PC Decrapifier

logoImagine this, you just bought a new netbook and even with a completely newly installed system you experience that it takes 3-5 minutes to start the pc (where it should only take 1-2 minutes), so what went wrong!?

Well often it is caused by stuff as Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar and whatever “crap” the manufacturer stuffs onto a new pc..

Now you could go ahead and start cleaning up yourself, that is uninstall all the strange “crap” that is installed OR you could just download a neat pice of software “PC DeCrapifier” and this nice free software will deal with the “crap” for you by removing it – simple and easy..

Problemo solved.

/by

AutoIT3 – Excellent scripting tool

, ,

autoit3If you once in a while work with installing software, then you HAVE to check this out.

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite

It is a scripting language that will make it very easy to install and modify installed software installations, it uses a very intuitive VB variant that is very easy to understand and the help is just wonderful.  One of the VERY neat features is that once you have completed your install script you simply compile it and viola you have an .exe file, thus you can simply add an install.exe file to the package you wish to distribute and the enduser do not need to have any scripting engine etc. installed, it IS neat..

So you might think, “well if its a VB vaiant, why not just make the whole thing as a VB-Script” – well you could – but have you ever tried to access files/registry etc via a VB script, well sure it is possible but the code quickly become unnessesary complex, this scripting language is straight out of the bag – copyfile( from, to) as easy as that.

The scripting engine has support for;
System variabels (eg. @StartMenu = location of startmenu, @StartMenuCommonDir = location of All users start menu etc etc.)
File management (copy / delete / move files)
Directory management (copy / delete / move directories)
Registry access (read write)
Replay keystrokes

and a whole lot more..

This is from the introduction in the help file;
Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
Manipulate windows and processes
Interact with all standard windows controls
Scripts can be compiled into standalone executables
Create Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
COM support
Regular expressions
Directly call external DLL and Windows API functions
Scriptable RunAs functions
Detailed helpfile and large community-based support forums
Compatible with Windows 95 / 98 / ME / NT4 / 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008
Unicode and x64 support
Digitally signed for peace of mind
Works with Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC)

Inspiration;
If you are interested I have created an uninstall script for McAfee Virus Scan and ePO agent,

you can download it here for inspiration;
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.au3 
or the compiled EXE version here
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.exe

For more on uninstalling McAfee Virus Scan and ePO please see https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=147

/1 Comment/by

File check-summing – MD5

,

winmd5_screenshotSome times you download large files and you might want to verify the integrity of the file, or it could be that you are the distrustful type and simply want to verify the file integrity just because you can!?

MD5 is an older check-summing algorithm, basically you put data through this algorithm and it spits out a long check-sum – change as much as a comma in the file or text and the check-sum changes.  MD5 is no longer considered ‘safe’ as some vulnerabilities have been discovered, however it would still be complicated to ‘fake’ the right check-sum for a file – so for something as trivial as file check-summing I would consider MD5 safe enough – then again it depends what are you looking for corruption errors or deliberate attempts of tampering (for the latter you should perhaps go with SHA1 instead).

Fine, so you got the MD5 check-sum (eg. 73f48840b60ab6da68b03acd322445ee) from the website, how do you compare it to the file you just downloaded?

Well I found this util which is free and fairly easy to use.
http://www.winmd5.com/?rid=winmd5

Direct Download

/by

Duplicate files cleaner

,

dc1zoomStumbled across this pice of software “Duplicate Cleaner“, a utility to remove duplicate files on you harddisk – a growing problem with the harddisk sizes these days, I guess I alone havearound 4TB disk storage and I would be VERY surprised if there was not a duplicate file or two.  The software also supports hardlinks which sounds interesting.

I will be testing this software in the near future.

