gHacks technology news » Tools

Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space

Joe — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:05:10 +0000

Your hard disk space may seem increasingly small but you may not be aware what is taking the space. I, for example, subscribed to dozens of podcasts but naively overlooked them when trying to clear space. In fact, they took up 5GB of space!

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Tags: directory, disk space, files, freeware, hard-disk, hard-drive, Linux, mac, optimise, optimization, optimize, os x, software, Tools, windirstat, Windows

The Best Free Guitar Tools

joshua — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:06:00 +0000

I’m going to go slightly off-topic today and share some of my recent finds with you, I hope some of you will find them helpful!

Guitar Tabs are an incredibly easy way to learn guitar. In fact an incredible number of famous and popular musicians have never used sheet music in their life, either using guitar tablature or playing by ear.

Here are the tools which I have found to be the best for teaching yourself guitar:

PowerTab Editor
A given. If you don’t want to shell out for GuitarPro tablature software then this freeware application does the job just fine. Unfortunately it’s abandon-ware although the fact it still remains the best free guitar software over 3 or 4 years after the final version was released says something about its quality. Works fine on Vista.

PowerTab Librarian
A application which organises your tabs based on meta-data, like media players do for music files. A useful resource if the tabs you use have been tagged correctly and are in the PowerTab file format.

Ultimate Guitar
911 Tabs provides a far more comprehensive database of tabs scoured from the entire Internet, yet inevitably 80% of these are crap and Ultimate Guitar Tabs generally provides the best guitar tablature on the Internet. Also has a lot of other great resources such as news, tutorials, music reviews and forums.

TabPlayer
If you were already familiar with PowerTab (and I’m sure you where) then perhaps you’d be interested in trying out TabPlayer. It looks like a great application and its still under development. TabPlayer is for .txt tab files which make up the majority of online tabs. You can “view, write, edit, print, search for and even play” your tab files.

Songsterr
An online tablature player, it can be handy but I generally prefer to work on my desktop offline. Sometimes its great just to load up and have browse through as it’s a really simple way to find some new songs to play.

Tags: guitar, Tools

Extract Resources From Files

Martin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:45:44 +0000

ResourcesExtract is a portable Nirsoft application that can automatically scan a directory for resources in files and extract them to a specified destination directory. Unlike the previously covered Icons Extract which can extract icons from files ResourcesExtract can extract a wider range of resources from files.

ResourcesExtract scans all dll, exe, ocx and cpl file for icons but also for the following other types of resources: bitmaps, avi files, cursors, type libraries, html related resources and more. The most interesting aspect of the software program is the automatic scanning and extraction which works nicely.

Scanning the Windows folders including all of its subfolders takes only a matter of seconds. All extracted resources are saved in the selected destination folder for further processing.

All Nirsoft applications support command line parameters. ResourcesExtract supports several parameters that can extract specified resources from a selected directory.

The software program is portable and works on any version of Windows starting with Windows 98 including Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Tags: extract icons, extract resources, nirsoft, software, Tools, Windows

A Few Defragmentation Tools

joshua — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:27:09 +0000

My defragmenter of choice has always been Auslogic Defragmenter, I have no idea how effective it is compared to other programs but it’s simple enough and looks pretty.

However I came across Piriform Defraggler the other day and I was interested in one feature it had… individual file and folder defragmentation. At first I thought this was pretty superfluous considering it would be difficult to notice much of an effect defragmenting a single file or folder… however I have a laptop and not a huge hard drive so a complete defragment doesn’t take huge amount of time anyway.

If you have a large hard drive however then this could be a very useful tool. I’m thinking of large music collections or DVD rips which go into the hundreds of gigabytes worth of space.

Using Piriform Defraggler to defragment just your music or video collection could have some kind of small effect on performance. Apart from this it has all the other basic features and even a nice monitoring tool which for some strange reason was omitted from the Vista defragmentation application.

Unfortunately there are no scheduling options but it’s simple and works fast enough to keep most people happy.

