Recuva

Recuva Review

Recuva is a freeware Windows utility to recover files that have been deleted from a hard  drive, memory card or an MP3 player. Recuva is developed by Piriform, the same guys that made the famous CCleaner and Defraggler.

Installation and Setup

The setup and installation of Recuva take a matter of seconds, just choose your language, accept the license agreement,  choose destination folder and check/uncheck what features you want installed. A tip is to uncheck the Yahoo! Toolbar as toolbars aren’t that good in the long run.

Ease of Use

As you might see Recuva has a similar interface as CCleaner, quite user friendly in our opinion.

When you start Recuva a recovery wizard pops up. It guides you through the recovery process, letting you choose things like what sort of files you would like to recover and where to look for them. If you don’t know what to answers to that simply choose Show all files and  Search everywhere on this computer, this will make Recuva search for all recently deleted files and list them in the interface.

 

The above screenshot shows Recuva’s advanced view. Even if it’s advanced most users will understand the interface. It shows deleted files on the left side with an icon illustrating the state of that particular file. Green files are most likely to be recovered and red ones are most likely lost, but you should anyway run Recuva on the red files to. Just remember to save the recovered files on another harddrive/partition, this is to avoid a recovered file to overwrite a lost file. You can even use an external device to save the recovered files on.

Two versions of Recuva – both are free

There are two version of Recuva available on the authors website, one for normal installations and one for portable devices. So choose the one that will fit your needs, they do both provide the exact same features.

Download Recuva or the portable version of Recuva

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Google Earth

Google Earth Review

Ever wanted to view your house from a satellite? This is actually possible thanks to Google Earth, a program that is free for personal use. With Google Earth you can view 3D models of cities, view the weather or even use the flight simulator!

Description from Earth.Google.com:

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others.

You can use Google Earth for:

• Planning a trip
• Getting driving directions
• Finding a house or apartment
• Finding a local business
• Exploring the world
• Playing with the flight simulator

The system requirements to run Google Earth are:

• Operating System: XP, Mac OS X (10.3.9 +) or Linux
• CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+
• System Memory (RAM): 512MB
• Hard Disk: 2GB free space
• Network Speed: 768 Kbits/sec
• Graphics Card: 3D-capable with 32MB of VRAM
• Screen: 1280×1024, “32-bit True Color”

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7-Zip

  

7-Zip Review

Most people know about ZIP and RAR, two forms of compression that can make large files much smaller to make them easier to transfer over the net. It’s pretty impossible to use the net for long without running into a ZIP file, but about a 7-Zip file? If you’re curious, or if you’ve just downloaded a file that ends in .7z and want to know what’s going on – read on!

Installation and Setup

7-Zip will install in seconds and use only 3MB of space, which is perfect for a program that you’ll likely keep on your computer at all times. Idle, 7-zip uses virtually no resources, although it uses a fair about of CPU and RAM when it’s extracting or compressing files. This is to be expected though, and the program doesn’t use significantly more or less resources to work than any other leading compression programs.

Ease of Use

7-Zip – like most compression formats- make bigger files much smaller. It can also combine several files into a single file to make transferring them easier. For example, if you had two word documents, a presentation, 20 pictures and music file, you could convert all the files to the 7-Zip and come out with a single file that’s smaller than the others combined. That file can then be extracted later. The compression works best on things that haven’t already been compressed, so files like MP3 and JPG that already use compression won’t be reduced in size as much as others.

7-Zip offers a variety of features including Outlook integration, Password Protection and Multi Volume support. You can also integrate the program with Windows which means you can access the programs features through your right click menu in explorer rather than loading up the program each time.

The interface is nothing outstanding but the overall design of the program makes sense, and due to its integration features you’ll likely be using the program combined with Windows rather than on a standalone basis, at any rate.

Various sites around the world offer files compressed with 7-Zip, so why not give it a go?

Download 7-Zip Today!

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Notepad++

 

 Notepad++ Review

Installation and Setup

Notepad++ comes with .zip and .exe setup options, although we advise using the installer rather than unzipping the program yourself. Installation is easy and you can customise which components and plugins to install, although most are selected by default. Due to the small size of the program – Notepad++ installs to around 6 MB – keeping all the plugins installed isn’t really a problem. Notepad++ has been designed with very low CPU usage in mind and its impact on system resources is indeed quite negligible.

Ease of Use

Notepad++ is the type of program you didn’t know you needed until you download it. It improves on the original Notepad in just about every way.

Notepad++ can keep up with a variety of plain text tasks, and is great for making quick edits or writing notes. Features like full zooming, auto complete and bookmarking all make using the program very easy. One of the nicest things about Notepad++ is what it doesn’t include, however. The program makes no attempt to be a fully featured Word replacement or editing software. Instead, it concentrates on a minimal interface, plugin based feature addons and simplicity backed up by some clever features.

