features (Note that Windows Explorer doesn't go away but it is just assumed that you will use this application in its place). It has a classic dual pane interface, which makes copying/moving files from one location to another a breeze. It also has built-in support for zip, rar and cab files, built-in hex and image viewer and many more features. As a bonus it is also portable. If it is too featured filled for you then another dual pane file manager that I found is Servant Salamander. It doesn't quite have as an extensive feature list as FreeCommander but it is still a pretty good program. | 0.9a | 1.55 MB | |
| Splitter & Merger | There are a huge number of file splitters available freely on the Internet. As Internet speeds increase the need to worry about large download sizes is not so much of a problem but every now and again it might be useful to split a large file into smaller pieces. To give a couple of practical examples, sending a large file via email can sometimes be painfully slow, by splitting a large file up, the resultant email will be faster for the recipient to download. Another situation in which you might want to split files is when using free web hosts, they sometimes set limits on the individual size of each file and you can get around this by splitting large files up. Now, I've tried a few file splitters but Splitter & Merger seems to be the one that most closely meets my requirements. For a starters you can create a exe file that will automatically re-assemble parts of a split file. The program is tiny, portable and it does the job it is supposed to very quickly. Another tool which is equally good is HJ Split. It gets a mention because of the number of platforms for which it is available (not just Windows). However, this is in part due to the fact that someone wanting to join parts of a split file must also have the small join program (and it is pretty small to be fair, usually only a few kilobytes). | 5.5 | 32 KB | |
| Data Interpretation / Modification | ||||
| FoxIt Reader | FoxIt reader is viewer for PDF files (Portable Document Format). It is a free alternative to Adobe's Acrobat Reader (Adobe originally devised the PDF standard). You might not think that you'd need a PDF reader but PDF files are fairly common place today because of their portability cross-platform. I really cannot express to you just how unadvisable it is to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. I provide a link to the website only for completeness but really this application has become worse and worse over the years. It has grown into a 27 megabyte-monster and I really can't fathom why a simple PDF reader needs to be so large (This takes "Bloatware" to whole new level... can you imagine Windows Notepad being 27MB. Worse still the requirements for Adobe Reader say that you need 100+ MB of hard disk space for the install; what the hell for?!?). Come on Adobe, get with the program; there are whole operating systems that are smaller than Acrobat Reader! In conclusion, there is no contest. Stick with FoxIt Reader, It does all that you'd require from a basic PDF viewer, without the need to allow a couple of days for the application to open. | 1.3 | 1.18 MB | |
| Irfan View | Irfan View is a picture/multi-media viewer. It allows you to quickly view images in hundreds of different formats, play certain types of movie files or listen to some types of audio files. It also has some basic image manipulation tools like crop, rotate, resize/resample (excellent results from this feature) and some basic filters like sharpen and blur. Furthermore, it has a built-in thumbnail viewer which can be used to generate HTML thumbnails, it batch tool for modifying a set of images or renaming a set of files and a built-in screen capture tool. There are also many more features that I couldn't possibly list here but if you regularly work with images then this is a tool worth checking out. I've been using it for a few years and it is still one of the best. XnView Is a popular alternative to Irfan View and it too supports many image formats. I've never used but it looks a very polished product ,from the screenshots I've seen, with many features comparable to Irfan View. | 3.98 | 884 KB | |
| PaintStar | PaintStar is an excellent image editing program complete with all the features you would expect from a larger and more comprehensive image editing program such as Photoshop. It supports various image types including BMP,JPG and GIF (as well as it's own file format). It has support for layers and paths, plus all the regular drawing and selection tools. | 2.70 | 2.57 MB | |
| System Tray Play (STP) | STP is a great portable MP3 player, featuring a minibar and easy play back of
entire folders of MP3s. Sadly, as mentioned, it is no longer being developed
but it is still a quality peice of freeware. If you prefer something not quite
so minimalist then XMPlay seems to come highly
recommended, with many people claiming that its sound quality is superior to that of
the mighty WinAmp. For what it's worth, I still like
WinAmp a lot and it is my installed audio player of choice.
