PCTips3000 » tools

A Free 64-bit FTP Client For Windows, Finally!

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:02:59 +0000

Ever tried to find a FTP client fully compatible with your 64-bit Windows Vista or 7? Obviously, there’s not only one program to fit the description, but when talking about freebies that work properly on 64-bit operating systems, things are getting really interesting… and today I decided to tell you a few words about a free 64-bit FTP client for Windows, namely Null FTP.

The Null FTP client is available as both free and paid versions (this one’s called Null FTP Pro), and while the free edition has some limitations, most average users won’t feel the difference. Anyway, if you want to know what you’re missing, you should know that the free version does not allow Z compression, can only work with 3 concurrent transfers and the number of registered servers is also 3. At last, the free version has a TCP buffer size limited to 128KB.

These being said, I should also add multilanguage support, integrity checks, and the fact that you get no additional restrictions when using the free version, except those already mentioned above. Null FTP’s current version is 1.3, the setup package has 5.8 MB in size, and… I guess that’s all. Have a nice weekend, folks!

Linux System Monitor, Comin’ Up!

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:03:09 +0000

As more and more people start using computers, Linux is slowly gaining market share. I don’t care about the reasons, since I could go on and on and on about them – I simply look at what’s happening and act accordingly. Leaving aside music/video players and other really popular tools, Linux system monitors also are facing an increased demand, and today we’ll take a quick look at Conky.

Why Conky? The name is funny, it’s lightweight, has support for a bunch of popular music players, IMAP/POP3, and can even be extended using Lua support or any of your own pieces of code. Sounds pretty cool, right? Sure, you may say that this is a program for experts, but that is completely wrong, since Conky works great out of the box, although you may want to take a closer look at its documentation to take full advantage of all the goodies coming in the box…

This is the free Linux system monitor I have for you today, and if you want to see more screenshots, just go to this page. That’s all, folks!

System Rescue CD

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:11:39 +0000

What’s strange with the system troubleshooting CDs is the fact that you never have enough of them. How’s that? Think about data recovery, for example – you never know which software tool will be able to revive your defective hard drive, despite the fact you did this a hundred times already, so all that you need to do is try, try, try again. Hopefully, you’ll get lucky sooner or later…

… but since everyone is looking for freebies these days, let’s move on straight to System Rescue CD (SystemRescueCD, if you want). What about it? Oh, well, you can run it from a CD or even some USB stick, as long as your system is capable of booting from such a device (if it’s not really ancient, that shouldn’t be a problem), and if you want to download the latest version, you should go here.

The official mumbo-jumbo looks like this: “SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It comes with a lot of linux software such as system tools (parted, partimage, fstools, …) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It requires no installation. It can be used on linux servers, linux desktops or windows boxes. The kernel supports the important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).”

If you’re not scared of Linux, you should grab this at once. After all, you can easily troubleshoot Windows-based systems with it, and there’s plenty of documentation for beginners. Oh, yeah, and I should also remind you that we’re talking about a freebie, don’t you think? That’s all, folks, good luck!

Nero Burning ROM Problems?

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:19:05 +0000

For a really long time, Nero was the most popular CD/DVD burning software I bumped into. To be honest, it was the only CD/DVD burning software used by most people I knew, and when I started burning my own discs, I started using it without giving it a second thought. After a few years, when Nero 7 appeared, I tried it, cursed a few minutes, then got back to my old 6.x version I was using before that. In the months to follow, I slowly started to use various other CD/DVD burning tools, some for testing purposes only, other on a regular basis…

… and this takes us to the question I had in mind when I started writing this article: what kind of Nero Burning ROM problems can make one user switch to some other piece of code? In my case, it was the fact that Nero got bulkier and bulkier with each version, adding useless features with each new update, so from a nice CD/DVD burning tool with all the features most users needed, it grew to a ~1GB monster sporting a bunch of useless things. Sure, this happened with other programs and even operating systems (Norton Utilities, Windows Vista, anyone?), but Nero shouldn’t have changed. Oh, well, we must move on!

