The New Freebie Thread

[dr_ml422]

Read the opening description. Sounds pretty good, and like Sand Boxie in a way correct? Has Sand Boxie been updated to be compatible w/7 x64 etc...?

At the moment MS Essentials has been pretty good. After some conflicts w/Avira, I think, and Malware Bytes I just decided to install Essentials.

[MilesAhead]

Basically it makes a shadow copy of your system partition and when you reboot, it discards any changes. It was hard to see in the fine print but I think the freebie offer died on Dec. 14. But there is a free version that many people use. Me, I don't want to run resident av anyway, much less inside some other protection, so the free version should be good enough. At some point you keep bouncing light through mirrors the image isn't worth watching. Likewise every layer of protection robs you of some performance. I have image backup. That seems to work well for now with the ocassional scan.

On 32 bit I can use Sandboxie. I've been looking at this for my 64 bit machine but anything that relies on a reboot to put everything back, well if your bootup mechanism is what got attacked, the restore probably won't work. Could be good if you let kids use your system. Make them run it inside the shadow copy etc..

[dr_ml422]

It discards any changes it deems harmful though, and not made by you correct?

I just use 1 AV right now myself, w/safe hexing. I'm going to read up on the image back ups because I really don't know about them, and how they work. Only thing I know is that it makes a image of your system etc...

I have True 2010 now, and it has a very convenient 1 click backup icon along w/all the other goodies. I'm so use to cloning I've yet bothered to even read about the Image options. They sound good though, because it keeps a record of your last image, and justs adds the newest changes on the next 1.

I suppose you use several discs for the Images? Or you load them on a HDD? You still using a online scanner every once in a while?

[MilesAhead]

I think the free version doesn't allow you to save changes. The paid one has an option. I haven't really looked at a demo or anything but the impression I get is that once you turn it on the only way to turn it off, is to boot the machine. If you could turn it back off by pressing a button, then the theory is some malware macro could press the button etc..
You'd have to look at the version comparison on the site.

The image backup programs usually exclude the swap file, and any hibernation file, and then it compresses the partition image. On my system typically if I have 30 GB disk space used, it can compress the backup image to around 20 GB. I don't bother with incremental backups because usually it's a pain in the ass when you have to restore. I'm a believer in a self-contained backup. I don't want to have to go get one file so I can then use another file. When a backup gets old I delete it. I rotate HDs using docking station and also I have some external USB drives. I always have a recent backup that's not connected to the network.

Of course I keep my system disks lean. I try to run with 75% or higher free space. That way I don't have to worry about incremental this or that. I just back up the whole partition. Usually takes 15 or 20 minutes to do a backup. A restore 45 minutes to an hour. No sweat.

[dr_ml422]

I'll read up on Image Backups just to know about it, and how it works. I probably asked you this before, but why not just clone the system disk, and throw it in whenever you have to/want to? You already have the docking stations/external USB Drives to use as the target Disk. I guess since you do a lot of software trials etc... you'd rather do Image Backups? Then again you're using a HDD to do it, if that wasn't the case then I see a reason to backup on something else to not frequently be using the HDDs.

[MilesAhead]

If you clone to HD you only have one copy of one backup afaik. I haven't used clone programs. You can put a whole bunch of backup images on one HD. I have no desire to open the box to stick a drive in to do a restore. If you have it set up with drive trays, or whatever they call those gizmos where you just slide a drive in a bay and flip the switch, then it may be easy. Take a look at the support video showing how to R&R a HD on HP Pavilion m9515y and you'll see why I don't want to swap drives out. That technician must have done 20 takes to make snapping that drive cage back into the case look easy. Imagine doing it after the machine is a couple of years old. No thanks.

[dr_ml422]

I knew there was a reason why besides the inconvenience of the HP PC. I will definitely look into Images, and see how they work etc... Could be good to have both. I build so I choose what case I want.

[MilesAhead]

If I had an easy to use case I could get into the swapping drives thing. But I don't really want to put one of those adapters for the drive to slide. Just not psyched. A couple of HPs ago they just had them bolted inside the front bezel. Take the side panel off, flip open the front. Then it was just unscrew 4 screws and disconnect 2 cables. Now it's a royal pita.

