Recently in Utilities Category

I read a huge list of free software that had a number of utils I wasn’t aware of, thought I’d better document a few here.

System Level Tools

GParted Live CD is a powerful full-featured partition management software that can create, resize, check, copy, merge, and destroy partitions, and supports multiple file systems.

Unstoppable copier will copy files/folders from disks that have physical damage and attempt to repair these. It will ignore error messages generated in the copying process and attempt to restructure the file using every readable part.

Amic Email Backup is a small, free program that can backup and restore the data associated with most major email clients, including identities, email and news messages, address book, accounts, message rules/filters, signatures, and even the blocked senders list. It works with a number of email clients including MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, PocoMail, Netscape Messenger, Opera Mail, and Incredimail.

Drivermax is a program that can backup and re-install your system’s drivers. It can also generate a report that lists all installed drivers and includes information such as version numbers and dates.

ProduKey is a free program that can display the product ID and Product Keys used in your installed copies of Windows, MS Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, and Exchange server.

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Spyware Terminator is one of the few antispyware programs that includes automatic updates.

Comodo Firewall will keep an eye on communication in and out of your PC, requires an email address to get the download.

TweakUI has been a long term favourite for adjusting windows defaults.

XNView is my favourite image viewer.

CDBurnerXP4 is a complete CD/DVD burning solution for the creation of data CDs and DVDs, audio CDs and Video DVDs. It offers full set of features including on-the-fly disc copying, copying to and burning from ISO images, and ISO image conversion. Supports new DVD formats such as Double layer DVDs, Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.

CPU-Z is a program which tells you all about your CPU and motherboard configuration. Useful if you don’t want to open up the case and peer through dust.

As it reads on the site “RatDVD is the result of my downloading experiences. Downloading movies, even DVD rips never really worked out to what I expected.

When I download movies, I want the full DVD features set and I want to be able to watch it on any DVD player - without loosing any features of the original DVD. That is what RatDVD can do for you.”

AMPsoft free font viewer is the nicest free font viewer I’ve come across. Makes finding the right font from your collection much easier.

If you’re looking for an application to check SFV files, you can’t go past SFV Manager. It’s freeware.

After finding a swag of old badly tagged Mp3 files I decided I should get a decent tagger which could add cover art and year, genre information to the files, but I didn’t want to have a single dialog box for each file.

Mp3Tag shows you a list of all the files under the directory you select and allows you to either edit each files tags in the list, or select a bunch and tag them with the same year, genre. Then you can select cover art and apply that to the files.

While I’m on the topic of Mp3 I might as well say that CDex is the best software for ripping Audio CDs to Mp3. All my audio CDs are archived in a plastic tub now instead of cluttering up my desk.

If you have files without correct titles and you have no idea who the artist is or what the album was, use musicbrainz. It will create a checksum of the files and look that up in its database and suggest likely possibilities for the song which you can then apply.

There are a certain set of tools that always seem to come in handy. I’ve documented the ones that I use all the time to get jobs done.