Software Picks from FVCS

I love good, well thought out utilities and this qualifies. It wasn’t too long ago that a program to convert pdfs to another format cost several hundred dollars. Now for thirty dollars here is a VERY capable program to convert pdf files to numerous formats:

With PDFZilla you can:

Stuff you MUST know: The programs we describe are ones we use or have used and found them to be effective. Many of these are very powerful and could totally hose your computer!!

Obviously we would never, knowingly, suggest a faulty program, but there’s always that possibility. Just as there is a possibility of a virus or spyware lurking inside. Very honestly, I find the free stuff better, on average, than the commercial products, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

Just so everyone understands – many of these programs have the power to TOTALLY hose your system and we take NO responsibility for that!!

Freeware Picks from FVCS

We do a lot of data recovery and many times we’re told “there’s not much on the drive” and we proceed to pull 60 gigabytes or more! Windirstat is a wonderful utility that scans your entire drive and shows you where the space is going.

Generally, you will find that those pictures and videos are taking up a lot of space and invariably poorly written programs are leaving temporary droppings all over the place.

There are a number of programs that will tell you where, but WinDirStat is the best at helping you remove the unnecessary files.

Here’s our normal procedure:

1. Set a restore point – very important.
2. Run CrapCleaner and possibly Cleanup! to remove the junk files.
3. Run WindirStat and then see where the space is going.
4. Clean out the unnecessary files.
5. Defrag

Here’s the official feature table:

• The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
• The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
• The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.
• Coupling. Select an item in the directory list: The treemap highlights it; and vice versa.
• Zooming.
• Built-in cleanup actions including Open, Show Properties, Delete.
• User-defined cleanups (command line based).
• Works with network drives and UNC paths.
• ‘Create disk usage report’ option.
• ‘Submit bug report/Feedback’ option.
• Online help.
• setup.exe.
• Language can be set to Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Russian.

Stuff you MUST know: The programs we describe are ones we use or have used and found them to be effective. Many of these are very powerful and could totally hose your computer!!

Obviously we would never, knowingly, suggest a faulty program, but there’s always that possibility. Just as there is a possibility of a virus or spyware lurking inside. Very honestly, I find the free stuff better, on average, than the commercial products, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

Just so everyone understands – many of these programs have the power to TOTALLY hose your system and we take NO responsibility for that!!

Stuff you MUST know: The programs we describe are ones we use or have used and found them to be effective. Many of these are very powerful and could totally hose your computer!! Obviously we would never, knowingly, suggest a faulty program, but there’s always that possibility. Just as there is a possibility of a virus or spyware lurking inside.

Very honestly, I find the free stuff better, on average, than the commercial products, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

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Fragmentation is caused by creating and deleting files and folders, installing new software, and downloading files from the Internet. Computers do not necessarily save an entire file or folder in a single space on a disk; they’re saved in the first available space. After a large portion of a disk has been used, most of the subsequent files and folders are saved in pieces across the volume.

When you delete files or folders, the empty spaces left behind are filled in randomly as you store new ones. This is how fragmentation occurs. The more fragmented the volume is, the slower the computer’s file input and output performance will be.

Defragmentation is the process of rewriting non-contiguous parts of a file to contiguous sectors on a disk for the purpose of increasing data access and retrieval speeds. Because FAT and NTFS disks can deteriorate and become badly fragmented over time, defragmentation is vital for optimal system performance.

In June 1999 the ABR Corporation of Irvine, California, performed a fragmentation analysis and found that, out of 100 corporate offices that were not using a defragmenter, 50 percent of the respondents had server files with 2,000 to 10,000 fragments. In all cases the results were the same: Servers and workstations experienced a significant degradation in performance.

Stuff you MUST know: The programs we describe are ones we use or have used and found them to be effective. Many of these are very powerful and could totally hose your computer!! Obviously we would never, knowingly, suggest a faulty program, but there’s always that possibility. Just as there is a possibility of a virus or spyware lurking inside.

Very honestly, I find the free stuff better, on average, than the commercial products, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

Once more: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!