It appears that STP is no longer being developed and the link given to the homepage has been inactive for some time. It is only given here for completeness, should it ever become active again. |
FINAL | 208 KB | |
| XVI32 | XVI32 is probably one of the most popular hex editors around; it even got a mention on a Microsoft knowledgebase page. It has all the standard functions you would expect from a hex editor including search and replace, edit the hex or text, character conversions and support for large files (up to 2 GB). As another plus, it is completely portable and doesn't write any settings to the registry. Excellent program. If you are into multi-purpose programs then the excellent programers editor PSPad , features not only syntax highlighting for multiple programming languages but also has a built-in hex editor. It is well worth checking out if you need a program editor. | 2.51 | 493 KB | |
| Data Transfer / Exchange | ||||
| Baby Web Server | As the name suggests Baby Web Server is a tiny web server that allows you to host web pages on your local computer. It is a portable application and can be run from any directory. It is very easy to use and if you are casual web developer then it can be a handy tool for testing your latest creations. Considering its size, it's a fairly robust server. Another small server worth mentioning is BRS WebWeaver. The only reason I chose Baby Web over Web Weaver is because Web Weaver needs to be installed. On the plus side it also features a built-in anonymous FTP server (See below if you require a more extensive FTP server) | 2.7.2 | 90 KB | |
| FileZilla | Filezilla is an open source FTP client that allows you to upload/download files to FTP sites. These days, with Peer 2 Peer file sharing programs, use of FTP is limited but one common area you will (usually) still need to a decent FTP client is when uploading files to your website (assuming you don't have some web-based solution). FileZilla is about the best client I've found, free or otherwise. I used to use CuteFTP but that isn't free and FileZilla certainly has all the features of CuteFTP. If FileZilla seems overly complicated to you (and I don't think that it really should be) then another alternative is iFTP from memecode. It is also portable but only takes up about 900 KB on disk. | 2.2.18 | 3.32 MB | |
| HTTP File Server (HFS) | HFS allows you to share your files using the Hyper Text Markup Protocol or HTTP, used primarly to host the web pages that you see on the Internet. The great thing about this program is that your targets users for your shared files shouldn't have any problems with firewalls and/or routers blocking the connection because it is based on HTTP. It is very easy to use and files are shared by simply dragging and dropping on the HFS window. Once the HFS server is active users goto the IP address of your computer, on the port specified (port 80 is the default and standard web server port) then they will be greated with a webpage, with links to all the files available to download. Once great part about HFS is that users don't need any special software to download the files, just a standard web browser. Another program which offers a more direct is File Gateway. It is a classic client/server application that allows users to send files over a direct connection. It is a small download and works well, if HFS is not for you. | 1.6a | 419 KB | |
| OffByOne | OffByOne is probably one of the smallest complete browsers you can find for Windows. It does NOT need Microsoft's Internet Explorer engine to render HTML pages, nor does it have any other major dependancies for that matter. If you don't require Secure Socket Layer support then you can run this browser off of a floppy disk! It features tabbed browsing, blocking of images (for faster downloading of web pages) and can easily be set to leave no traces of browsing on host PC. If OffByOne is a bit too lightweight for you, and you're fed up with Internet Explorer, then I would recommend K-Meleon or FireFox, which are both based on the Gecko Mozilla rendering engine. Both of these browsers have a wealth of features, not found in Internet Explorer, like tabbed browsing and cookie management. Furthermore, they both have portable versions available for download so that you can take your web browser on the move where-ever you go. | 3.5d | 986 KB | |
| TypSoft FTP Server | This free FTP server has it all; creation of users with custom levels of read/write access to defined directories, virtual directories, activity statistics of current users online etc. etc. The last packaged release was 1.10 but make sure you download the updated executable that fixes a minor bug. If you find this program a bit confusing (and I admit that it can be a bit daunting at first) then you might prefer to use Quick 'n Easy FTP Server Lite, although note that this lite version has certain features missing like virtual directories, disk quotas and activity statistics of online users. | 1.11 | 473 KB | |
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