Restore deleted files from NTFS and FAT drives

How many times in your life you accidentally clean your wastebasket on your desktop and felt sorry a minute ago. Too late, the file you planned restoring was gone forever. The tool presented in this publication will change the situation. You will be able to get your file back with high probability for the success, if the time between deletion and recovery attempt is small.

SoftPerfect File Recovery is a free and useful tool to restore accidentally deleted files from hard and floppy disks, USB flash drives, CF and SD cards and other storage media. It supports the popular file systems such as FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and NTFS5 with compression and encryption. If your important files disappeared and you can’t find them in the recycle bin, try this software product and get the files back to life. Easy to use, no installation is required.

MAIN FEATURES

* Lightweight (268 KB only).
* Supports FAT & NTFS.
* Supports compressed and encrypted volumes.
* Supports most storage media.
* Easy to use, just run it!
* Completely portable, works from removable media, and does not leave any residual traces.
* Software is free to use for any purposes, as soon as the code is not modified.

Note that when you restore the files from the main boot-up Hard Drive, the success rate might be lower due to the considerations of the time to recovery parameter. The software is able to restore accidentally deleted files from built-in hard disk drives as long as two the following conditions are met:

1. The file was deleted recently and no writing was made on the volume after that.
2. So, if you delete a file from a system volume (e.g. C:’), there are little chances to restore it because the OS is constantly writing on this volume (logs, registry branches, etc).

Developers Website: http://www.softperfect.com/products/filerecovery/

Direct Downloading Link: http://www.ziddu.com/download/2799320/file_recovery.exe.html

Screen:

SoftPerfect File Recovery

Free Download Readon TV Movie Radio Player

Readon Technology, a fresh startup company from New Zealand, presents new freeware Windows based utility (Vista supported): Readon TV Movie Radio Player. The developers announced is as “revolutionary new software that allows you to watch Live Satellite TV broadcasts and latest movies directly on your computer. This new technology, called TV over IP, requires no additional equipment and gives you access to a brand new world of digital entertainment”.

Readon TV Movie Radio Player

While the technology cannot be considered absolutely new, and there are already multiple utilities on the market, Readon managed to introduce a new flavor to the competition. The software is well-built, with nice graphic interface, and easy operation. Porn lovers might enjoy adult channels included in the application, while family-style users have the ability to disable or password-protect the adult content.

Main Features

* Thousands of TV and radio channels from all around the world.
* Watch latest movies (even those showing in the cinema now!)
* A large variety of genres including movies, comedy, news, general TV, kids, music, pop, jazz, classic etc.
* Includes adult porn TV channels and videos on demand.
* Record online music to MP3 audio files.
* Record TV into ASF format video files.
* Adult videos search engine
* User password protected to disable viewing of adult content.
* Free to use.
* Auto updatable channel lists.
* Auto shut down.

Developers Website: http://www.readontech.com/aboutinternettv.html

Direct Downloading Link: http://www.ziddu.com/download/2760826/setupTV.zip.html

Screen:

Readon TV Movie Radio Player

How to Convert DVD to iPod Format

Do you have a ton of DVD’s? Are you interesting in watching them on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV? The free multi-platform open-source software Handbrake is everything you need to rip DVD’s into MPEG-4 video files for these purposes.


System Requirements:

• An iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.
• 500 MHz processor or better with at least 16MB of video RAM.
• QuickTime 7.0.3 or later.
• iTunes 6.0.1 or later.

1) Download and install HandBrake. If you download version 0.9.2 you must be running Leopard. If you are using Tiger or older, you should download 0.9.1

Direct Link for Windows OS HandBrake version: http://www.ziddu.com/download/2733667/HandBrake-0.9.2-Win32_GUI.exe.html

To download installation files for other operating systems, go to the developers Website: http://handbrake.fr/

2) Place the DVD you wish to rip into your DVD drive and open HandBrake you just installed. If your computer tries to play the DVD automatically, close the program so that only HandBrake is accessing the DVD.

