Re: Problem with VLC
Handbrake (freeware) could probably convert it for you. The only problem with the later versions is they've dumped .avi and xvid to be all modern.
Ten... freeware gems for new PCs
Reg Hardware PC Week If you’ve just purchased a spanking new Windows PC, what to slap on there often leaves pause for thought. The trial bloatware that inevitably came with your machine might keep you busy for a while until the payment nag screens start. Yet those costs and curses aside, there are plenty of free apps out …
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Friday 11th May 2012 10:47 GMT Dave 126
Re: Well, someone has to say it...
I've always Windows user - the software I use is only available for it. Linux vs Windows is a complete non-argument for me.
However, the first thing I did when I got this PC was to create an additional partition and put Ubuntu on it. I haven't used it much at all, but its good to know it is there- saves carrying around a Linux live CD for 'just in case' situations. Or if I suddenly need functionality only offered by a Linux-only application. But really, its there to indulge my geeky side- the Scientific section of the repository is great - a 3D molecule designer!
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Friday 11th May 2012 11:41 GMT Dave 126
Re: Well, someone has to say it...
I agree with what you said, but the way you put it could be read as being akin to the old "Windows is rubbish, just use Linux" cry.
An install of Linux on a Windows machine is handy for its recovery tools, or as a dedicated OS for online banking... Any more suggestions for 'Uses for Linux on a dual-boot Windows machine'?
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Friday 11th May 2012 08:08 GMT Alex Walsh
I'd add a few suggestions like:
Always on PC- useful virtual PC application to easily bypass work site filtering
DVD Dycrypter- still working my way through ripping my DVD collection :/
Boxee/XBMC-- useful if you're hooked up via HDMI to a telly. My nettop is :D
AnyVideo Converter- just found this and it's rather good for converting formats AND downloading videos off YouTube easily (just paste the URL). Free version isn't very limited at all.
Calibre- ebook management, conversion and server software. Very useful indeed.
Now, can anyone recommend a decent PC UPnP media server? I currently use Twonky but was wondering if there's anything out there that's free?
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Friday 11th May 2012 08:11 GMT Andydude
Dropbox alternative
I've been using Dropbox for ages, but then noticed if you have an old hotmail address you can upgrade skydrive free to 25GB! The app isn't as great IMHO as Dropbox, and there isn't an android app (although you can use it with browser apparently) but that's a lot of free space!
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Friday 11th May 2012 10:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Dropbox alternative
MS Skydrive 25 GB upgrade is, sadly, no more. I managed to upgrade my very old and operational hotmail address, and then, surprisingly, a very new and hardly used hotmail address. Then I went to do the same for my wife and - why did she choose hotmail?! - children's hotmail addresses. Alas, no more and they're all stuck with 7 Gb. That said, the arms rance is only going to get faster and we'll probably see the upgrades from all providers, including that new, funny one from google, the one that says: it's your stuff, but we can make full use of it. Or something.
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Friday 11th May 2012 08:13 GMT g e
XBMC
Another vote for this great app.
It's looks great and is the only media player I've found on 'doze (and Linux come to think of it) that easily lets you browse
standards-compliantnon-Microsoft DLNA media servers.Never got Mediatomb/Ushare to show up under VLC/Media Player/Rhythm Box/Banshee
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Friday 11th May 2012 08:46 GMT dotdavid
Re: And how to install them?
I do like Ninite, but a way of saving your preferences for some common configuration options (like "don't create a bloody desktop shortcut please", for example) would be nice.
It would also be nicer if the range of software it supported was more extensive. I tried to suggest some other free/open source apps but heard nothing back.
But definitely recommended.
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:10 GMT Toby Poynder
Some more
As mentioned above, Irfan View is a terrific image viewer
ImgBurn is a very competent CD/DVD/Blu-Ray burner, I've found it can do things that Nero can't manage.
NirSoft have a load of cool little utilities, check out their website.
Macrium have a free edition of their Reflect disk imaging software which works really well.
Thanks to all the developers who create this stuff and give it away!
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Friday 11th May 2012 10:58 GMT Dave 126
Re: Fences
I installed it. I liked it. It worked... for months. Then, one day my icons broke free and scattered themselves all over my desktop again (Win 7 x64). The Fences still work (icons can be dragged back in) but maybe it needs a 'sheepdog' companion to round things up again?!
Recommended, though.
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Saturday 12th May 2012 22:15 GMT deviAnt Ostrich
I downloaded a number of Stardock widgets including Fence and a number of other windows customising utilities (allowed me to alter all the system icons and themes etc.) I paid for a years worth of updates. I then reinstalled my machine sometime after the year was up, and lo and behold - because stardock utilised a downloader for all its software - this downloader was the only installer I had for it all. So I reinstalled the downloader - signed in - and it wouldn't let me download and install any of the software I had previously paid for as my year was up and I no longer had access to their software updates...