For anything more advanced I recommend IOBit Smart Defrag. This has the kind of scheduling options you may be looking for as well the ability to defragment and optimise multiple hard drive partitions.

The best thing about Smart Defrag is that it can be set to start up whenever the computer is left idle. I think schedules are a pain as you might in the middle of something when a scheduled task starts up so instead running when the computer is idle is the best solution.

Tags: defrag, defragment, Tools, vista

Windows Shell Enhancer

Martin — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:50:43 +0000

I seldom run into an application that is as hard to describe as Shell Enhancer. When you install the application you can configure some settings of it and I was really blown away by the amount of options the program was throwing at me. I cannot go back to that dialog but it seemed like 15 or so windows with configuration options.

Shell Enhancer adds some long needed functions to Windows and when I write Windows I mean Windows XP or newer versions. The main functions are window and task management each offering numerous options that make your live easier. I think I use some examples to explain some of the functions of Shell Enhancer.

With Shell Enhancer it is possible to resize windows without having to move the mouse to a border of it. Pressing the ALT key plus one of the mouse keys resizes the active window fluently to the desired size. The window can be moved, resized with two static sides and resized completely by using the hotkey and the mouse. It’s far easier to click anywhere in the window to resize it.

Some other functions that are provided are to minimize windows to the system tray, set the transparency level of windows, set automatic options for windows (when firefox started make it always on top and set the transparency level to 90%), a task switcher with preview option, hide desktop icons and activate mouse gestures.

We are not finished yet. Screen Corner Tasks can be configured. Those are tasks that are executed when the mouse is placed for a certain time in one of the screen corners.

And then we have the Hotkey Tasks Manager. You can import a list of preconfigured task that do all kind of things like opening the search engine with the search results of a phrase that you have marked, maximizing explorer windows, opening a link in a browser. Those are basic tasks but the application can process complex tasks as well. You could for instance run five applications in a row, create a system restore point after the termination of the third application, open notepad, insert text into notepad, close notepad, send keystrokes to a confirmation window and initiate system shutdown. All with one hotkey.

Shell Enhancer is an excellent software, it does not have such a large memory footprint if you consider all the functions that it offers. If you need one or more of those functions regularly or want to start certain programs or windows in certain states then you should give it a try. It might be a bit intimidating at the beginning but you get used to it pretty quickly.

Tags: shell enhancer, software, Tools, Windows, windows shell

Customize the Windows System Clock

Martin — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:16:06 +0000

Windows is only displaying the current time in hours and minutes in the system tray and detailed information can only be accessed with a double-click on the clock. A double-click opens a detailed view that is showing the seconds and the date as well. If you want to display those information in the system tray you have to use third party software like TClock Light which adds the functionality to Windows (except Windows Vista).

TClock Light makes it easy to customize the system tray clock. It adds the current date and the seconds by default but everything can be changed. You can change from a 24 hour format in the 12 hour format, display one, some or all of the following: day (digit or word), month (digit or word), year (two or four digits). It is even possible to create your own format if you are unhappy with the default ones.

The layout can be changed as well. It is possible to change the font type, the size of the font, the alignment and the background colors. The tool offers additional functions, some related to the clock, some general options to change the design of the task bar.

It`s for instance possible to set alarms and to define actions for left and right-clicks on the time. The application uses roughly four Megabyte to provide the functionality.

Tags: software, system clock, Tools, Windows, windows software

WinLibre, your open source software library

Daniel Pataki — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:22:41 +0000

I was thinking on rounding up some of the net’s best freeware apps and putting them into one easily installable pack. As these things go, it seems like some clever people have beaten me to it. While I am a bit sad, I am actually really happy to have found this, since they did a really good job and it will help me a lot.

If you re-install Windows (or OSX) a lot, you know that you need to go through the process of installing Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, VLC Player and a whole lot more, and at times this can get a bit tedious. With the help of WinLibre or MacLibre all you need to do is download the installer and you can choose what you need, installing it with one click.

You can either get the 150Mb standalone version that contains everything you could install, or the 0.6Mb online installer version. I recommend the later, since you will be downloading the most recent updates for the apps. When you run the installer again, you can check for the latest software, without the need to download all 150 Megs again.

