0 Small But Powerful Software

Hello there! Today, instead of talking about a single thing, I decided to make a small compilation of software which I think would be really handy to have installed. You can pick whichever you want from the list and try it out to your likings. You might or might not have heard of these software, but I'm sure you wont leave them out of your toolkit once you got them.

Our first software is TeraCopy. TeraCopy is a file copying software which replaces the usual Windows one.

I don't know if it ever occured to you, but most of the times when you copy high amounts of files, or large files, the copying process either freezes or goes really slow. I've experienced freezing with Windows' own integrated copying software so many times, which made me look for an alternative. After using TeraCopy, I've noticed an increase in my copying speed, and also the freezing was gone. It's a great tool which should be installed right after formatting your computer, since it swaps itself with Windows' own copying software so you don't even have to run it. TeraCopy also features pausing/resuming which I personally haven't used so much, but I'm sure some people will find it useful.

You can download or find more about TeraCopy here.

Next up is Connectify, a software which saved my life many times. This one goes to the laptop users who don't have access to a wireless network. With Connectify, you or any of your friends who has a 3g/4g modem can turn the laptop into a wireless hotspot, and share the connection. I've experienced this problem many times when I went to holiday, and I was the only one who had a 3g modem. Luckily, I managed to share the connection with my family using Connectify.

Using Connectify is pretty simple and straight forward. All you have to do is choose a network name, a network password, and choose the connection which you want to share. Note that you will need the Pro version in order to share your connection, which I think is well worth for the money you're paying. Without Pro, you can only relay a WiFi connection, which is sort of useless if you have a router in the house.

You can find more about Connectify here.

I'm sure all of you know about Daemon Tools, but I'm sure I should mention it here. For those who don't know, Daemon Tools is a virtual cd/dvd-rom software, where you can mount CD/DVD files such as .iso or .cue in order to use them. Daemon Tools also lets you make images of the CDs or DVDs you own already, which you can use later on with Daemon Tools.

The usage is pretty simple again. All you need to do is to create virtual drives by clicking the DT plus sign in the main window, drag your iso files into the empty screen, and then mount them to the drives you want to by right clicking and selecting mount. The biggest advantage of this software is that you can create virtual copies of your CDs or DVDs, and keep as much of them as you want mounted with Daemon Tools instead of replacing a physical disk in your rom every single time. I personally find it such big of a hassle to replace a physical disk every single time I need to use something different.

To learn more about Daemon Tools, you can click this link.

This would be it for now, but I will be returning with a part 2 of this post after a while. I hope you enjoyed the read and found something which will make your life easier!

0 Spotify - Music anywhere

Spotify is a music streaming software which is a must have for any music fan. (at least in my opinion!) With Spotify, you have access to millions of songs anytime you want, (provided you have an internet connection) without downloading them.

There are many great features about Spotify, but let's look at the subscription plans since the features change depending on which one you have.

Spotify Free - You have access to the songs, but you can listen to a song only five times until it gets disabled. You will also have ads inbetween some songs.

Spotify Unlimited - The ads will be gone, and the five time limit will be lifted compared to Spotify Free.

Spotify Premium - You will have offline mode, where you can add songs to your offline playlist which Spotify will let you listen to even without an internet connection. You will also be able to use Spotify on your mobile phone.

In Spotify, you have the ability to make as many playlist as you want, so you won't have to worry about categorizing. Talking about playlists, there's also a function called "collaborative playlist", where you can link your playlist to your friends and they can add songs into them as well, making it a great function for sharing music with friends.

There's also a pretty interesting thing called the Radio, which actually isn't a radio, but better. You simply choose a genre (or more than one genre), and Spotify starts streaming music which belong to those genres. The reason why I said it's better than a radio is because that you can actually skip the songs you don't like. It's a great way of discovering new songs and making new additions to your playlists.

The next interesting thing about Spotify is the App Finder, where you can download "apps" for your Spotify. There are many different apps for many different purposes, such as Moodagent, (my favorite one) TuneWiki,  and so on. These apps serve purposes like finding playlists you like, giving you lyrics of the songs you are listen to, and lots of different things.

Spotify also serves as a local music player. It will detect the local music files you have under a category called Local Files where you can play them, making it a great place to collect all of your music. You can also download the tracks you like off Spotify in exchange for a little bit of money.

Spotify also supports iPhone/Android sync through WiFi, which is an easy way to update the songs on your phone. Facebook integration is also supported in Spotify for the ones who are interested. (personally I'm not really a big fan of this, but I'm sure there are people who would like it.)