I must say I never contacted them about this - I wasn't overly bothered TBH - only lost about 40 quids worth of software. But it has made me wary of being forced to use a downloader for software which I have paid for. Maybe all I needed to do was find where the original downloader had plonked the installers on my drive before wiping my system - but it wasn't something I had thought of at the time and I thought I'd at least still be able to re-download all my previous purchases... If I pay for software - I want to manually download each installer so I can manage my own backing up of them - and not rely on a downloader which will lock me out after a set period of time.
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:13 GMT A J Stiles
Being pedantic here .....
At least 7-Zip, OpenOffice.org and VLC are not Freeware, but Free Software.
Free Software gives users four basic freedoms: The freedom to Enjoy using it for any purpose without let or hindrance (freedom 0); the freedom to Study how it works (freedom 1); the freedom to Share it with your neighbour (freedom 2); and the freedom to Adapt it to suit your own purposes (freedom 3). This requires for it to be released under a licence which permits these activities which the Law of the Land would ordinarily curtail, and with the Source Code (the human-readable form, as used by programmers) available to all users.
"Freeware" is software which is offered gratis, but without some or all of the above freedoms. Freedoms 0 and 2 can always be taken by force if necessary; but access to Source Code is what directly enables Freedoms 1 and 3 and in its absence, users may be hamstrung.
The term "Open Source Software" is often used as a mealy-mouthed, politically-correct alternative to "Free Software", since it (1) avoids potential confusion between £0 and freedom, and (2) avoids implying awkward things about non-Free software.
Whatever name you are going to call it, this drum needs banging, because people are still too keen to sell their freedoms until it is already too late.
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Friday 11th May 2012 10:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Being pedantic here .....
Actually, you may find you're using terms in a manner most people don't. "Freeware" and "Free Software" are not terms generally used in the way you've described by the majority of the world. You may think that's what those terms mean. The majority don't share that opinion.
So, being pedantic, that's a load of bollocks.
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Friday 11th May 2012 15:46 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley
Re: Being pedantic here .....
"because people are still too keen to sell their freedoms until it is already too late."
What "freedoms"? The ones the Church of Stallman invented out of thin air?
There's a damned good reason why that clichéd shepherd-and-flock metaphor keeps popping up in threads like these, and it's not what the religious think either:
It is impossible for a single person to know everything there is to know about everything. Therefore, people prioritise. Most people who have to use computers have no idea how they work, any more than most drivers know how to strip down and rebuild their car by themselves. In each specialism, only a few can be the shepherds. The rest will be sheep, because they have different priorities.
Stop wasting your time trying to teach sheep how to dance the polka as it only wastes your time and annoys the sheep.
Personally, if I'm going to give something I've made away for free, I'll put it in the Public Domain, thanks. I don't believe in attaching strings to my gifts.
Bollocks to the Church of Stallman.
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Friday 11th May 2012 18:16 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Being pedantic here .....
If you want to play the pedantic game, you're wrong : 7-zip etc are freeware, and may also be Free software. They're not, though. 7Zip is LGPL. Freedom does not restrict what you are permitted to do, whilst the GPL and LGPL apply various conditions to their usage.
The principles you list are great, but the GPL/LGPL and various other licences don't satisfy all of the above principles - everything beyond the first paragraph isn't precisely true. Source code helps an awful lot, but is not what enables 1) and 3). Suggesting the use of the GPL over closed source merely exchanges one set of (commercial) interests for other forms of self interest.
That may align with your own personal philosophy, but it's still not freedom.
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Saturday 12th May 2012 02:07 GMT A J Stiles
Re: Being pedantic here .....
"They're not, though. 7Zip is LGPL. Freedom does not restrict what you are permitted to do, whilst the GPL and LGPL apply various conditions to their usage."
By which logic, people in a country where slavery is permitted are freer than people in a country where slavery is not permitted (and thus people are denied the freedom to enslave others).
Maybe the freest person in such a land would be more free than the freest person in a non-slave-owning country; but one must suppose that the average person would be a lot less free where slavery was permitted.
Similarly, a country whose government is not bound by a written constitution is not necessarily freer than a country where the government's powers are restricted by a written constitution.
The fallacy is to assume that the power (not freedom; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html) to do what licences such as the GPL do not allow would always be used in a benign manner. History has shown consistently that such expectations are naïve and unrealistic.
After all, whyever should anyone want the power to rob others of their freedom, if they were not going to exercise it?
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Sunday 13th May 2012 22:48 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Being pedantic here .....
You are blinded by your own philosophy and equating slavery to software licensing carries more than a whiff of Godwin, but I'll spell it out :
Yes, if software is issued under a completely free license it's entirely probable at some point it will be taken, monetized and enhanced without returning anything to the original authors. The GPL/LGPL is one way of enforcing an evolving software ecosystem, but not the only way.
A third party taking code and not releasing enhancements is not depriving the original author of 'freedom' - it is merely refusing to sign up to the same viewpoint on how software should be distributed.