3) Click the Source button in the top left corner. Then choose your DVD drive and click Open. At this point HandBrake will begin to scan the DVD. This could take a couple minutes.

 

4) Click the drop down box next to Title and choose the longest title if you wish to copy the entire DVD (this does not apply to Episode based DVDs).

5) The default Destination is the Desktop. Change this to wherever you wish to save the DVD file.

6) If the presets are not already displayed on the right side of the window, click the Toggle Presets button in the upper right corner to display them.

7) For the iPhone and iPod Touch you should choose iPhone / iPod Touch.
If you have an iPod video or iPod classic and want high resolution (much larger file size, good for 160GB versions) choose iPod High-Rez.

Lastly, if you have an iPod Video or iPod classic and want smaller files (good for 80GB versions) choose iPod Low-Rez.

 

TIP: For better quality, choose 2-pass encoding. This will take longer to encode but will look better.

8.) Click the Audio & Subtitles tab. Here you should choose the language you prefer under “Track 1:”. Also, be sure toset Subtitles to None. The Sample rate should be between 32 and 48 while the Bitrate should be set between 112 and 160.

 

9) At this point you should be ready to begin ripping your DVD. Click Start to begin.

10) Once your DVD is finished ripping all you need to do is add it to your iTunes library (or whatever iPod manager you use) and then transfer it to your iPod.


Troubleshooting If you have trouble with the video and audio settings from the presets, you should try the following settings instead. These settings are more strict and should work on any iPod with video capabilities.
File format: MP4 file Codecs: MPEG-4 Video/AAC Audio Average bitrate (kbps): 700 (again lower numbers mean less quality and smaller files) Check 2-pass encoding Picture settings -> set Width: 320 and the height will auto adjust to something close to 240 (will be lower for widescreen movies)
Once you find the settings that work the best for you, you can save them as a custom preset.

Additional Reading:
http://wlmtips.com/2008/06/02/how-to-rip-dvds-to-your-ipod-using-handbrake-mac-monday/
http://ipod.about.com/od/addingvideotoyouripod/ss/ipod_dvd_ih.htm
http://www.methodshop.com/gadgets/tutorials/handbrake/index.shtml

Video Tutorial:

Video HandBrake Tutorial

Free Utility for Easy Hard Drive Cloning

PC INSPECTOR Clone Maxx is the new professional DOS-based hard drive copying program from CONVAR. Using the new direct DMA support, data can be copied from hard drives in high speed mode with speeds up to 3.3 GB per minute.

This high speed is achieved by PC INSPECTOR™ clone maxx through intelligent inspection of the PC motherboard and the hard drive controller. The software independently determines the fastest data transmission rate and achieves these exceptional speeds through optimal utilization of the DMA chipset on the motherboard of your PC.

PC INSPECTOR™ clone maxx can be started directly from a boot diskette. The copying process is always based on the physical drive and is independent of the file system (e.g. FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, HPFS, NTFS, Ext2, Reiser, etc.) or the number of partitions. It also can be downloaded as ISO image file and needs to be burned to a CD, witch you will be able to boot for the drives copy session.

If you have chosen to download the program for boot up floppy creation, launch the executable file. The software will create a bootable disk. Now, you can restart the PC with the it. After the PC has booted, you can start the program by entering cmaxx. You can choose your operational language by starting the program with the following parameters:

cmaxx -Language

Utility supports the following languages:

-DE German
-SP Spanish
-FR French
-IT Italian
-DU Dutch
-US English

You can also select the language after booting the program, from the menu list.

Note that you cannot copy separate partitions, directories, or individual files, as it is designed exclusively for the entire Hard Drive cloning. It also does not work for External Hard Drives.

Developers Website: http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/clone_maxx/info.htm?Language=1

Direct Downloading Links:
For Floppy Creation: http://www.ziddu.com/download/2695191/pci_clonemaxx.exe.html

Google Hard Drive on your PC

Google Desktop uses the power of Google’s search capabilities, developed for online searches, but instead of searching the web, you search the files stored on your own computer.

