Pandora Recovery is compatible with all Windows NT operating systems including Windows NT, Windows XP and Windows Vista. The recovery software provides some interesting features that most of the other software programs do not offer. It lists the available partitions and hard drives and the user can start a scan immediately by clicking on one of the partitions. This will scan the partition for all deleted file information.

The user can browse the partition after the scan. The software application is displaying the name of the deleted file, the path, the creation and modification date and the percentage that it is overwritten. Overwritten files have a lesser chance of being fully recoverable.

Pandora Recovery provides access to a file search as well which can be used to find specific files on a partition. Files can be filtered by partition, name, size and date. The application is also displaying overall statistics about the amount of deleted files that are not overwritten, partially overwritten and completely overwritten.

To recover deleted files the user would simply right-click a file or folder and choose the Recover To option from the context menu. It does also provide the option to quick view the file which can display the contents of the files or show the contents as text if no viewer has been found for the file.

The third function is a deep surface scan which can find file information in the following three cases:

• Recovery of files whose MFT record has been reused by OS.
• Recovery of files from reformatted media.
• Recovery of files from discs with damaged or missing file allocation table.

Think of it as a deep scan which takes much longer to be performed but is more thorough. The additional information and the surface scan are great aids when trying to recover deleted files on a partition.

Free Undelete scans one partition of the hard drive and provides access to all recoverable files and folders that it found during the scan. The scan itself is surprisingly fast, faster than the one by Recuva but this could be due to the way both applications present the data after the scan. Recuva is displaying all files it found in the main window while Free Undelete displays the folder structure of the files.

That’s a great approach if you can remember the folder names of the files that you want to recover. If you cannot remember them you are in for some folder clicking until you find the files that you want to recover because Free Undelete does not offer a search, only a filter that filters the current results by filename and folder name.

This difference matters only if specific files have to be recovered. It is easier to recover all files and folders with Free Undelete because it displays less of them in the main interface. A tip is to always recover files on a different partition than the one the files are being recovered from. It could happen otherwise that recovered files are stored in locations of files that are still to be recovered which will obviously fail then.

If you only have one partition I suggest to use an external device, USB drive, external hard drive or similar to store the files temporary on that device.

This week saw a lot of updates and it was quite hard to pick one that would receive the update of the week award. Since the Open Office update has not been made official yet on their homepage I’m giving the award to Orbit Downloader which is in my opinion the best free downloader out there.

If you know of an application that has been updated but is missing in the list let me know, I will surely do my best to monitor it from now on and add it to the list.

µTorrent 1.8 Build 9137 Beta – a new Beta version of this lightweight Bittorrent client.

7-Zip 4.58 Alpha 5 – another popular archiver with support for many different zip extensions.

aTuner 1.9.82.17453 – a tiny tool that can change several settings of Ati and Nvidia video cards.

BitComet 20080320 Beta – a fast Bittorrent client.

CCleaner 2.06.567 – cleans the computer from temporary and other unnecessary files.

Cobian Backup 9.1.1.166 Beta – an excellent backup software with options to backup to an ftp server.

CodecInstaller 2.9.1 – analyzes multimedia files and displays information about the codecs that are needed to play them.

doPDF 6.0.257 – sets up a virtual printer that creates pdf documents.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 4.1.2.0 – copy DVDs to your hard drive and remove protections – if any – in the process.

FeedDemon 2.6.1.0 Beta – a desktop feed reader.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 3.8.5 – a highly popular codec package.

Locate 3.1.8.3260 Beta – Locate offers one of the fastest ways to search for files and content in files in Windows.

MediaCoder 0.6.1.4077 – a batch transcoder for audio and video files.

MediaMonkey 3.0.3.1147 Beta 3 – music organizer, manager and player.

Nokia PC Suite 6.86 Release 6 – applications to transfer to and backup data from your Nokia mobile phone.

ooVoo 1.5.1.96 Beta – offers multi-user video chat.

Norton Removal Tool 2008.0.3.15 – Some call it the best software Norton ever produced. Use this if you want to completely remove a Norton / Symantec product from your computer.

Open Office 2.4.0 – the final version of Open Office 2.4 after several release candidates. A popular replacement for Microsoft Office.

Orbit Downloader 2.6.4 – a fantastic download manager with many advanced features.

PeaZip 2.0 – an alternative to the more popular packers like Winzip and Winrar.

Recuva 1.12.291 – recover accidentally deleted files on your computer.

Songbird 0.5 RC2 – a multi-platform multimedia player.

SpeedFan 4.34 Beta 44 – manage the speed of the fans in your computer.

SUMo 1.7.0.42 Beta – Sumo scans your computer for known applications and checks their version against an online database to let you know if the computer is having the latest version installed.

Vista Codec Package 4.6.2 – add several missing video and audio codecs to Windows Vista at once.

WildBit Viewer 5.2 Alpha 4.0 – another update of this popular image viewer.

WinSCP 4.1 Beta – I’m almost exclusively using WinSCP to update my websites.

It is for instance possible to get a visual analysis of the fragmentation level of a folder or file. While it is nice to know it would not make much sense if the software would not take advantage of this feature. Defraggler makes it possible to just defrag a folder or file instead of defragmenting the complete drive.

This is of course considerably faster than defragmenting the whole hard drive and useful if you want to work with a certain application. As far as I can tell it is not faster or slower than any of the other defragmentation tools out there but as I said, the new feature makes it stick out from the rest.

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Defraggler

The question that some might ask is why one could recover deleted files at all. This is actually a very good question. Windows does not delete the file at all when you press the delete button. It simply deleted the reference to that file and makes the space the file occupied writable again. This means that you can recover most files if you are just fast enough. One freeware that can do the job is Recuva which is supposed to be pronounced recover.

It is developed by the same team that created CCleaner. Recuva scans the hard drive that you have selected and displays all deleted files that it finds in a list. It found more than 60000 files on my E: drive that I could try and recover. Information like filename, path and size are displayed to make it easier to find the files that you want to recover.

Recuva has fortunately a filter option. Just enter part of the filename or path and it will display only those files. It took 53 seconds to scan my 140 GB partition and display the 60000 entries.