Only Free Software
Automatically backup files, directories, even entire drives! Karen’s Replicator copies selected files from one drive/folder to another. Source and Destination folders can reside anywhere on your network.
Options include repeated copies at intervals as short as a few minutes, or as long as several months, copy only files that have changed, and the replication of folder and file deletions.
The name gave it away huh? This program has 5 different options to minimize programs:
It is also possible to password protect programs when minimized to tray and completely hide the program and tray icon. And one option I thought was very interesting, you can group icons of the same application in one single icon.
I wrote Memento after the 29th time I needed a simple app to keep little text notes on my desktop, and, as usual, found the only programs available seemed to be either crap, not free, a 7Mb download, or some combination of the above.
Memento is about 345k and does pretty much everything with little desktop notes that I want it to do. The emphasis is on being convenient, unobtrusive, and easy to use. I hope you find it useful too.
Q10 is a simple, full screen text editor targeted towards writers. It is much like Dark Room/WriteRoom but with some extra features like a spell checker, notes list, alarms, auto correction and a customizable info bar. It also makes the sound of an analog typewriter, a very nice touch which you can disable if you like (phew).
It comes in different languages and in an installable and portable version.
VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also open source software.
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
The Ultimate Boot CD for windows is a bootable recovery CD that contains software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing almost any computer problem.
I came across this package when searching for a free hard drive imaging program. I found DriveImage XML, which is nice, but is missing one option. When restoring your image you need access to the target drive as a secondary disk, and DriveImage XML doesn’t come with some sort of self bootable version like most, if not all, commercial drive imaging programs. The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows solves this problem because it contains, as you might have guessed already, DriveImage XML.
DriveImage XML compressed and imaged my 5.7 GB C: Drive in 13 Min to 4.2 GB. Restoring took 7 min. Not very fast but fast enough for something you only do every once in a while. The Ultimate Boot CD is filled with a lot more great tools for testing, restoring, removing, undeleting and benchmarking stuff.
One thing though, because of the obvious copyright laws you have to build the CD yourself with the UBCD package and a Windows XP Disc. Instructions are available on the UBCD website.
This is a tool for checking and creating CRC32 and MD5 checksums. Why the name? The author of this tool tries to use the fastest available open source (assembly) implementations for this task. One special option is direct support for CRC32 in the filename.
Available for download is just a binary, or an installer which optionally installs a right click shell extension and file association.
This is, as the name suggests, a disk defragment and optimize utility. It can not only handle hard discs but also usb disks, usb sticks and floppies.
The program is available in several versions and is completely automatic by default, although you can control the behavior of every version through the command line. The windows GUI version is really bare bones, there are no buttons or pull down menus. It only shows its current action and progress in a high detail map of your hard disc. The command line version is for use in an automatic environment like the task scheduler, administrator scripts and so on. The final version is a screensaver version whose use should be obvious.
JkDefrag is based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft, a standard system library in Windows. Most defraggers, including commercial ones, are based on this API. JkDefrag is therefore very solid and there is no risk of losing data. You can stop the program at any time with alt-f4, the close button of the window, the pulldown menu of the taskbar, the task manager or another utility and it will finish the current file in the background.
Hold it. For everybody who would like more control through a GUI and not through the command line there is a separate frontend available which also doubles as a frontend for the former Sysinternals (now Microsoft) utility PageDefrag. This small utility will defragment your system files at reboot.
DM2 provides several Windows enhancements that may help in every-day work. One of the nicest and most popular features of DM2 is minimizing windows to floating icons (unique feature!) freeing both task bar and tray bar space. Moreover, DM2 can manipulate windows in various ways: minimize to tray, make them standing always on-top over all other windows, roll to caption, resize, align to screen borders, hide, set the opacity etc. DM2 also helps with Open/Save dialog boxes, by providing user-defined menu with favorites and recent files and folders. Plenty of program’s settings options will satisfy most of requirements.
And that is not all! DM2 also supports custom plugins, which further enhances the program and that usually covers some more specific functionalities. So, from this aspect, one may think of DM2 as a small, but robust manager for all kind of plugins. Find what you need, plug it in, and use it:)
DM2 is free for use. Source is released under the terms of the GPL license.