Lastly, you can always take a look at the Top Lists, where Spotify shows you the hit tracks, albums, and artist at the time. It's also a great way of finding new songs to listen to.

I've been using Spotify since the beta, and it's truly an amazing software. It's adding more features day by day, (there was no app finder, no Spotify Mobile, no top lists or anything similar back in the day) which surely looks promising. So if you like listening to music, if you like sharing music with your friends and family, and you want to have a big archive of music under your hand, then Spotify is the right choice for you!

I hope you enjoyed the read!

0 Dummy File Creator

Hello everyone! I wasn't planning on writing something today, but I felt the need to share a really interesting software which I've just stumbled upon a few hours ago. There's not much to say about it, as you will notice that it's a pretty simple software to use.

This one is called Dummy File Creator. You can download this software here in its official page.

As it is obvious from the name, this software creates dummy files, which basically aren't anything, but just things which take up space. All you need to do is fill the size box, and the software will create you dummy file(s) of that size.

I'm sure everyone has the same question right now. "What could be possibly a good use of this software?" That's exactly what I asked myself when I saw it, and then I started thinking to myself if I can do anything useful with this piece of software.

When you think about it, there are actually many great uses for this software. I remember the days I didn't do my projects in high school, so I just downloaded a random file and named it myproject.ppt, then told my teacher that the file was corrupted and I will bring my project the next day. 90% of the time, it earned me another day to finish my project. That's probably the best purpose I can think of for this program!

Putting the jokes aside, you can do things such as filling your hard drive to see if there are any problems in your hard drive's sectors, (you'll experience errors at some point if you have bad sectors) you can check the writing speed of your hard drive, you can make dummy files after you deleted something so that they become unrecoverable, (since the dummy files will be written on those sectors) and many more things that I can't think of right now, or that I shouldn't be speaking about here.

All in all, using this software and deciding what you're gonna do with it is totally up to your creativity. This is what I would call a simple, but a powerful tool.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

0 CCleaner

Ever wished there was a software which would clean your computer from every single obsolete thing in one click? Then CCleaner is the software you are looking for! With one click, CCleaner will clean your computer and make it ready for daily use.

As you can see, the software cleans things like browser cache, Windows Explorer cache, and system cache which we are usually too lazy to clean by ourselves one by one. But of course, there's no reason to waste your computer's performance by not cleaning them since this can't get simpler.

CCleaner also supports cleaning cache of the applications you have such as Skype and such, which makes it a quite good bundle overall. You won't ever have to clean any cache manually anymore after you start using CCleaner.

It also has the option to analyze and tell you what you should clean by giving statistics about the software you are using in the right pane. You can see which cache is taking how much space by looking at the right pane and clean the ones you want, and leave the others.

CCleaner also offers registry cleaning, which is kind of a sweet feature. Registry entries tend to get messed up and stay there for long time even if they aren't used anymore, so it can't hurt to scan for registry issues every now and then and clean it.

Lastly, there are some extra tools in the software such as a built-in uninstaller, a startup manager similar to msconfig, a system restore utility, and a drive wiper. The drive wiper is also quite useful, since it deletes the files that are deleted before, (similar to Revo Uninstaller, which I covered in one of my posts) opening up more space and making them unrecoverable. The drive wiper also gives you the option of deleting the whole drive, also known as formatting. 

My recommendation would be to run CCleaner's Cleaner & Registry tools once per day right before you close your computer, so you can start fresh the next day. That's what I personally do and I can say I'm satisfied with the results.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

0 Revo Uninstaller Pro

Many times when I uninstall something off my computer, the things I uninstall usually leave lots of unneeded files and registry entries. It becomes pretty annoying when all this stuff stack up and take unneeded space or create conflicts. Icing on the cake, sometimes the uninstallers don't even work and you have to manually clean out a whole program...

After being annoyed at stuff like this, I started a research to see if there's any software which would help me to get rid of all these problems, and I found Revo Uninstaller Pro. You can find more information about Revo Uninstaller Pro here.

The main function of the software, as you will appreciate, is to uninstall software. In order to do this, the software follows a 3 step process which consists of making a system restore point, uninstalling with the integrated uninstaller, and cleaning the leftovers by scanning.

This way, if you uninstalled something which will cause a problem, you can just system restore without any problems, (I disabled the feature cause I doubt I need it) and you won't have any leftover files which will annoy you later on.

It also has extra features like cleaning your browsers' caches, cleaning the recent documents history of your Microsoft Office, and cleaning things in Windows such as the clipboard, temporary files and many more which I will be showing in the picture.

