Symform offers 200GB free cloud storage
Online backup services have traditionally been all about storing files from lots of users in a single, large data centre. Which is fine, but can be expensive, as there’s a lot of costly infrastructure to maintain.
Symform takes a more distributed approach, spreading its data around the hard drives of other Symform users. And with that meaning the service is more about managing this distribution than the data itself, the company can offer you up to 200GB of cloud storage space at no cost at all.
FolderChangesView tracks file changes in real time
Your hard drive is buzzing, and you don’t know why. Finding out what’s going on is probably a good idea: at best a legitimate program is tying up resources and slowing you down, at worst you’ve got a malware infection. But what do you do now?
Launching FolderChangesView, the latest release from NirSoft, could be a good first move.
Looking for an affordable, compatible Excel alternative? Try Gnumeric
If you’re looking to equip your PC with a free spreadsheet, then your first thought will probably be to download one of the open-source Office competitors: OpenOffice, maybe, or LibreOffice.
But if you prefer something a little more lightweight then there’s an interesting alternative in the GNOME Project’s Gnumeric.
Live Capture grabs the grub from your PC's screen
Most PC users need to capture an image of their screen from time to time, and Windows’ ability to grab the full screen and active window will usually be enough. Opting for a specialist screen grabber can give you considerably more options, though, and the open source Live Capture is a particularly good example.
The program allows you to draw a rectangular (or freehand) area you’d like to capture, for instance. It can grab the contents of a fixed area of the screen. There’s an option to grab a program menu, and the Window Control Capture tool makes it easy to grab specific elements of a window: a toolbar, say, or the folder tree in Explorer.
Menu Uninstaller Lite makes removing apps a whole lot easier
Uninstalling a program within Windows can take a little work. You might have to head off to Control Panel, find the “Uninstall a program” applet, wait for it to display (which can take a few seconds in itself on some systems, as Windows calculates “disk space used” figures and more), then find and double-click your unwanted application.
Menu Uninstaller Lite could make your life a little simpler, though. Once installed removing any program is as easy as right-clicking its shortcut, selecting the new Uninstall option and confirming your decision. Menu Uninstaller will then find and launch its regular uninstall application, which will remove it as usual.
Use ImDisk to mount ISO images as virtual discs
One of the plus points of Windows 8 is that it can natively mount an ISO image as a virtual disk, allowing you to browse it without requiring a physical disc. If you’d like to have that ability right now, though, there’s no need to wait -- the free ImDisk provides capable ISO handling and a whole lot more.
If you’d like to take a closer look at an ISO file, for instance, then right-click it, select “Mount as ImDisk Virtual Drive” > OK, and in a few seconds the image will be available within Explorer as a new virtual drive. (The program supports NRG images, too.)
Local Website Archive easily saves the pages you need most
When carrying out research online you may often find important pages that you’d like to save, and of course you might do this by simply clicking File > Save from your browser. The results can be a little messy, though, with files and folders scattered everywhere, and reviewing the pages later might be difficult.
Local Website Archive tries to help by storing the pages for you. There’s no need to worry about file names or folders -- the program can handle all of that -- and when you’re done you’ll have a neatly presented archive of pages, which is far easier to browse and search.
MailWasher 2012 Free cleans up the spam
FireTrust has today revealed MailWasher 2012 Free, a new version of its popular spam filter. The latest release will provide all the features of the full commercial MailWasher Pro edition for its first 10 days of use, but after that introduces four main restrictions.
There’s no Recycle Bin, which means you can’t browse or restore deleted emails. Preview options are limited, so it may be more difficult to manually determine whether a particular message is spam. Technical support is unsurprisingly reserved for paying customers. And, probably most crucially, the program will be limited to checking 1 email address only, perhaps a deal-breaker for many people.
Keep your hard drive in tip-top shape with Eassos PartitionGuru Free
Most free recovery tools focus on undeleting files only. As its name suggests, though, Eassos PartitionGuru Free goes a little further: the program can recover anything from individual files to entire partitions, and it has a few other useful features thrown in, too.
That’s the theory, at least. In practice the free edition of the program is a little restricted, and can’t recover data on USB keys, GPT disks, or regular drives which don’t use 512-byte sectors. If that’s not going to affect you, though, PartitionGuru does otherwise have some interesting functionality which you might find very useful.
Windows users, get a Firefox Australis sneak peak
It’s been public knowledge for a while now that Mozilla intends to provide a uniform interface for Firefox across all platforms. The aim of the Australis project is to ensure that the browser looks and feels the same just about everywhere (as much as possible, anyway), and you can read more at MozillaWiki.
This is no longer just theory, though. Jared Wein, a Software Engineer at Mozilla, has written a blog post with an image of the new Australis design (or the new curvy tab shape, anyway), which he says aims to bring “more customizability in a cleaner and fresher user interface”. And if that’s not enough, he’s also created a test Firefox 16.01 build so that you can view it for yourself.
Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 now supports Windows 8
Already one of our favorite free disk imaging tools, Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 Free has today been improved further via a maintenance upgrade.
The headline addition this time around is support for Windows 8. There is a wrinkle in the small print, where Paragon say “Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 Free edition has been tested on Windows 8 Developer Preview and Consumer Preview” -- so presumably if you’ve moved on to the latest Release Preview then there’s still the possibility of issues. (Although, to be fair, if you want guaranteed data security then you probably shouldn’t be using the buggy and unfinished Windows 8 in the first place.)
QuickMove automatically puts files where you want them
Is your hard drive a little messy, cluttered with files that aren’t where you’d like them to be? You’re not alone, and a part of the problem is that Windows really doesn’t make it very easy to clear up. No matter how many times you drag and drop a ZIP file into your Archives folder, say, Explorer never learns that’s where they’re kept, and so you have to move them there manually. Every. Single. Time.
Don’t give up just yet, though – help is at hand in the shape of QuickMove, a simple free tool which aims to speed up your file management. Teach the program where you’d like to keep particular files or file types and you’ll be able to move them all to their destination, in just a couple of clicks.
Camtasia Studio 8 for Windows and for Mac 2.2 add ease and power
TechSmith Corporation has released new editions of its flagship screen recording and video editing software, Camtasia Studio 8 for Windows ($299), and Camtasia for Mac 2.2 ($99). And this is no minor upgrade: the latest versions include some very substantial new features.
Flash and HTML5 support mean it’s now possible to add many new interactive elements to a video for instance. This could be as simple as providing a hotspot link to web content, but it’s also possible to ask the viewer questions in a variety of types (multiple choice, true/ false, “fill in the blank”, and more). TechSmith’s servers compile the answers and you’re emailed detailed reports on the results.
BabelPad opens unicode files in 60 character sets
At first glance text files may seem very easy to edit and display. After all, even Windows Notepad can handle the key basics. If you’ve ever tried to view or edit a Unicode file, though, one which uses a different character set to your own, then you’ll know it can be surprisingly difficult -- unless you turn to a specialist tool, like BabelPad.
As you’d expect, the program offers support for opening files in more than 60 encodings: Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more, they’re all here. So if you’re just looking for a way to display a file as the author intended, BabelPad will do the trick.
When Windows annoys with file 'in use', try LockHunter
It should be simple. All you want to do is copy, move, maybe delete a particular file. And yet Windows won’t allow it, complaining instead that the file is “in use”. It’s annoying, but don’t give up: LockHunter can help.
Once installed, a quick right-click displays a new “What is locking this file?” option, and if you choose this then LockHunter will pop up, telling you which process “owns” the file. Or that’s the idea, anyway -- the program would occasionally give odd results in our tests, though for the most part it worked just fine.
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