Ronbur

Software Reviews by Ronbur

The reviews and opinions below are posted by SnapFiles visitors. They do not necessarily reflect our opinion, and they are solely based upon the experience of individual users.

Vopt

One of the best

I have Diskeeper and a year ago decided to try VoptXP.Now I just have to keep them both,'coz VoptXP is much more faster,its result is great (Diskeeper can't find anything to defragment after this Prog) and its size is 20 times less. Why I need them both? Answer is simple: VoptXP doesn't do a boot defragmentation. But,on the other side,Diskeeper can do it only with Windows XP and if you stil run Windows 98,in any case,you'll be without this feature. So what's the point in installing huge Prog if you can get the same excellent result with tiny VoptXP. As soon as they add boot defragmentation,I'll uninstall Diskeeper. It's the best choice for people with an old PC. Price: Free Trial ($40.00)

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The software developer responded to this review on Feb 02, 2007: Thank you, User! I have good news for you -- you can get rid of Diskeeper because VoptXP can defrag automatically every day the first time you boot. Just click Daily under Schedule Preferences, select the drives you want to defrag automatically, click Apply, and it will happen. Best regards, Elizabeth Bryson Golden Bow Systems

Shrink Pic

Too limited

Prog does exactly what it's said,but I found its function is too limited.Problem is I don't like to send several resized photos without archiving them in one file at first,but this Prog doesn't allow to save them to somewhere,just automatically attaches photos to your e-mail. It's good for people who doesn't want to spend extra time to arrange their stuff in better way. Price: Free

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JPEG Resizer

Excellent small program!

Standalone EXE file (740 kb) doesn't mess with Registry and smaller than other 5 Resizers I tried.Don't be put off by a dull Screenshot:it's just one of dialog boxes,Prog looks OK with very simple interface (4 buttons for easy 4 steps).Can't compare speed as I don't usually work with hundreds of pictures,only 5-10 to sent with e-mail.But you won't need anything else for this kind of job as JPEG Resizer does it perfectly.I've recommended this Prog to all my relations and now hardly ever have e-mails without lovely pics. Highly recommended! Price: Free

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Spider Player Pro

Absolutely must!

Have you ever made your own CD compilations with CD-text?If so,you'll know what I mean:you hardly can find Prog which is capable to see it.To get your CD-text in Windows Media Player or Musicmatch Jukebox you'll have to use special Progs to import all this info in .INI file,famous Winamp still can't do it even this way.It's amazing that this small FREE Prog can see all CD-text entries,play music with pretty good quality and support Unicode:no trouble with Cirillic (in Russian song names),can edit both ID3 tags and has lively Apple look.It's my main player now. Get it as soon as possible! Price: Free

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The Form Letter Machine

Stay away from their website

Nothing particularly interesting in this Prog to go through all this troubles.To remove a nagging screen you'll have to visit their site,register and get "free" reg.key which is valid only 6 months.After that you'll receive 2-3 e-mail a month asking for a donation (the name of the site, by the way,is "DonationCoder"),even if you haven't checked any checkboxes allowing them to send you messages. This guys are just spamers! Price: Free

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The software developer responded to this review on Sep 07, 2006: This program is one of many utilities on DonationCoder.com. We are a donationware site that is trying to figure out a way to keep our software free and still encourage donations. You can donate as little as 10 cents to become a lifetime member of our site and never see another donation reminder. Or you can not donate anything and sign up for an endlessly renewable license key that you have to download every 6 months or so. We do not spam people nor give our email lists to anyone. we have a twice monthly newsletter that many people love, which you can opt out of by clicking a link in it, or selecting not to receive it at signup time, or disabling mail from your forum profile. We love hearing suggestions for new features and talking about software and new ideas on our forum so please stop by if you want to chat - we have a very active forum. -mouser (Jesse)

Bitlets

What's happened with british pound sign?

Prog is quite handy in some situations.I mostly use it after a holiday to write reviews for Websites.I look in my dairy and begin collecting bits and pieces of info,which I can organize straight away into Tabs with different subjects.For a more complicated job it's better to use KeyNote. 2 complaints:1)spell checkers don't work in this Prog (but work in NotePad);2)I was surprised to find author's UK e-mail address as I was sure that it's an American Prog.When you use "",it's shown on the screen,but as soon as you save it,"" will turn into "?".Very uncomfortable.My Keyboard layout is for Brithish English. But nevertheless,I still use it a lot.Thank you. Price: Free

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The software developer responded to this review on Feb 01, 2007: Bitlets has been upgraded and redesigned and may resolve some of the observations raised. For certain it saves the sign! Re the spell checker, I d appreciate knowing which one you use. Thanks for commenting

Aurionix FileUsage

Not reliable

It doesn't show correct size,e.g.TreeSize and Windows Folder Properties estimate Folder size as 661 mb and Nero-670 mb,but Aurionix FileUsage v1.1.0 shows it as 775.8 mb(110 mb difference!).This is a crucial mistake as you'll think that it won't be possible to burn full Folder and maybe will be forced to throw away some useful stuff. Bad an uninstaller,after uninstallation: 1) Column "Keywords" appeared instead of Column "Total Size" (which was removed).This Column has never been used before! 2) Windows couldn't show Folder size in Bubble Popup (when hoovering on a folder) and gave a funny message: "Size is bigger than 440 mb" for folder which size was 670 mb. Fortunately after opening this Folder Properties dialog box several times everything was back to normal,but it proved that Prog somehow damaged the Windows configuration and can not be trusted. Price: Free

