I have examined the new Autopatcher Updater before and the program was kinda buggy back then. Some time has passed and the Autopatcher team managed to produce several new versions and recently released version 1.04 of their Autopatcher Updater. It felt right to take another look to see what has changed since the early beta releases.

But let me give you a brief description of Autopatcher before I continue. Autopatcher queries the Microsoft update server and downloads all patches and updates from that server to your computer. When I say all I mean all for the operating system or software (like Microsoft Office) that you have selected.

This procedure has several benefits over automatic installations. All patches and updates are downloaded to the users computer and can be used to update several computers, even those without Internet or network access. It is furthermore possible to select the updates that should be installed on the computer and those that should not be.

continue reading "Autopatcher Updater 1.04"

Recent Files View is another excellent software developed by one of my favorite developers Nirsoft. I discovered this application by chance at the Freeware Genius blog and immediately saw the benefits of using the application. Let me tell you what it does. Recent Files View lists the most recent files that have been accessed on a computer. It can be compared to the Recent Documents option in applications like Microsoft Word only that it displays all files and not only a few selected file extensions.

The information are collected from two sources. One source is the recent folder that contains shortcuts to recently opened files while the second is a location in the Registry. Only files and folders with user interaction are listed of course and not files that are automatically used by the operating system.

As I said I can see several uses for this application. The first is to check which files have been accessed in the last days on your computer. Great if you suspect that someone else accessed the computer and you would like to see what they have been doing.

continue reading "List all Recently Accessed Files"

I received some very nice responses in my last Ask The Readers article that was asking the readers for a way to extract archives - including multi part ones - that would reside in different folders in one go. The archiver that I was using was able to handle all archives in one directory but not in multiple directories.

Extract Now was mentioned in the comments. I did write about it earlier actually but forgot completely that it would have that feature. As the name suggests its main purpose is to extract archives and since I do not pack files regularly I decided to make this my main application to handle archives. Extract Now supports many major file types such as zip, rar, 7z, iso and img, all in all 17 file types are supported.

Two ways are provided to communicate with the program. The main interface supports drag and drop which is probably one of the coolest features in an archiver that I have seen for a long time. Just drop a folder into the interface and Extract Now will scan it plus all subfolders for supported file types. The files will then be added and can be extracted automatically.

continue reading "Extract archives from multiple folders at once"

Every Windows user browses for folders regularly, be it to save files in specific folders or to load files from folders. Windows itself offers no way of saving often used folders as favorites so that they can be accessed with just a click. I already did test several applications like Flashfolder but I did discover the perfect application for my needs only recently.

Direct Folders adds a double-click menu that gives the user access to folders,files and recent documents that he has added to the application before. The system is so simple that I would call it brilliant. A double-click opens the Direct Folders menu when you are in Windows Explorer, Windows desktop or a file browsing dialog (like Save or Load) and opens a folder or file with just another click.

Several items can be added to the menu. First of all direct access to folders and files can be added on the main level. Separators can be used to visualize folder categories or add a break between folders and files. Last but not least subfolders can be created that add another level to the menu meaning in return that you need another action to access the folders or files contained within.

continue reading "Quick Folder Access with Direct Folders"

It can be sometimes quite handy to automatically move certain types of files from the Internet Cache to another location on your hard drive. I’m especially thinking of multimedia files like movies, music, pictures or flash games. Skrommel created a wonderful application named Cache Sort which observes the Internet Cache and moves files into folders named after their file extension.

The real value of this application is that it is highly customizable. You can basically point it to any folder on your hard drive which you want observed. This can be the Internet Cache of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera but also other folders, say those of P2P applications.

The heart of Cache Sort is the configuration file which can be accessed by right-clicking the Cache Sort icon in the Windows system tray. You can change the folder that is observed in here, the file extensions, if they should be moved or copied, the scan interval, the minimum file size of the files, files that should be ignored and where to put the files.

continue reading "Move files automatically from the Internet Cache"