The Evidence Remover tool is also a quite nice tool in my opinion. It makes sure that the stuff you delete from your hard drive is totally unrecoverable by recovery softwares which I covered in one of my older posts. Note that this will only works for the deleted files, so you can safely use this to make sure noone digs out information off your hard drive.

Unrecoverable Delete tool is the alternative for Evidence Remover tool, where you can select files on your hard drive which will be deleted completely like the Evidence Remover does to your deleted files. It's better than deleting files by using Windows' own deleting tool since it won't give any room for recovery.

Junk Files Cleaner is a scanning utility which scans for the leftover files from the previous uninstalls you've done without Revo Uninstaller Pro. It is a good idea to run it once in a while just to make sure that every leftover file is cleaned and gone.

Autorun Manager is something that I don't really use since I'm used to using msconfig and it works just good for me, but it's simply a Startup manager where you can add/remove programs to/from your startup.

Lastly, there's the Hunter Mode, which is sort of an interesting feature. When you click Hunter Mode, you will get a crosshair which you can drag on the items on your desktop. After you successfully drag the crosshair on one of the windows (I use chrome for this example), it will give you choices such as uninstalling it, killing it, or removing it from the startup. I can't say I used it, but it looks like a really interesting feature which I might be using later on.

That would be all the features of Revo Uninstaller Pro. It's a really good software to have in your after-format software package, since I'm sure you will need something like this one day or another.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

0 Notepad++

Are you still using the original Notepad in Windows? It's time for a change! Notepad++ is an advanced version of Notepad which comes with many more features, and I promise it will make your life easier. It's especially good for people who are coding, but it's still an amazing upgrade for a home user nonetheless.

Notepad++ comes with great features such as highlighting / folding, opening your notepad documents in tabs instead of windows, making macros, (it records the things you do and you can recall it later) launching the notepad file in different browsers, (good for web programming) auto completion, customizable GUI, document map, plugin support for anything you might possibly need in Notepad, and many more.

The plugins include various things such as spell checking, exporting your file, quick translation, automatic saving, and the list goes on. There are too much plugins for me to actually talk about one by one here!

There are a few popular Notepad++ plugins which everyone using Notepad++ should have in my opinion. My recommendations in this case would be having Compare, Explorer, Multi-Clipboard, CharM, TopMost, AutoSave, and SpellChecker. Let's see what these plugins do one by one.

Compare : Shows you the changes between the saved document and the one you are working on at that moment.

Explorer : Think of it as an integrated Windows Explorer. It allows you to open any files on your system via Notepad++.

Multi-Clipboard : This one is pretty straight forward. It gives you more than one clipboard where you can see all your copies stored.

CharM : A special character map for the things you can't insert via your keyboard.

TopMost : Allows Notepad++ to be always on top.

AutoSave : Saves your document every X seconds where you choose the value for X.

SpellChecker : It's a spelilng checker!

You can find more information about Notepad++ here. I doubt you will look back to the original Notepad after using Notepad++, with all these great features.

I hope you enjoyed the read!

1 Recuva - Free File Recovery

Ever regretted deleting a file and wanted it back? I sure did! Infact, it happened many times to me and I just let it go until one day I lost a really important file which made me get to work. I'm sure this has happened to many of you as well, and I'm glad to say that today I will be writing about a software which will help you out!

When I was browsing the internet to find a way to get my file back, I tested many programs and I decided to stick with a file recovery software called Recuva. If you're interested, you can find more information about Recuva here.

With this piece of software, you will most likely be able to return the files that you have deleted, unless a long time has passed until you deleted them, or you filled the clusters of the hard drive which contained those files before with something else. In that case, you will end up getting corrupt or wrong files.

Using Recuva is quite simple. All you have to do is to scan the drive where you want to return the files from to start with.

After the scanning part is done, find the file(s)/folder(s) you want to recover and check them.

After you checked the files you want to recover, click the recover button at the bottom right corner. It will ask you to choose the destination folder. Note the important part here is that you should not choose the hard drive you're recovering files from as the destination, since it will reduce the chance your files will be recovered.

If all goes well, you will succesfully recover your files within moments depending their size. This worked 90% of the time for me, except for a few instances where I tried to recover files which I deleted months ago. Then again, it's a great example of file recovery and that deleting a file isn't the end of everything.

This software is the one I had most success with, but feel free to try other softwares since they all work in a different way and you might have luck with an another one if you didn't have luck with this one.

I hope you enjoyed the read, and I hope this helps you out!