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Archive for the ‘System Utilities’ Category

Since everyone else is listing their favorite apps for 2009, I thought I would go ahead and throw in my .02 cents worth. There’s tons of good software out there, but this is the list of stuff I pretty much use everyday. I use these at home and at work.

Writing/Publishing
Microsoft OneNote 2007
Microsoft LiveWriter
Notepad++
Wordpress

I obviously use Wordpress on a daily basis for my blogs and Live Writer is one of the best tools for publishing articles. It might be a couple years old now but OneNote is one of the handiest apps I’ve used in a long time. Grabbing notes from the web and compiling research is a breeze with it. And Notepad++ is the best plain text editor out there.

Graphics
Corel Paint Shop Pro X2
Adobe Lightroom 2
Irfanview
FastStone Image Viewer

These are the graphics apps I use pretty much every day. Irfanview is my primary viewer and FastStone is a great folder viewer. For simple editing PSP is so easy to work with and Lightroom is amazing when it comes to working with photos.

Internet
Firefox 3
Digsby
Roboform
Internet Privacy Pro
Firebug
Web Developer Toolbar
Feedreader 3
Dropbox

Firefox is my choice in browser since it gets updated every few weeks versus the years it takes Microsoft to update IE. Digsby has become my choice for IM client since it connects to multiple services at one time and has tons of features. I really can’t live without Roboform these days. I now have hundreds of logins stored in it (and I have it on the iPod too!). Internet Privacy Pro cleans up all the cookies and left over temp files while Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar let me debug web pages with ease. Everybody working on the web is using Firebug aren’t they? I would be totally lost without Feedreader. Not only can it fetch the latest articles from RSS feeds, but it can scans the web looking for articles that match my specific keyword search. And finally there’s Dropbox which is an incredibly easy way to sync files across multiple machines. I use it all everyday to sync my OneNote files between work and home. I can find articles, paste links for sites, work on Word docs or drop files I need to work on in the folder and they’re always available. Very cool and totally free.

Media
AnyDVD
CloneDVD
CloneDVDMobile
Handbrake

AnyDVD is the only way to get your DVDs on to your media center. CloneDVD just makes it all the easier. CloneDVDMobile gets DVDs onto my iPod with just a couple of clicks and Handbrake makes it easy to convert my AVIs to MP4s so I can play them on the iPod. Handbrake can convert from DVD to MP4, but my machine hasn’t had much luck with it.

Utilities
Windowblinds
ObjectDesktop
7-Zip
O&O DiskImage
O&O MediaRecovery

Windowblinds and ObjectDesktop offer tons of tools and enhancements to Windows. Make it look better, make apps easier to launch, tweak the settings and clean up the desktop. Some of it’s just for fun, but there is still a lot of power in the tools they make.

7-Zip is a great open source way to handle Zip and Rar files. For backups and file recovery, O&O makes some of the best tools out there. They’re small and fast and do a great job of imaging drives and finding lost/damaged files.

New Graphics Apps
DxO 6
Artisteer

These are some new apps I’m trying out this year. I got DxO at version 4 and thought it was pretty good, but seriously lacked some camera support. Version 6 seems to pick up the slack and offer lots of new cameras and bodies, as well as new features for adjusting pictures. I got it for a great price so I’m willing to give this new version another chance.

Artisteer is a new app I bought for making Wordpress themes. For the most part I have been very impressed with it. I made a bunch of themes for Halloween and even a couple for Christmas. Making themes is incredibly easy, but it does have a cookie cutter sort of feel to it. It’s a little on the expensive side, but it let’s me swap out themes whenever I want without having to spend hours searching the web. Plus, the code is easily modified so I can make adjustments where I see fit.

Like I said, this isn’t every software program I use, that list would be unruly, but these represent the apps I use all the time. When I build a new machine these are the first apps to go on. I’m sure some of you are using a few of them yourselves. If you’ve got a favorite app, let me know, I’m always on the lookout for useful utilities.

I remember this tool from several years ago and quite frankly it’s something that should be built directly into Windows. It’s a multi-threaded file copy program that can efficiently handle thousands of files and poor connections. The main thing is that it won’t get stuck on a single big file while other, smaller files are waiting to be copied.

Right now I’m using it to copy 250+GB of pictures to a secondary location. Using normal Windows it would copy one file at a time. With RichCopy it copies three at a time. It’s moving right along to try and make sure I don’t lose any more information because of the chaos Western Digital has caused.

If you haven’t looked into RichCopy it’s worth investigating. It’s a free tool that can speed up the copy process and be used as a sync tool as well since it does a file compare before taking action. Plus, it’s free. Again, this should be part of Windows and ironically it’s written by Microsoft, or at least a developer within Microsoft.

If you want to learn more you can read the article about it here:
Utility Spotlight – RichCopy
Or if you want to go for broke and just download it, click here:

RichCopy is a free utility that comes to us from Ken Tamaru of Microsoft. The tool was first developed in 2001 and has been updated regularly to keep pace with evolving needs. Trust me when I tell you, this is the answer to all your file copying needs. What you’ll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it’s a multithreaded copying tool. That means that rather than copying one file at a time in serial order, RichCopy can open multiple threads simultaneously, allowing many files to be copied in parallel and cutting the total time required to complete the operation several times over. You can also pause and resume file copy operations, so if you lose network connectivity at any point, you can just pick up where you left off.

Either I’m having really bad luck or Western Digital is making crap drives. Just before Halloween I bought a new 1TB drive to replace the 500GB that failed. If you recall I have two Western Digital 500GB drives that mirror each other with all my pictures stored on them. Since I can’t replace these files I needed to get my backup in place and dupes of all the files. Now that I have dupes of the files my other Western Digital 500GB has decided to call it quits. The drive is throwing delayed write errors and the Event Log looks like a stuck pig full of red event errors.

Now it’s not like the drive has been pleading for help for weeks and I’ve just turned a blind eye to the situation. The drive literally started throwing errors a few hours ago and now it’s unreadable by Windows. Plus, I got the drive in October 2007 so the damn thing is just barely past two years old. Additionally I haven’t been using that machine very much this past year so the drive quite literally has only a few hours of actual use on it.

To put it bluntly I’m f@$king furious with Western Digital right now. The odds of two drives failing that close together are astronomical, but yet they did. And I can only count my blessings for getting a new drive and copying the files over before the other piece of $hit failed tonight. I was right on the cusp of losing four years worth of digital photos. Every single picture I’ve taken is on those drives. I thought a mirror would be the most practical way of having a backup. In this case it actually did work, but the backup is only as good as the drives themselves and from where I sit Western Digital drives are pieces of junk and can’t be trusted.

Suffice it to say that is the last Western Digital drive I’m ever going to buy and I will never recommend one to anyone ever again. Had the drives been five or six years old with thousands of hours on them this might make sense. But they’re not. Two years old and minimum usage hardly explains what’s happened.

I’m running a check on the drive that Windows can still partially access, although I’m not sure why since I can’t trust the drive and won’t ever put anything important on it. They’re nothing more than fancy paperweights with pretty blue and green flashing buttons on them.

As I write this I’m copying my files to a non Western Digital drive so I will once again have two copies. I really can’t believe these two pieces of crap failed this close together. Maybe the internal drives are better, but I’m never getting a WD MyBook or another version ever again. Having a mirror of my images definitely saved me, but this goes to show you your backups are only as good as the drives they sit on.

Western Digital, you suck.