Rate Discuss free software off the Net

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Hunter368

Hunter368

Tech Sergeant
2,145
17
Nov 5, 2005
Winnipeg
I did a search for a thread on this subject and could find nothing so here we go. This is what I thought would be helpful to us all. Rate and discuss and free useful or fun software that we can get off the net. It can be about anything you want. Please is there is spyware that is attached to using it make sure you say so.

Here is a few I use, some I am sure you know of but I hope maybe some will be helpful to you.

Ad-Aware - Free, great for getting rid of annoying spyware.

Housecall - Free. great for getting rid of spyware, viruses and it tells you vulnerabilities on your computer. Very useful.

Imageshack - Free, Offers easy upload tools and automatically generates HTML links for use on other sites, boards, and blogs.

Limewire - Online home of LimeWire peer-to-peer file sharing program, letting users share MP3s, JPEGS. It is good for finding music on and videos, movies etc. But careful there is alittle too much adult content there for my liking. There is much better peer - to - peer sites but Limewire is sooooo easy to operate.
 
ENDITALL
This is, without a doubt, the PC user's best friend! It closes all the TSR- Terminate-and-Stay-Resident that sap system resources from you even if you are not using the programs. Those cute little icons in your tray all take power you need to run games and sims. System resources are diluted an average of 10% with just three or four running plus the non-closeable Windows ones like Explorer and the tray applet itself.

Yes you can key "ctl+alt+del" or whatnot, depending on your Windows version, to close them one by one but Enditall does it all at once with a couple of clicks. Depending on the version of Windows running, you will see a difference in percentage. With things in Win 95/98 all closed up I got 93-94% free resources and with ME I got 91%. XP no longer shows resources available.

Most importantly, if you plan to play a game or run a combat simulator you should do it from a fresh boot. If you use several programs like Word, a scanner and image software and accessed the web first even using Enditall will not free up all you can by rebooting. Vestiges of the programs lurk in your system no matter what. So boot up, use Enditall and go directly to your game for the best results. You can protect any TSRs you want with Enditall to not shut down. Nice.

Keep the number of pop up icons installed in the system tray to a minimum. Go to "my computer" and find the proper folder and click on the icon to find them. Go to the Start Up menu and delete all start-up icons! It may take a few seconds more to start up the program but it relieves the clutter and allows faster Windows loading too. For that matter desktop icons that are not often used can be removed as well. You can make a desktop folder with all your shortcuts inside instead of having them strewn across your screen. XP has tons of TSRs running at start up, which I've closed with no ill results. I can't be forceful enough in this point- Keep it clean and simple!

There has been a change to where programs are doing less automatic start on boot up and are not placing icons on desktops and in trays. In years gone by intsalling a program meant all that schlock showed up on your machine. So even programs you use once in a month were hovering there robbing strength form your system.

There is an Enditall2 out there and features a RAM booster but I like the original better and it works even in Windows XP with Service Pack 2. ZDNet: Tech News and White Papers for IT Professionals has the latest version but the simpler 1.0 original can be found using a search engine to a download site.

SISOFTWARE SANDRA
There exist too many free diagnostic utilities to list to gauge various benchmarks and performance with problem areas highlighted. You should try a few to see if they suit your needs. Sandra has two versions. One is a freeware edition and the other is the Pro edition. Being cheap I've used the free one with good results to diagnose my system and find interesting things.

The Pro version allows 50 areas to be separately analyzed with the free edition giving some less, but all your vital hardware is covered. For example, "Windows memory" is analyzed but "memory resources" is not. Actually, Cacheman can cover that. It may tell you that you video card is producing 60 MB out of 64 MB and break that down further and show refresh rate plus a long list of supported modes. It produces almost more info than you can digest. What the free version doesn't cover I've found not lacking.

There is a long list of tips and suggested settings to make that the analysis gives you to improve performance. You can benchmark components of your system against others. These are nicely shown in graphic form. This is probably the best diagnostic and can't hurt anything on your system.

Go to http://www.sisiftware.co.uk/sandra
 
EASYCLEANER
Another freeware utility I use is called EasyCleaner. You can safely clean out all that silly stuff that Windows will not throw out on your registry. Over time they can amount to hundreds of files of all sizes that do nothing. Many are temporary web pages you've visited. EasyCleaner will search for duplicate files and unnecessary files that are, perhaps, still on your hard drive after deleting a program or old game. The utility sees if they are connected to anything and then deletes them if you wish. If you have any backed up files with the .BAK extension EasyCleaner will target them so if you have ones that you must keep do not highlight them for removal or make a new extension name.

It is a simple task for EasyCleaner to round up the invalid registry entries and ask you if it can delete them. I have always eradicated all of them with no ill results. Again, a lot of invalid registry entries can contribute in slowing things down overall.

EasyCleaner is multilingual by user choice and you can toggle what you want it to clean. For example when running checks on "unnecessary files" you can choose to send them to the recycle bin or permanently delete them. And you can choose which files to "ignore." . Again, how much this contributes to the health of you PC I don't know, but it is logical to get rid of your baby clothes by the time you begin college and throw out stuff cluttering your machine. You can easily choose not to delete your system restore files.

All commands prompt you to make sure you really want to perform the deletions. There's a handy pie chart that will show you how much space any folder or program is using compared to the H.D. in whole. As an example Windows 95 uses 7% for program files while ME uses 11%. With XP it's a huge 21%.

There is a later version than the 1.7f that does work in XP.

2.06.380 is the latest version which is a new, stand alone from the version 1.7 and not an upgrade. The new version has several new features in addition to the older version. You can make changes to the Start Up menu and it notes start up items that are suspicious too, like ad ware/spy ware implants on your machine. A feature allows the user to clear cookies, history, and temporary files in the same way possible as using the control panel.

I have both versions on my computer. I like the way the original cleans the registry better but the newer version does other cool things. These utilities do no harm and have easy access to check for updates.

See sites below or http://wwwsaunalahti.fi/tonihele
http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/files/EClea2_0.exe is the site for the 2.0 version
 
well it's that time of year again- finally our norton subscription's about to run out, so i'll need some new anti-virus software, either free from the net or from a shop, either way, so what does everyone else use? any reccomendations?
 
well norton sucked :lol: caused tons of problems- even restarted the computer several times disgust so you guys think everything'll be safe enough with AVG?
 
Went to download the program.

From the website:

"SORRY!

Unfortunately the very useful formerly-freeware utility EndItAll2 which I have praised and recommended for years is no longer available free of charge to end users. While there are a number of copies still floating around the web for those who look hard enough due to the intervention of the Ziff-Davis, Inc legal team and their false accusations to my ISP that I personally have been providing their copywrited program, links to the program can no longer be found on this web site. Those prepared to pay for a subscription can find it available at winmag.com"

Oh well.
 
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