But one good thing about having a bunch of images is sometimes you realize you had some crud on your system about a week ago and didn't know it when you did the backup. You just delete that image. You don't have all your eggs in one basket so to speak. Plus it's kind of like a sloppy backup. You can mount the image file as a virtual drive and copy files out of it with most of them. Even the free version of Macrium Reflect does the image mounting bit. Pretty cool.

[MilesAhead]

Free One Year License for Returnil 2010 Home

http://dottech.org/freebies/13102

It claims both 32 and 64 bit Windows support.

btw GHacks claims to have an unlimited supply of licenses to give away. Here's the article:

http://www.ghacks.net/2009/12/15/christmas-giveaway-returnil-virtual-system-2010-home-lux/

Try the promo link and see if they send you a license.

edit: Yup. I just did it with another email address. They are still sending the licenses out.

[seomul]

comment

Thanks for sharing the link.

[MilesAhead]

Thanks for sharing the link.

Sure thing.

[MilesAhead]

Minefield (FireFox 3.7Pre alpha) w/2D GPU rendering

Anyone having super duper video cards may want to try the Minefield 3.7Pre with 2D GPU rendering enabled:

http://www.bassified.nl/f....win32.d2d.2009.12.20.zip

So far the things I've found broken are only:

Those pop-down program descriptions on TV Guide program listings don't show the text.

Silver Light video doesn't play.. or at least I haven't figured out how to use it whereas it does work in Firefox 3.6 betas 2 and 5.


I don't have a super video card but it does seem like the pages are rendered just a bit snappier. Others claim that scrolling as with the mouse wheel, has less jitter. Guess it depends on your GPU and how much stuff the page has to render.

The link is from a Mozilla programmer blog. I can't find the blog link now but if you are curious search the tech news sites and you should get info. Apparently 3D GPU rendering is in the works also.

[MilesAhead]

Fave Folder hotkey utility

I found that very often I was opening the same target folder for drag & drop operations. I wrote a small hotkey utility in AutoHotKey so that I can move folders to this target folder directly from the source without drag & drop. Also as a convenience you may hotkey on the desktop to just open the Fave Folder. By default the target is Documents but you may change this using the Tray Icon Menu.

The idea is to move folders with large files on the same partition via a Windows directory entry reassignment. Moving to a different partition is not prevented but unless the files are small I'd use Windows Drag & Drop or some command line copy function instead.

Also the selections for hotkey move must be folders only. Otherwise an error will be generated. For moving a mix of multiple files and folders use drag & drop. If there is an error during the move, a dialog pops up telling you which folder had the problem, then the loop continues if more than one folder was selected.

The program is a compiled AutoHotKey script. It supports any version of Windows that the latest AutoHotKey supports. If you get a warning from your av program, false positives are endemic to compiled AHK apps. Google yourself if you need reassurance.

Here's the page for download:

Hotkeys

[MilesAhead]

Here's one I noticed on Gizmo's site. A page of native 64 bit freeware:

http://www.freeware-guide.com/download/64bit.html

Right now I'm playing around with Q-Dir since it looks like my favorite file manager FreeCommander is never going 64 bit.

edit: I'm starting to get the hang of some of the Q-Dir features. It has "favorites" which is similar to Layouts in FreeCommander. The default setup is 4 panes. You can set each pane to a folder or drive, then name the entire configuration as a favorite. The cool thing is in the File menu it has a command to save the Current State to the desktop. It makes a shortcut on the desktop. I use 7stacks. This is handy to make a shortcut that corresponds to a favorite. That way I can open the program to that "layout" or favorite setup by selecting that shortcut. This makes it pretty easy to have shortcuts set up for different tasks. You can open more than one instance of Q-Dir and drag & drop between all the panes.

I haven't gotten into it enough to know if program launch with a selected file or folder is as easy as FreeCommander. But this program is native 64 bit. Unless I find something better I'm likely to use it on my Vista64 PC since 32 bit FreeCommander has noticeable lags on this machine.

The documentation is still sparse. There's an outline of the features and trial and error figures out the rest. So far the only hang was trying to access a USB drive over the network while it was busy with a large file copy. I had to use DTaskManager to kill it. That's the only glitch I've noticed in a couple of days of usage.

[MilesAhead]

Core Temp updated

Core Temp updated to 0.99.5.27

Now has an "overheat protection" thingy.

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/