One thing Notepad++’s feature set is especially geared towards is coding. The program has full colour-coded support for tons of languages and all the popular ones such as CSS, HTML and C++ are included. This makes it an excellent tool for people who prefer to hand code rather than use expensive editors. The coding options are easy to set up but don’t get in the way of casual users.

Because Notepad++ improves on the original concept of text software while getting nothing wrong at all, it’s impossible not to recommend it to anyone who even occasionally uses a text editing program.

Download Notepad++ Now!

 

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Defraggler

Defraggler Review

Piriform Defraggler is an application which allows you to defrag your drives that provides a far wider range of options and settings than Windows’ default defrag program.

Installation and Setup

Defraggler is made by Piriform, famous for registry and system cleaner, CCleaner. As anyone that has used this application will know, Piriform pride themselves on providing excellent and easy to use freeware applications with no ‘catch’. As such, the program installs simply and quickly, works on all modern version of Windows and takes up around 3MB of space fully installed.

Ease of Use

Defragging is a necessary evil for modern computer users. If your computer experiencing slow downs, particularly in accessing the hard drive, it can give you a noticeable speed increase. However, defragging programs tend to be either slow or inefficient like Windows own in-built application, or costly. Defraggler bucks the trend by being both 100% free and incredibly quick and easy to use.

The main ‘hook’ for Defraggler is that you don’t just have to defragment entire drives – once your drive has been analyzed you can choose to defrag individual files. This is a great time saving device and very useful if you have large hard drives where the vast majority of your files are not in need of any maintenance.

While defragmenting the program used between 250 and 300MB of RAM on our test computer – not bad considering the amount of work it takes to defrag a drive. Even better, the system is perfectly capable of running even when you are using the computer. Windows’ defrag system will quite often restart every single time a file is edited or accessed while it’s running. If nothing else, Defraggler is a cost free alternative to leaving your PC on all night to defrag files.

Our test system ran as normal while the program worked, but if you do want to set your system to defrag while you are away Defraggler’s simple scheduling options will allow you set this up.

In summary, Defraggler makes a somewhat arduous but necessary task so much easier that there’s very little reason not to keep the program installed.

Download Piriform Defraggler

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CCleaner

 

CCleaner Review

As you might know Windows has a tendency to get slower over time.

CCleaner is a tool designed to reduce this effect by deleting files that you don’t need and removing invalid entries in the registry. After running CCleaner you can expect to have a faster and more reliable computer, you’ll even get more disc space!

Lets start with the developers description of CCleaner:

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

Sounds good, right? Lets have a closer look on what CCleaner actually cleans:

Temp files and similar from the following applications:

• Internet Explorer
• Recycle Bin
• Clipboard
• Windows Temporary files
• Windows Log files
• Recent Documents (on the Start Menu)
• Run history (on the Start Menu)
• Windows XP Search Assistant history
• Windows XP old Prefetch data
• Windows memory dumps after crashes
• Chkdsk file fragments

Temporary files and recent file lists for the following applications:

• Firefox
• Opera
• Safari
• Media Player
• eMule
• Kazaa
• Google Toolbar
• Netscape
• Microsoft Office
• Nero
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR
• WinAce
• WinZip

and more…

You may also choose to clean:

• Menu Order cache
• Tray Notifications Cache
• Window Size and Location Cache
• User Assist history
• IIS Log Files
• Custom Folders

We do not recommend you choosing the last six them if you aren’t a advanced user

and know what you are doing.

What we think so far:

The list is long, but running CCleaner doesn’t take a lot of time. We have also experienced that we got more disc space to play with after deleting lots of temp files, if you have used your computer for

some time it isn’t unusual that CCleaner would delete several

gigabytes of crap. Remember to defrag your hard drive if this happens to you!

The registry cleaning:

CCleaner is designed from the ground to be safe and secure to use. It has

multiple levels of checks in place to ensure that it won’t delete any useful information or documents you may still need.

CCleaner is capable of cleaning the following entries from the registry:

• File Extensions
• ActiveX Controls
• ClassIDs
• ProgIDs
• Uninstallers
• Shared DLLs
• Fonts
• Help File references
• Application Paths
• Icons
• Invalid Shortcuts and more…

Our Conclusion:

We have been using CCleaner for several months now, and we think that CCleaner is getting better and better by every program update. Did we mention that CCleaner got a auto update function? There is a new CCleaner release every month so remember to update CCleaner!

Cleaner is fast in use as long as you choose just to delete files, but if you choose the safe file deletion it takes much longer time, but this is normal as the files are overwritten several times. For normal users we would recommend just using the normal deletions method, but if you want your temp files to really be deleted, then go ahead, use the secure file deletion.

The registry cleaner part of CCleaner is not the best registry cleaner out there, but it’s good enough for a normal Windows user. Remember that this piece of software is free! Available in 35 different languages.

Pros:

• Freeware
• Easy in use
• Fast
• Doesn’t delete needed files/entries

Cons:

• Not the best registry cleaner

Download CCleaner

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