Windows already provides you with built-in capabilities to search for files and folders, scanning your PC, but the functionality of this feature is basic, and the time of search is significant. Google Desktop is lightening fast, and allows you to display the search results in order of either date or relevancy.

Google Desktop can index several different types of data, including email, web browsing history from Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, office documents in the Open Document and Microsoft Office formats, instant messenger transcripts from AOL, Google, MSN, Skype, Tencent QQ, and several multimedia file types. Additional file types can be indexed through the use of plug-ins. Google Desktop allows the user to control which types of data are indexed by the program.

After you install the application, Google Desktop starts indexing the email, files and web history stored on your computer. This one-time indexing occurs only when your computer is idle for more than 30 seconds, so it shouldn’t slow down your machine’s performance, but depending on the number of items, this process can take a total of several hours. Desktop also makes sure your index stays up to date by adding new email as you receive it, files as you update them and web pages as you view them.

A prominent feature of Google Desktop is the Sidebar, which holds several common Gadgets and resides off to one side of the desktop. The Sidebar is available with the Microsoft Windows version of Google Desktop only. The Sidebar comes pre-installed with the following gadgets:

• Email - a panel which lets one view one’s Gmail messages.
• Scratch Pad - here one can store random notes; they are saved automatically
• Photos - displays a slideshow of photos from the "My Pictures" folder (address can be changed)
• News - shows the latest headlines from Google News, and how long ago they were written. The News panel is personalized depending on the type of news you read.
• Weather - shows the current weather for a location specified by the user.
• Web Clips - shows recent posts from RSS news feeds.
• Google Talk - If Google Talk is installed, double clicking the window title will dock it to one’s sidebar.

Like the Windows Taskbar, the Google Desktop sidebar can be set to Auto-Hide mode, where it will only appear once the user moves the mouse cursor towards the side where it resides. If not on auto-hide, by default the sidebar will always take up about 1/6 - 1/9 of one’s screen (depending on the screen resolution), and other windows are forced to resize. However, the sidebar can be resized to take less space, and you can disable the "always on top" feature in the options. With the auto-hide feature on, the sidebar temporarily overlaps maximized windows.

Another feature that comes with the Sidebar is alerts. When the Sidebar is minimized, new e-mail and news can be displayed on a pop-up window above the Windows Taskbar.

While there are several alternatives on the market for the desktop searching, no utility can beat the Google Desktop, so this software is highly recommended for all users.

Developers Web Site: http://desktop.google.com/

Additional Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
http://www.businessbrainwaves.com/blog/2006/06/useful-free-software/google-desktop
http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/
http://www.cnet.com.au/software/office/0,239035383,240056887,00.htm

Direct Download Center with 100% AdSense Revenue Sharing

DirectDownloadCenter.com is a free software download portal. There, you can download any Freeware and Shareware utilities directly from publisher. Pretty unusual feature of this site is the fact that the system has been setup to share 100% AdSense revenue to all contributing members from all traffic that they sent to the portal. Check that. It is quite easy and painless to use DirectDownloadCenter.com to earn advertising revenue, while being able to dawnload a free software and share it with friends.

There are two ways of earning money:

1. Link to any page of DirectDownloadCenter.com using referrer code, provided to you. Traffic sent from your link will display Google Ads using your AdSense ID for 90% of the time. The referral link you post on your site will look like that:

Free Download 50000+ Freeware Shareware NOW.

2. Refer your friends to be new affiliates and get your ads displayed on the traffic links they send for 10% of the time. Just link to any pages using your referrer code and wait for his/her registration.

It is a fair play, and you have nothing to loose - publish or share software with your friends and start getting money too. Welcome to the club!

Make Money With Adsense Without Your Website. Apply now!