Screenshots here;
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner/screenshots

/by

DVD Backup made easy (excellent for digi pictures)

,

2009-08-28_2308Have you ever tried to burn your collection of digital photos or mp3 files to DVD?  Sure you have, how did you accomplish it?  By sorting files into groups of 4.6gb and burning one dvd at the time?  Most people do it this way, you could also use winrar or other and create compressed files with a size of 4.6gb (one per dvd) – however that is not optimal if you later wish to extract just that ONE file you deleted by accident or if one DVD gets corrupted…

What to do!?  Well I stumbled across this blog post;
http://www.jonnysblog.com/2009/04/12/how-to-split-directories-to-span-dvd%E2%80%99s/

Where several utilities are mentioned;
SizeMove (see above link for screenshot)
SizeMe

I also stumbled across;
LargeBackup2DVD (a full featured backup solution)

UPDATE;
A related product Dirsplit has come to my attention, this appear to be more related to sorting than size, but may still be interesting to you;
http://code.google.com/p/dirsplit/

/1 Comment/by

Gparted partition tool – freeware

,

gpartedNeed to repartition your harddisk?  Don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for Partition Magic?

Well you may be in luck by visiting;
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Here you will find a linux iso of a utility called Gparted, maybe its worth a look before you order Partition Magic 🙂

/by

Nero 9 FREE version (not just trial)

nero9Nero has released a FREE limited version of their popular CD/DVD burner software.

Get it here;
http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-nero9-free.php

Screenshots here;
http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/nerofree.htm

Review here (does not sound too promising);
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/nerofree.html

/by

Fastcopy a possible alternative to Robocopy

,

You may be using Robocopy when copying files, Robocopy is an older Microsoft command line utility (even though a GUI has later been created) that can copy files in a particular robust way (Robocopy actually stands for Robust copy), the trick is that you can specify a lot of parameters eg. copy NTFS rights, mirror a directory structure and much much more.

However I just stumbled over an interesting freeware utility, this utility seem to offer many of the same options plus a bunch of new once..  

Among the the interesting plus features is one I have often sighed “move one at the time”, say you need to move a LARGE directory structure on a server to a new location on the same drive and as a twist you need to inharit NEW ntfs rights (the ntfs rights from the top folder in the new structure) – you could not just use the build in drag and drop move in windows as you would also move the NTFS rights (as its the same drive) (yes of cause you could afterwards change the NTFS rights but that takes a lot of time)…  but now you can set Fastcopy to just move one file at the time.  Sure there were other other ways of doing this, but this however is quite neat..

Other interesting features is speed limiting, less intensive processor usage, verify, filtering and many many more.

If you liked Robocopy and Terracopy you will likely also like Fastcopy.
http://www.ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

fastcopy

/by

Uptime – when was a server restarted

Ever wanted to know just how long a Windows 2003 server has been running (or rather when it was last restarted)?  In unix and many other os’s you can simply type uptime and hit enter and viola you have the answer, however not in Windows 200x…  But winding time back to the good old Windows NT4 days, Microsoft actually thought of this and created a small commandline that would do just this, however afterwards it was abandoned or forgotten…

But it’s actually still there (if you know where to look), so download it here and put it on your Windows box, and then you can simply goto a command prompt and type uptime 🙂  nice..

Download here;
http://download.microsoft.com/download/winntsrv40/install/uptime_1.01/nt4/en-us/uptime.exe

UPTIME, Version 1.01
(C) Copyright 1999, Microsoft Corporation

Uptime [server] [/s ] [/a] [/d:mm/dd/yyyy | /p:n] [/heartbeat] 
[/? | /help] server  Name or IP address of remote server to process.
/s  Display key system events and statistics. 
/a  Display application failure events (assumes /s). 
/d:  Only calculate for events after mm/dd/yyyy. 
/p:  Only calculate for events in the previous n days. 
/heartbeat  Turn on/off the system's heartbeat 
/? Basic usage. /help  Additional usage information.

Source;
http://frankdzedzy.com/2008/06/06/check-windows-uptime-stats-w-uptimeexe/

/by

Ipod/Iphone audiobooks

,

abc_ss_small_shdIf you have a bunch of Audiobooks lying around and want to use them on your Ipdo/Iphone then it’s an advantage to convert them to .M4B files (then your device will remember where you left off the last time you listened, and not as .MP3 where you have to use the slider to get to where you were)..

I found this free util that will assist you, it’s not perfect – but it works most of the time and it’s free 🙂

http://www.freeipodsoftware.com/

/by