How can we move on and overcome those Nero Burning ROM problems, no matter their nature? The answer is simple – get your hands on an alternative! There are countless CD/DVD burning tools, some of them absolutely free, others available as commercial products, and I must say that I currently use Ashampoo Burning Studio Free (version 6), ImgBurn and a few other ones, and if I ever get bored or feel the need to change my gear… I can take a look here and get something else. In the end, that’s what I also recommend you to do – don’t get stuck with that old mammoth, move on and see how beautiful the software world can be!

Free Ping Tool For Windows

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 07 May 2010 06:57:09 +0000

Some rumors say that, lately, Google started to consider the speed of every site when awarding a ranking, so knowing how fast is yours when compared to the competition is a good action to take, before anything else. On the other hand, I think this is only a rumor, but anyway – knowing how fast is your server is still useful. After all, we all pay for our hosting plans, so we should know exactly what we get, right?

The free ping tool for Windows I just bumped into is called PingMaster and comes from AgataSoft, a company that released a few freebies and commercial programs so far. To download PingMaster, just go to this page and click the corresponding download link (the setup package has only 550KB). To use it… just install the thing, give it a go, and do what it takes, it’s as easy as 1-2-3!

No, I am not joking here! All you have to do is add the hosts to check (up to 5, unfortunately), set the maximum timeout and delay values, press the Start button, and let it run… Think about running this program continuously and saving the log to a file. Pretty useful when you say that your site was down, and the hosting company says it wasn’t!

More than being able to ping various locations, PingMaster also has a traceroute utility and works great with all popular Windows versions, including Vista and 7. Sweeet!

Hail & Kill… The Easy Way

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:00:26 +0000

“Hail & Kill” is one of my favorite Manowar songs, but this article doesn’t have anything to do with it. After all, now it’s called “searching for weapons of mass destruction” or “protecting human rights,” not “pillage & plunder,” although the result is about the same… Anyway, we’re going to kill some Windows processes now, but the tool I have in mind is way beyond Task Manager’s capabilities and it even surpasses the command prompt killing trick I told you about some time ago!

KillProcess is a tool for those who don’t like to kill same processes over and over again… no matter their reasons. For example, they may simply be tired of waiting for all programs to close when shutting down the computer, so why not kill them fast? According to the official product page, “KillProcess is an application assassin of the extreme kind. It can terminate almost any process on a Windows machine, including any service and process running in the system,” and it can even terminate protected Microsoft system processes. Sweet!

This program works with all popular Windows versions, from Windows 2000 to 7 and can be downloaded as a portable EXE file or, if you are old-fashioned and have no need for portability, you can also get it as a setup package. KillProcess allows you to create list of processes to kill, also offering features like the ability to search information about a certain process on the Internet or, even better, search video tutorial for an application that opened a certain process.

These being said, I won’t spoil any of the remaining fun, leaving the rest of this freebie to be revealed once you install it and start enjoying its features. That’s all, folks, so good luck, have a nice weekend, and don’t forget to hail & kill!!!

Web-Based FTP Client Needed? Here It Is!

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:34:53 +0000

If you hate installing stuff, I have some good news for you, in case you lived on a remote island so far – there are plenty of Web-based tools for most tasks you can think of! Even better, they are usually free, so if you use a FTP client only from time to time, there’s no need to install any single bit of code, since tools like Net2FTP can easily get the job done!

As you surely figured out already, Net2FTP is a Web-based FTP client, but it’s surely nice to see it has quite a few features, including a plain text editor, support for ZIP archives, rename/chmod capabilities and it can even filter out files based on the filename, last modification time and file size. Not bad for a free tool, don’t you agree?

To make things interesting even for developers, Net2FTP is also available for download, so you can host the script on your own server, allowing only connection to some FTP servers or using advanced rules (keyword-based filters, IP ban, and others). All in all, this is a tool worthy of everyone’s attention, so get to it, will you?