The portal carries respected rating 4 of 5 in the RateItAll list of the 32 Top Freeware Directories on the Web: http://www.rateitall.com/t-24284-top-freeware-directories.aspx

Digital Images Printing Program

Couple of years ago, I was looking on the freeware software market for convenient application for the pictures printing. With quality paper being quite expensive, it is not a bad idea to reorganize pictures for the most optimal paper usage. At the time, I could not find an application, which fitted my modest needs.

It seems that the Pos Multiple Image Printing Wizard is exactly what I was looking. It is a simple free computer utility allowing printing easily multiple images on a single paper page in various ways and in multiple formats. The software comes with many build in templates and effects you can select from. With Pos Multiple Image Printing Wizard you can also create impressive photo albums, artworks, posters, collages and much more. Software is designed for all versions of Windows Operating System Windows 98 and higher, including support for Windows Vista.

Developers Website:
http://www.image-editor.net/Pos-Multiple-Image-Printing-Wizard.asp

Screenshot:

Print Manager

Direct downloading link:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2612697/PosMIPrintingUtility_Setup.exe.html

Free Avast Anti Virus

We have a guest blogger today! It is Rudy, my virtual friend from YouSayToo Community. He will present the article on the very useful free antivirus program - Avast!

After having a little problem with AVG 8 free edition, I thought it was a good chance for me to try a new free antivirus from ALWIL Software based in Prague, Czech Republic. As a matter of fact, I was very happy with AVG 8 until it displayed a warning box telling me that "avgscanx.exe" had a problem during full scan. The scanning itself was stopped or interrupted and not completed. I could not find why this happened whenever a full scan was executed.

 

The brand new replacement was Avast Antivirus 4 Home Edition which is free for non commercial and home use only. The package already includes anti-spyware protection and anti-rootkit detection as explained in its home website athttp://www.avast.com/. But you have to register and get a licence key in order to use it for one year period. After one year, it will expire and you have to re-register again.

 

The product has On-Access Scanner with 7 "providers" as follows:

1. Instant Messaging: "While chat itself would not impose any serious security risks in terms of viruses, today’s IM applications are far from being just chatting tools: most of them support more or less sophisticated file sharing methods - which may quite easily lead to virus infections, if not properly monitored."
   
2. Internet Mail: It is supposed to scan all incoming and outcoming e-mail when I use Outlook Express as explain in their website, ie: "it is a generic scanner working on the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4/NNTP protocol level. It is capable of protecting any existing e-mail client that uses these protocols". But it seems that I cannot get my Outlook Express working well. You can see from Comodo Firewall Active Connection List depicted below that there are 4 open ports for these feature, ie: 12025 (SMTP), 12110 (POP3), 12119 and 12143. I use Gmail and Yahoo Mail which use SSL with port 465 (SMTP) and 995 (POP3) to connect to their servers. I try to use 12025 and 12110 for connection between Outlook Express and Avast but it fails. So that is the end. I cannot find alternatives. Maybe someone on the net can tell me :-)
   
3. Network Shield: "This module provides protection against known Internet worms/attacks. It analyses all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. It can be viewed as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely, an IDS - Intrusion Detection System)."
   
4. P2P Shield: "The P2P protection module doesn’t need much explanation - on today’s P2P networks (such as Kazaa) there are thousands of infected files, and an effective protection is a must."
   
5. Standard Shield: "File system protection ensures that no virus will be started on the computer. It offers a wide range of settings, such as the possibility to specify that files will be scanned during copying, or that the scanning will include files with given set of extensions only."
   
6. Web Shield: "Web Shield is a unique feature of avast! that enables it to monitor and filter all HTTP traffic coming from the Web sites on the Internet. Since an increasing number of viruses (and other malware, such as adware, spyware and dialers) are being distributed via the World Wide Web, the need for an effective countermeasures has also increased. The Web Shield acts as a transparent HTTP proxy and is compatible with all major web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox, Mozilla and Opera." It is good to have this feature but if you set its sensitivity to "high", the performance of web browser will be low. It shows the pages slowly. Therefore I set it to "normal" in order to show web pages faster. All HTTP connections at port 80 are intercepted and scanned by Avast. I still set the proxy setting in Firefox to "No Proxy"and the interception stil works.
   
