VikingMan

Software Reviews by VikingMan

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.

Avast Free Antivirus

Easy to use - peace of mind

Avast requires virtually no maintenance at all. Just download, install, configure a bit, and then you can forget about it. Unlike the OTHER free AV, this one updates itself automatically all the time, without needing any special scheduling set-up. It uses few resources and the on-access scan traps viruses and trojans effectively. On-demand scanning is quite slow and tiresome because if it does find anything, the scan stops and waits for you to decide what to do. But I don't scan on demand much anyhow. I like the multi-lingual interface on Avast as well. Price: Free

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Opera

Great for serious web surfers

I have used Opera for years as my main desktop browser and it's still a great browser for serious web surfers and web developers. It's much easier to secure than IE, has better features than FireFox out of the box, and renders pages fast. The main problem with Opera is that there are sites that don't work with it (especially Javascript), so you still need to fire up IE or FF sometimes. But I still use Opera as much as I can. Opera works very well on a smartphone or PDA and can sync with the desktop version. Price: Free

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Restoration

Keep this ready for when you need it

I love these kind of apps - lightweight, simple, and incredibly useful. Everyone should have this utility sitting on your desktop, USB drive, or somewhere handy. Come the day when you wipe a file from the recycle bin by accident, use Restoration to get it back (hopefully). Thanks to the author for a wonderful tool. Price: Free

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WinMerge

Fast, easy to use and it works

This is a great utility for developers that highlights any differences between one text file and another. It works with any text file - XML, HTML, source files, config files. It compares not just visible characters but whitespace as well. It's much quicker and easier than SourceSafe, and so easy to use when you turn on shell integration - just select two files in Explorer, right click and choose Compare and Winmerge compares them. Price: Free

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Replace Text (BK ReplaceEm)

Powerful batch search and replace

This is a powerful program for searching and replacing strings in a batch of files. I used it to update an HTML link wherever it occurred in loads of HTML files for a web site. The program is powerful and versatile but you need to set up a few options before you use it - it's not just like you run it and say "replace X with Y" and press the Start button. But overall it's the best freeware application I have found to do multiple batch replacements. Price: Free

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Color Cop

Must-have tool for web developers/designers

A simple but incredibly useful tool for web developers or designers who need to reproduce or encode colours as hex codes. One of those tools that you get and then wonder how you managed without it. Price: Free

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Web Developer Extension

Must-have for web developers

If you develop web pages you must get this - it's free and will save you loads of time and also make your pages better. With this tool you can debug page errors and check that your page is really structured how you want it (not just that it looks like it should). It's great for designing modern accessible web pages that validate properly. Price: Free

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KeePass (Classic Edition)

The best password database I`ve found

I wrote a positive review of another free password manager app but subsequently changed to this one because, hey, it's still free and it's better! This is the best password manager I've found so far. It's designed securely to combat keyloggers and is packed with features (even more via its various plugins). But still easy to use. It's also designed to be configurable enough for a network environment. Price: Free

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Image for Windows

Fast and simple partition imaging

With this software it's easy to create an image of a disk partition either to a file or onto a CD/DVD. The uncluttered interface is a simple two-step wizard. It takes about 10 minutes to image 4GB and validate the image afterwards. To use this program effectively you also need to install PhyLock (available free from Terabyte's site) so that you can image your Windows partition. The problem comes when you want to restore your partition because you can't restore Windows while Windows is running. So you must restore from outside Windows using Terabyte's other DOS-based image restorer (which comes free with this program) or their boot manager. I personally prefer the latter - it's also available here on Snapfiles. But this Windows-based program has the advantage that it is easier for newbies and can be run automatically from a batch file or a scheduled task. Price: Free Trial ($49.98)

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WinAudit

Comprehensive versatile pc audit

I tried three well-known apps to do a PC audit. This is the only one that covers both software and hardware audit comprehensively. It displays for example your partition structure, scheduled tasks, installed application versions and product ID's, BIOS settings, motherboard details, processes and services. Unlike other audit apps Winaudit produces an HTML report with hyperlinks to each section so you can quickly get to the section you're interested in. It can also save reports in PDF or text (although the reports are 100 pages long, so it's probably not practical to do so). However, Winaudit has one flaw: the interface is only in English and doesn't support Japanese language Windows systems. I ran it on a Japanese Windows XP system but its HTML report would not display Japanese characters properly in either Japanese encoding or Unicode. For English systems, I would definitely recommend it. Price: Free

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UK`s Kalender

Powerful focussed calendar/reminder

This small app does only one job and it does it very well. It takes time to learn but it's worth the effort because it's so powerful that it can handle practically any reminder task - stretching from annual events like birthdays to intervals of minutes. It's important to create sensible categories for your events to prevent the display becoming muddled. What's missing is the ability to define the holidays. You can download holidays for some countries but not many, but there's no way to register your own holidays (e.g. for other countries or your own days off) - you have to create events for holidays instead. Also it would be good if the year view could be set to start at a month other than January (e.g. teachers generally like to see the year starting from September). But these are minor gripes in an otherwise excellent app. Price: Free

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FreeCommander XE

Especially good for search and syncronization

This is a generally excellent file manager - a good range of facilities additional to Windows explorer. It's search facility is better: you can fully specify date ranges and file attributes to search. The folder synchronize feature has a feature that I have not seen in any other synchronizer. Most synchronizers operate in both directions together, i.e. they synchronize two folders left->right AND right->left at the same time. Freecommander lets you distinguish either left->right OR right->left OR both. This is useful to create a backup folder when you want to copy from the source to the backup, but not vice versa. The only problem with synchronize is that you cannot set it to ignore small differences in timestamp, a feature that most other synchronizers have. It conflicted with Norton Antivirus on my Win98 system. It has some bugs when deleting folders: the view is not always updated correctly. But overall this is a program I use every day. Price: Free

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Software Reviews by VikingMan

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