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Picasa

Greate viewer

I've installed and tried Picasa2 first time only recently.My first intention was uninstall it straight away as I hate Progs which try to push me to do something that I don't need (I don't use Hello,Blogs and etc.),but then I discover couple of very important things that I couldn't find anywhere else: 1)Last year I spoiled my holiday photos by setting wrong quality settings and get pictures with 640x480 pixels.Other Viewers show them as a small square surrounded by black background and only Picasa managed to open them as a full screen slideshow with a reasonably good quality. 2)Very handy function is "Straighten Image",others just rotate canvas. 3)Stars,Labels system is a really great idea. Pity that editing features aren't great at all.Look at this Prog as a Picturer Organiser/Viewer only,but believe me it's definitely worth to try. I know exactly that if I run out of space I'll uninstall something else, but leave Picasa. Price: Free

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Xenu Link Sleuth

Must have

Brilliant.You'll be able to make an order in all this URL mess! Prog looks so modest and simple that I really was amazed by quality of report which it produced.Works extremely fast:200 URL for 10 sec.Most important findings are:1)broken links with an explanation about what's happened with them; 2)redirected URLs,which still can get you to the needed website but take longer,'cos it's already not correct address.The only problem is that you'll be overwhelmed by this huge job to correct them.My suggestion: export Bookmarks from browser not all at once but folder by folder to get several HTML files and each time when you go to Internet,you'll ask Xenu to check one of them and then will correct links.Don't forget to save it as .XEN or it'll be difficult to sort the result. Price: Free

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FastStone Image Viewer

Prog doesn't make exif comments

Agree,it's a really nice viewer,one of the best.Very comfortable to use Full Screen with popup menus,where you can jump to any picture you like and see all properties without leaving Full Screen. Modern look with several skins. But unfortunately it's missing an important (at least for me) feature: EXIF Comments. It can write only JPEG (Image) Comments but this type of comments are not readable by most other Progs. If you use only Faststone,it doesn't matter,but if you want to open the same image (with JPG comments already there) using, say, cam2pc, comments column will be empty. Strange enough that such a good Prog lacks it as all others [..] have. Price: Free

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Fast Launcher

Free replacement for turbolauncher

Excellent Prog with a very good level of customization:you can do whatever you want without hovering cursor all over the screen,just using a mouse wheel. By the way, before v2.2 it was shareware,but now it's even better! The only thing I'd like to change is its look. Big buttons take too much space.If change design,it would be possible to make two rows of buttons for each group. And I'm not sure that icons for Groups are very important, maybe Name is enough (Like in TurboLauncher)? Otherwise,a great job. Thank you. Highly recommended. Price: Free

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Cathy

2 extra functions which are very handy

2 extra functions which are very handy and can't be found in many paid for Progs: 1) Cathy can make excellent Directory List(important for making inventory of your CDs with Progs),which can be easily transferred into Excel.Before, after trying 5-6 Progs,I found that only DriveZ could do this job. 2) Ability to sort Columns by clicking on their headers as well as using different colours for Folders and Files and show them in two separated groups allows you to read search result easily. It would be nice if Prog can arrange Catalogs in different groups not to mix Progs' CD with Music. I have to confess that I downloaded Cathy a year ago,looked at its interface and removed as I thought that it's too old for XP.What a mistake!Now I'm switching to Cathy from my commercial Prog. Price: Free

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Spybot Search and Destroy (Free)

Spybot has serious flaws

I agree that its scanner is very useful and trustworthy,but I can't say the same about Startup Scanner.I've been using SpyBot for 3 years and when run it first time Prog managed to persuade me that one of Norton startup files was a fake and recommended to delete it.After removing it,e-mail check stopped working.Each Prog has bugs,but amazing thing is that this fault hadn't been corrected until v1.4 (nearly for 2 years) and even v1.4 still has another one which I reported to their Forum long time ago. Entry in question is "ctfmon.exe" in system32 folder,which according to SpyBot favorite "Paul Collins Startup list" is "CoolWebSearch parasite related virus/spyware".But actually it's very important System file which is responsible for switching between Keyboard languages and it's very easy to check,'cos you'll have this entry just after clean Windows install as soon as you configure second Language. Price: Free

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dBpowerAMP Music Converter

Not free anymore

Prog doesn't support MP3 encoder anymore,has only 30 days trail.If you want to get it,pay $15.For the price you can find something better! Price: Free Trial ($39.00)

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Notepad2

Support for unicode is what i needed

I tried Metapad,NoteTab,Notepad++,Win32Pad,Copywriter and realized that neither of them can read Cyrillic (Russian and other Clovenian), displaying letters as question marks.It was first Prog which managed to do it.It's important,'coz I usually visited Russian/English websites and copy interesting Info about new Progs,so I can use only text editor that is capable to save them in UNICODE ,otherwise all info from Russian sites will be lost. Windows Notepad was irreplaceable,but now I've got alternative!Thanks a lot! I'd prefer to get from this Prog another 2 things: ability to save Bookmarks to see them when you open your text next time and highlight selected text (like Copywriter does).I don't use it for HTML jobs,so don't know,if some improvements can be done there as well. Price: Free

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Software Reviews by Ronbur

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