Tags: apps, Open Source, Tools

Top Xp Freeware that every user needs part 3

Martin — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 10:04:28 +0000

What ? Part 3 ? You said that there would be only two parts in the top xp series. I know that I said that but I wanted to write a third part because of the nice comments that the other two parts received. (access part 1 and part 2) This time I will write about the lesser known tools, special purpose ones that most users do not need but some can’t live without. I thought it would be nice to give those tools some exposure as well, they are great and they deserve it.

I did write about some of them here at ghacks already but I guess only the die hard ghacks readers will know about this. I would like to start with a tool that I have been using for some time now. It is called Hamachi and the main benefit is that it is able to simulate a lan over internet. This is great if a game only offers lan play for instance. I do not suggest you use it for the following purpose but it is possible. Many games require serial numbers and those numbers are checked when you connect to a game server on the internet. They are not checked if you create a lan game.

System Tools:

Please insert the CD into the drive and restart the application. I hate this message. Forcing legit users to have the CD / DVD in drive to execute the program is something I never understood. Pirates crack those protections in seconds and legit users have the problems with methods that are supposed to make it harder for pirates. Something is wrong here. I do like Daemon Tools which emulates CDs on your hard drive. Create an image of the CD, mount it in Daemon Tools and you may use the software without the Cd.

That shitty movie is not playing. I don’t see a picture, I hear no sound. Have you ever witnessed something like that ? This could be due to a missing codec on your system. Gspot analyzed a movie file and displays the codecs it is using. Did I say that I hate the fact that there are billions of codecs out there ? Waste of time and energy.

Notepad 2 replaces Notepad which ships with every windows installation. It offers more features than Notepad like syntax highlighting.

Rbtray makes it possible to minimize every window into the system tray instead of the task bar. If you are like me and dislike crowded task bars this tool is for you.

I like my computers as silent as they can be. One method to achieve this is to use a software that is able to control the speed of the fans in your pc. Speedfan is my choice. It displays temperatures for important system components such as processor, motherboard and hard drives and lets you change the fan speed if that is supported on your system.

Vippy the writer friendly cursor changes the cursor into a eye-friendly one. This is great if you have troubles finding the cursor in a text document. Vippy changes the color of the cursor to red for instance.

Internet:

Ghacks is running on a dedicated server and I have to make the connection using a terminal program. I do use Putty for this, it is fast and clean and does exactly the things that I need it to do. I do use WinSCP to connect download backups that I made from the dedicated server. SFTP means secure file transfer.

I have a Skype account to talk to my friends and see who is online at the moment. There is no charge if both users are connected to the Skype network. I do prefer Teamspeak while gaming. Teamspeak has the advantage that more users may chat and talk at the same time while Skype has that limited I think. When I was playing WOW we were using Teamspeak with more than 40 people in one channel. Don’t worry, you can moderate everything.

If you want to view tv on the internet you should take a look at tvu player which offers some interesting channels to choose from. To name a few: ABC, ESPN, Comedy Channel, CBC, Fox and more. All free, with relative good quality. You need a broadband connection for good results.

You need some additional tools if you want to save video streams. Most providers hide the real url to the stream making it impossible to detect it by normal means. Url Snooper comes into play and detects the real address by analyzing all network traffic.

I need a local test installation of ghacks to test new features before I make the upgrade on the running site. XAMPP offers everything I need to have a local Apache installation with PHP and MYSQL support. It is great for learning and testing upgrades.

Security:

You might remember the Sony rootkit incident. They planted a rootkit on some of their CDs and users had a hard time getting rid of it. Rootkit Revealer is one of those tools that helps detecting and removing rootkits.

Other:

I do not buy lots of new CDs but sometimes I buy some used ones on Ebay or Amazon. I don’t have a CD player at all so I have to get the songs from the CD on my computer to be able to play them and transfer them to my Ipod. CDex is the tool I use for that purpose. It is fast, pulls all relevant information from the internet (author, title, songs..) and adds them automatically to the songs.