DuckLink, Free Screen Capture Utility For Windows

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:06:45 +0000

No matter the Windows version you’re using, there’s always something better than the tools included with it, at least for most tasks I can think of. While Windows Vista and Windows 7 improved the screen capture process a lot, by adding the Snipping Tool, I think there’s still room for another solution. In Windows XP, the tool I found today is simply awesome, so please allow me to introduce you DuckCapture, a tool coming in a 4.2 MB setup package and compatible with all Windows versions (or so it seems).

If you can get over the funny text in the first screen of the setup wizard (“This will install 2.1 on your computer.”), not to mention the funny name of the application itself, you’ll be rewarded with a nice little tool that can help you speed up the process of taking screenshots, also giving you more control at the same time. Its advanced options include the ability to include cursor in your shots or not, select clipboard or a file as output target (or choose a default target to use without prompting) and support for hotkeys, while output file formats available are BMP, JPEG and PNG – just fine for anyone, I think.

This is it, my friends – you gotta give this free screen capture tool a try, because I am sure you’ll love it, if you really need to take screenshots on a regular basis and using the PrintScreen key (or combining it with Alt) isn’t enough…

P.S. Just fixing that funny text in the setup program and the addition of a freehand selection tool should be enough to make this tool almost perfect!

File Conversion, As Easy As It Gets!

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:01:32 +0000

I hate file converters. Do you really want to know why? First, it’s because those junky converters available for ridiculous prices and full of spyware, and second, there’s also that file formats support part – no need to get into this deeper, because that would surely raise my blood pressure! Instead, I will give you a convenient way to convert most popular files to various formats without having to install anything. Sounds like a deal? It surely is, I tell you!

The deal goes like this – you go to Zamzar Beta, select the files to convert, choose the output format(a lot of popular ones available, such as 3GP, AVI, FLV, MP3, HTML, RTF and so on), enter your email address, press the Convert button, and then wait. Then, you wait some more. Depending on the size of the files and the speed of your Internet connection, you may even leave the computer and go for a walk… or for a vacation, if you want to convert a 100MB MOV file to AVI and you’re still using a modem or dialup connection, for example (for larger files and some extra features, you will have to get a paid account)! >:)

How does it end? You get an email with the link to the converted file… or one with an error message, if something goes wrong! I saw both of them, but I can’t say what was wrong with the file that wasn’t converted… so, anyway, if you’re one of those who aren’t exactly converting 100GB of data daily and your connection can live up to your upload/download needs generated by Zamzar, I think you should give this tool a try!

Zemana AntiLogger – 3 Years License For Free!

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:29:51 +0000

In the last weeks, I constantly felt like someone’s watching me. Something may be watching me, you, or anybody else. Who’s behind it, that’s not important, but keyloggers are a really dangerous category of malware, so when I bumped into Zemana AntiLogger and the awesome deal I’ll tell you about, I couldn’t just stay aside, so I downloaded the program from here and…

1. Visited this promo URL, disregarding the fact that I am not quite familiar with German language. Thanks to Rammstein, I know quite a few words, but not enough to handle the email I’ll get after going beyond step 2…

… which requires entry of name/surname and email on the page I just mentioned (don’t worry about the first field, it’s about your gender – “Herr” stands for “Male” and “Frau” for “Female”).

3. Now I just got the email, so I have to click the link starting with “http://www.whiteletter.de/mailresponder/”

4. Once you click that link, wait for the email containing the product code. In the meantime, feel free to install the program and restart the computer as asked.

5. After loading your Windows version once again, check the email and enter your code. If it doesn’t work… tought luck!

To close this with some additional info, you should know that Zemana AntiLogger’s 3 years subscription that you can get for free is worth $102, and this program works perfectly with Windows 7, Vista, or XP/2003. Get it, play with it, and if the serial doesn’t work… don’t blame us! At least you found out about a pretty solid tool to help you fight keyloggers and protect your privacy, right?