Instant Elevator Music is a fun application for users who like to be accompanied by calming soothing music during file operations. I’m not saying that any sane person would want to listen to that music for a long period of time, but it is fun the first times you run into it.

You need to install the software before you can enjoy music during most file operations and even some splash screens. You can open the program’s settings to define when the music starts to play while you are waiting.

Popular choices include “anything with a progress bar” to Firefox downloads or the Adobe Photoshop CS5 splash screen. And if you are annoyed by the elevator music in a particular application you can turn that off to. The ignore list in the program settings offers to add programs that will stay silent even if they would trigger the music otherwise.

You can also add your own tunes to the music playlist for some extra variety. One of the issues that I ran into was that the music started playing even while I was playing another video or song on the computer. The program can be configured to identify some music playing applications like Winamp to block the elevator music while other music is playing, but there is no option to do the same for video players or even web video.

Regardless of that; You can still have some fun with the little application. It is likely that you will uninstall it sooner or later though.

Windows users can download Instant Elevator Music from the official website. It should work with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The process to copy files into another folder for instance is not optimized at all, and users may have to navigate a lot in one explorer window, or use two Windows Explorer instances for the job.

Filer Frog is a free Windows Explorer shell extension that improves the file browser in this regard.

The previously commercial application is now offered for free at the developer site. Both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition are available, which add the same feature set to Windows Explorer.

filerfrog

All new features become available in the right-click context menu after installation.

The new features can be loosely divided into file operations and image manipulations.

File Operations

Filer Frog adds the following file operations to Windows Explorer:

• Extract From Folder: Moves all files of a folder to its parent folder, with options to delete the empty folder afterwards.
• Extract To Folder: Creates a new folder and moves the selected files into it.
• Copy / Move: Like the Copy To, Move To commands. Opens a folder browser after selection where the selected files and folders will be moved or copied to.
• Delete Empty Files and Folders: Empty files and folders that have been selected will be deleted after executing this command.
• Copy Path To Clipboard: copies the path of the current folder to the Windows Clipboard.
• Invert Selection: Inverts the current selection in the folder.
• Split and Join: Option to split large files into smaller ones, and to join them again.
• List of Files: Creates a text or html file that contains a list of all selected files and folders. Option to create a simple or detailed listing.
• Encrypt and Decrypt: Option to encrypt or decrypt files and folders.
• Renaming: Option to rename files and folders in bulk, available are: Find Replace, Auto Numbering, Alphabetize, Append, Auto Numbering with Append (Links to Auto Numbering), Alphabetize with Append (Links to Alphabetize), Make All Same Name, Truncate

Image Manipulation Operations:

Three main features are provided by Filer Frog, they are:

• Image Manipulation – Resize: Option to immediately resize selected images in Windows Explorer. Selection includes custom sizes, presets, and the selection of the image quality.
• Image Manipulation – Put Logo On Image: Adds a logo to all selected images. Option to overwrite the existing images, or add the manipulated images to another folder.
• Image album: Filer Frog can create a basic image album which is saved as a pdf document in the same folder.

Some of the options provided by Filer Frog are already available in some Windows operating systems. Still, several of the file operations can be helpful in speeding up operations in Windows Explorer. The software does not need to run in a background process, which means that it does not put a strain on the system’s resources.

Filer Frog is available for download at the developer website.

There is however a way to make those file operations more effectively. And that is done by using the Windows Explorer search. The search is powerful enough to speed up some file operations.

This can be largely attributed to the fact that the search will only find files and folders that match the search term if they reside in the folder the search was started or a subfolder of it.

To find all photos with the jpg extension one would simply search for jpg in the search form. Windows will then list all files that match the keyword jpg. This can mean that some files are added to the search results that are not jpg images, for example a file called photojpg.exe would also be included in the list. But that is not a problem as that list can be sorted by file type or name easily.

All or only selected files that have been found this way can be copied or moved easily to another location.

That’s how file recovery programs like Recuva operate. They scan the hard drive for those deleted files and have a good chance of recovering them. The chance is better for newly deleted files because the chance is lower that their sectors on the hard drive have been overwritten by other files.

You will hopefully agree with us that it is highly impracticable to wait until the file has been overwritten by other files to make sure that it cannot be recovered by normal means.

One solution is to use so called File Wipers and DP Secure Wiper by Dirk Paehl is one of them. It provides three different methods of deleting a file permanently so that it cannot be recovered anymore.

Single Overwrite: This is the fastest way of deleting a file. File Recovery Programs that are freely available on the Internet will not be able to recover the file anymore.
lDoD Wipe: Department of Defense compliant wiping. The file will be overwritten seven times.
Gutmann’s Method: It will overwrite the file with 35 different patterns.

DP Secure Wiper works by dragging and dropping files or folders into the program window. The one thing that is missing in our opinion is a context menu entry that sends files directly to the application.

Copy Handler replaces and enhances copy and move operations in Windows by replacing the native software with an advanced version. This is done by registering the shell extension dll once which has the effect that all move and copy commands are performed by Copy Handler.

The author claims that it can speed up file transfers between different partitions of the same physical hard drive by a factor of 6 which is probably a bit to much. A speed difference is visible nevertheless.

The default Copy Handler window lists all file transfers with information such as filename, source and destination and status. Selecting a file lists even more parameters such as transfer speed, buffer size and the full path.

Buttons give you the option to resume, cancel, restart or pause transfers which is great if only a few of the transfers were interrupted. Instead of transferring all files again you only need to select the incomplete ones and click on resume.

The configuration lists an extensive number of settings that can be changed. The system can be shutdown after file transfers, buffer sizes can be changed as well as windows and information that are displayed.

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Copy Handler