Tags: abc, cdex, comedy-channel, espn, fox, freeware, gspot, hamachi, microsoft, Open Source, Operating Systems, putty, rbtray, rootkit, skype, software, speedfan, ssh, teamspeak, Tools, tvu-player, url-snooper, vippy, Windows, windows-xp, winscp, xampp

Free Album Art Cover Downloader

Martin — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 19:14:25 +0000

Many portable media players and software players support album cover art which is displayed when a song is played from within the player. Most players unfortunately do not have a feature that automatically searches for and downloads album cover art for the album s that you have stored on your computer. One of the tools that can help you if you like to have album cover art displayed is Album Cover Art Downloader.

Album Cover Art Downloader can be downloaded for Windows, various Linux distributions and as a source code if you want to compile it for yourself. It displays a list of albums that are stored on your computer and offers the functionality to search for album art for that album. It searches Amazon, Buy.com, Yahoo and Walmart for images and displays them in a sidebar. You may pick the best image that fits and it will be automatically downloaded and added to all mp3 files that belong to that album.

Tags: album, album-cover-art, album-cover-art-downloader, album-covers, covers, download-covers, freeware, iPod, Linux, mp3-album, Tools, Windows

Burn Audio CDs from exotic audio formats

Martin — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:46:53 +0000

Most burning tools that support the creation of audio CDs support only the most common formats by default. Those formats are normally mp3, wav or wma. Some suits support other formats as well but I never found a burning suit that supported all of the formats that I needed. One way to solve this issue would be to use plugins that would increase the supported formats, one plugin pack for Nero can be downloaded here. (Click on Nero Audio-Plug-Ins..)

If you do not have a software that supports plugins you could use the excellent freeware Burrn which supports many formats which are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets as well as embedded cuesheets for ape, wv and flac files. It reads the tags automatically and adds them to the burning process. Burrrn is really easy to use, it supports drag and drop and direct editing of song title and artist.

You will have to choose a burner the first time it starts. Once this is done the main window opens and you may add new songs to the CD by dragging songs or cue sheets to the main window. If you want a certain order for your files you have to drag them one at a time. Last but not least it offers a way to adjust the replaygain for all songs before the songs are burned to the audio cd.

Tags: ape, audio-cd, burn, burn-audio, burn-audio-cd, burrrn, exotic-audio-formats, flac, fpl, freeware, m3u, mp3, mp4, mpc, music-cd, ofr, ogg, pls, Tools, wav

Automatically sort files with Filesort

Martin — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:24:37 +0000

Do you have a folder with many files and file types in it ? Sorting those files reminds me a lot of two famous stories I heard when I was a child, namely those of Cinderella and Sisyphus. If you ever tried sorting a folder with 10000+ files you know what I mean. I always thought that it would be great to have a freeware that would help me presort the files and let me do the fine tuning afterwards.

Filesort is the freeware that I was looking for. Once downloaded and installed (it is only 100k) you simply pick a folder which files you want to sort and define some sorting rules. Filesort offers three different types of rules: File Name Rules, File Age Rules and File Size Rules. Click on new rule to add a new rule in one of the categories. If you wanted to move all mp3 movies you would add *.mp3 in the second tab of the new rule and enter a directory where those files should be placed instead.

Simple and effective. The same rules can be defined for file ages and file size. This could be nice for p2p incoming folders for instance as well. The only thing that bothers me is that you can’t define more than one rule to work together. For instance I could not move all mp3 files that are older than seven days to the new folder. It is either all mp3 files or all files that are older than seven days.

Maybe this will be added to the tool in the future. You may even schedule Filesort that it sorts files automatically every XX minutes.

Thanks to my reader P5chin for this nice tip.

Tags: file-folder, filesort, freeware, huge-file, schedule-file-sort, sort-files, sort-files-age, sort-files-name, sort-files-size, Tools, windows-file

Auto Window Manager

Martin — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:07:17 +0000

The freeware Auto Window Manager adds additional functionality to the way windows manages the windows it displays. You could for instance customize that whenever a program opens it opens in maximized, minimized or default state. This setting should work with most programs and windows, i tried it with firefox and thunderbird for example.