Neither is a third party taking code, putting a fancy skin on it and selling it in closed source form to users depriving them of as much freedom as the GPL would assert. After all, the original free source is still there. The users are equally able to search that out. If the enhancements the third party make are trivial then it should be equally trivial for the authors of the majority of the source code base to create an open source alternative, whilst if the enhancements are major then frankly I don't think there's a real case to answer.
Enforcing how code has to be used is pushing a particular viewpoint on others. This is not freedom.
Now, it's entirely possible that by using other licences such as BSD, Apache etc, the growth of a software ecosystem is not as fast as GPL/LGPL proponents would prefer, but history proves that growth still does occur.
History also proves that the GPL/LGPL is an effective philosophy for creating a large base of software, but don't dress it up as freedom when it's merely pushing a particular viewpoint.
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:17 GMT joeW
Eraser
Regarding use of the 35-pass Gutmann algorithm, Mr Gutmann himself has this to say -
"In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods.... If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now."
Plus, CCleaner can do multi-pass overwriting to delete data - maybe that slot in the top ten should go to an Adobe-alternative PDF reader?
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Saturday 12th May 2012 21:22 GMT sam bo
Re: File managers?
Total Commander PowerPack makes it even better. You quickly forget that it handles everything transparently - until you have to use a machine with just Explorer on it. Feels like working with both hands cut off . just copy the whole directory to a USB stick and you can run it from there.
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Friday 18th May 2012 11:49 GMT philbo
Re: File managers?
> Heh. I actually paid for WIndows Commander before the rename.
Me, too :-) And the latest version still works with the (14-year-old) wincmd.key
The UI is skinnable, but after playing with a few different looks, I've gone back to what I'm used to: I don't use TC for what it looks like, but for the incredible power of what you can do with it.
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:55 GMT Blacklight
And then...
All the Piriform apps (not just CCleaner) are worth getting. Defraggler (as mentioned), Speccy & Recuva (damned handy).
Also - consider photorec - free deleted file recovery tool which is very thorough and useful when things go wrong.
If you use Eraser (as you suggest), why not grab Sandboxie too, to further bolt down web browsing and ensure no little nasties get to remain on your machine via Flash/Java etc, without having to block their usage. It also uses Eraser (if you have it) to clear itself up on exit.
Then of course there is Soluto - for optimising boot, and Secunia PSI to keep track of what needs patching and again increase security.... :)
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Friday 11th May 2012 22:15 GMT Duncan Idaho
Re: And then...
Zero Assumption Recovery is amazing for recovering images from memory cards for free. I bought the full version after using the free a few times. Well worth it. There might be other more full-featured free programs but for flexibility in dealing with images it does seem to have everything.
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:57 GMT thesykes
Media converter that works?
The kids got a triple play dvd for Christmas, so thought I'd give the digital copy a go. The only thing I can get to run it is Media Player, making it not all that useful.
Anybody know of a utility that can convert a digital copy to comething more useful? Just tred VLC player on the strength of the review here, only to that, not only will it not convert, it can't even open the file.
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:58 GMT Psymon
VLC? Pah!
Yes, as several others have pointed out, VLC's a tired old dog. One of the most annoying features is when you hit pause, theres a delay.
What, am I watching this on VHS?
Media Player Classic is a truly well rounded app, but to get around the codec issue, simply download the K-lite codec pack, and choose "Lots of Stuff" during the install, and you get MPC.
Voila, you have high functionality media player, with codecs to to play just about anything, even the Bink and Smacker A/V codecs EA and Codemasters commonly use as the format for their in-game videos. Crucially, because they are system codecs, your other player apps can use them too, improving overall system flexibility.
For disc writing, I've sworn by Ashampoo Burning Studio (ver. 6, the free one) for years, and can count the number of writer drives more easily than the the number of discs I've worked through. Tiny memory footprint, extremely stable, fully featured, delightfully lacking in bloatware and I can run multiple instances, writing to multiple drives simultaniously.
I've used XBMC, and while I have no argument over cross platform issues, the interface is appalling unintuitive for novice users. I know this because I had a system with it set up for my parents in their living room.
No matter how much I tweaked the preferences or themes, they found it just too difficult to navigate.
The solution came with MediaBrowser, an open source plugin for media player which combines similar functionality, incredible beauty, and crucially, ease of use which means my parents, rather than watching telly, frequently browse through the 2TB of movies and TV using the media center remote, with the same ease that they use the DVD player
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Friday 11th May 2012 09:58 GMT moonface
My Admin favourites
Primitive File Size Chart
Very quick to use, shows you the 50 largest files and 50 largest folders in specified disk or folder. No install just a small .exe file. Helped me numerous times tracking down rogue processes filling up system hard disks. Only downfall is that you can't export the results to text on the version I have.
SysExporter utility
Allows you to grab the data stored in standard list-views, tree-views, list boxes, combo boxes, text-boxes, and WebBrowser/HTML controls from almost any application running on your system, and export it to text, HTML or XML file.
Absolute life saver when used with standard Window searches, etc. Just export results straight into Execl spreadsheets.
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