7. (Microsoft) Outlook / Exchange: I turn it off. It only works for Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) and Microsoft Exchange only.

 

Conclusion: I like all the features available in Avast with some setting adjustment but unfortunately its e-mail scanner cannot work with SSL for Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Therefore I rely completely on Gmail and Yahoo virus scanner to do that (if only the Gmail or Yahoo virus scanner is also active for their POP mail?). Because Avast e-mail scanner is useless for me, I would turn it off later.
That’s it for now. Please let me know your comments or suggestion to share with us... Thanks!

The article originally was published on Rudy’s blog Dummy Review.
Come chat with us at YouSayToo, and make money as well, as this is a place where you get Google AdSense revenues share for plain participation.

You can meet Rudy and me there quite frequently. See you…

Advanced Free Download Manager

As defined by Wikipedia, download manager is a computer program dedicated to the task of downloading possibly unrelated stand-alone files from the Internet for storage. The modern operating systems are equipped with built-in downloading capabilities, however, since they lack any advanced functional features, market is filled with the better alternatives. Most of the downloader managers are free and can be considered as valid replacement to enhance the downloading abilities for the computer users.

One of the descent representatives of the download manager utilities is Free Download Manager (FDM), formally known as 3wGet, supporting all Windows Operating systems, including Windows Vista. Although the FDM website claims it only runs on 32-bit releases of Windows, testing has proved that it also runs on 64-bit releases of Windows (in 32-bit mode).

Main Features:


Download acceleration

Free Download Manager splits files into several sections and downloads them simultaneously, allowing you to use any type of connection at the maximum available speed. With FDM download speed increases, or even more!


Resuming broken downloads

When the downloading process is interrupted, you needn’t start from the beginning again. Free Download Manager can resume broken download from where it was interrupted saving your time, nerves and money.

Smart file management and powerful scheduler

With FDM you can easily organize downloaded files by their type, placing them in predefined folders. A smart scheduler allows you to start and pause downloading files, as well as perform other actions (launch other applications, establish or hang up connection, etc.) at the set time.


Adjusting traffic usage

There are several traffic usage modes. You can adjust traffic usage for browsing the Internet and downloading files at the same time.

Site Explorer

Site Explorer lets you view the folders structure of a web site and easily download necessary files or folders.


HTML Spider

You can download whole web pages or even whole web sites with HTML Spider. The tool can be adjusted to download files with specified extensions only.

Simultaneous downloading from several mirrors

Free Download Manager is able to download files from several mirrors simultaneously.


Zip files partial download

Free Download Manager lets you download only the necessary part of a zip file.

Active spyware and adware protection through active communication among users

You can read what other community members say about the file you are going to download, right in the program window, and also leave your own opinion about the file you downloaded. In this way FDM users are always warned against useless or malicious files.


Automatic files format conversion

You can automatically download Flash Videos from YouTube and other similar video hosting services and convert to the more suitable formats on the fly.


Multi language support

Free Download Manager is translated into 30 languages. Supported languages are: Macedonian, Serbian, Albanian, Croatian, Korean, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese Traditional, Chinese, Czech, German, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Uzbek, Greek, Vietnamese, Slovenian, Persian.

Option for portability

Download the installer and install to the default folder. Run the program and select File, Create Portable Version to copy the portable version to a folder of your choice. Finally uninstall the program. Launch fdm.exe.

Developers Website: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/index.htm

Direct downloading link: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/freedownload/fdminst.exe

Free Download Manager is rated 4.5 out of 5 on the Rating list of the 47 (as of today) freeware download managers at RateItAll.

If are are familiar with this software you can add your rating and review directly at the widget below:

Download Managers - Freeware Reviews on RateItAll