That is of course not all that auto window manager can do. It is able to change the way windows reacts when you click on the minimize button. You may send minimized windows to the tray instead of sending them to the task bar. This is great if you want to run a program in the background and don’t want that it wastes some space in the task bar. You may also configure windows to stay on top all of the time.

Another nice option is the transparency one that gives you a similar transparency effect that windows vista ships with. You may choose a transparency rate between 0% which means no transparency to 100% which means absolutely transparent.

Last but not least you may specify a location where the windows should appear on your desktop. All options are accessible when you right-click the window.

Tags: auto-window, freeware, maximize, stay-on-top, system, Tools, transparency, transparency-effect, transparent, tray, window, Windows

Top 15 Security and Hacking Tools & Utilities

admin — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 07:35:03 +0000

Finally a great darknet.org.uk article that lists 15 Security and Hacking Tools & Utilities. Users who are working in the security field will recognize many if not all of them and beginners will have a great list of tools with explanation that they can work with. You find for instance the telnet and ssh tool putty in the list next to the tool Eraser which overwrites files on your windows system more than once to make sure it can´t be restored that easily.

Here is a short list of all the other tools mentioned: Nmap, Nessus Remote Security Scanner, John the Ripper, Nikto, Superscan, pof, Ethereal, Yersinia, LCP, Cain and Abel, Kismet, Netstumbler and hping. Make sure you check the tools that you do not know about yet, it might be worth it.

Tags: ethereal, freeware, Hacking, jtr, password, ping, port, Security, sniff, ssh, telnet, Tools, utilities

Astalavista Top 10 Freeware Tools

Martin — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 17:49:28 +0000

Astalavista Security Group have a beta page up that lists top freeware software products in various categories including Data Recovery, Anti Virus-Tools, Firewall and IDS and Anti-Spyware. The list contains some of the freeware tools that I already wrote about but also some new ones that might interest you.

Page loads a little bit slow but its worth the wait. I will check some of the tools out that I did not try out until now and if I find a gem review it here at ghacks.net.

Tags: antivirus, data-recovery, firewall, freeware, port scanner, remote, scan, Security, sniffer, software, Tools, virus

Google File Search “Share it” 1.0 Final

Martin — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 19:42:17 +0000

We are proud to announce that our Google File Search tool “Share it” has reached final status. We decided to provide two versions, one with installer and one that you simply unpack and run.

A few changes have been made in the final version. First, we included another torrent search engine, you now have the choice between four prominent torrent search engines to find torrent files.

We added three new “translate” proxies who let you surf the web anonymously by hiding your real ip to the site you want to reach.

Three additional bonus features have been implemented, Domain Dossier check (for site details check), DNS Tools whois ( for a quick check) and DNS Ping (to see if target is up and running)

Tags: filesearch, ghacks, Google, P2p, share it, software, Tools

Google File Search Beta 2 released

Martin — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 12:58:03 +0000

We are proud to announce that the second version of our Google File Search tool (Gfs) has been released to the public today. We hope to recieve additional feedback for further improvements from you, feel free to comment on the program here.

I suppose you want to know about the changes since Beta 1, there are some. The most prominent one is that we included a bonus section. In there you can surf the web anonymously without the need to use proxies and all the proxy hassle like verifying them etc.

You can also check a site for vulnerabilities using the bonus section, simply enter a site url and click on Check It to do so.

We fixed some bugs and provide the program now without an installer. Just unpack it using winrar and your clear to go, no registry entries nothing. 100% spyware free :P

Take a look at the following screenshots:

to Download click here

Tags: ghacks, share it, software, Tools

gHacks technology news » Tools

Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space

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The Best Free Guitar Tools

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Extract Resources From Files

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A Few Defragmentation Tools

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Windows Shell Enhancer

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Customize the Windows System Clock

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Top Xp Freeware that every user needs part 3

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Free Album Art Cover Downloader

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