EmpressTrudy

Software Reviews by EmpressTrudy

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.

Classic Shell

Made win 8.1 usable again

It's a great option, particularly if you were stuck with Lenovo's awful Pokki shell before. Classic shell is a great add on that makes Win 8.x operate just like Win 7. If anything it has too MANY features. It's lightweight and fast. Price: Free

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Waterfox

Meh - nothing to write home about

Even their own benchmarks don't show much improvement over 32 bit. But this is true with nearly 100 of everything in 64 bit Windows world. A few plug ins don't work unless you can dig up 64 bit versions but the real issue is that it really doesn't provide much of an advantage at all. 64 bit is pretty much a scam in Windows on the desktop and no one cares. Price: Free

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Firefox Browser

Beginning to suffer

FF has become increasingly clunky and slow and bloated. And it's becoming difficult to say in sync with add ons. For instance FF 32.0 is incompatible with Symantec Vulnerability add on. And almost immediately they released a 'fix' to 32, 32.0.1 which is supposed to address stability and security issues (of course) but it runs slower than 32.0 which was ever so slightly faster than 31 but the overall trend had been bigger, bulkier, slower, fatter. And the releases don't appear to add much except for developers. Price: Free

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Free Window Registry Repair

And therefore, what?

Much like CCleaner or Hoverdesk's Regseeker, this prunes out a slew of old useless, nonfunctioning or stubb registry entry. On a scale of CCleaner being the least aggressive and Regseeker being dangerous in some circumstances, this one is in the middle. Whereas CCleaner might find 1 entry to prune, this found 376 and Regseeker found almost 1600. But a lot of things don't work after Regseeker. So I guess 376 is good enough. The issue is that 376 makes zero difference in how anything works or whether anything works better. Maybe the best use of any of these is ONLY in the case where something is actually already broken. Otherwise I've never detected any improvements in anything. Price: Free

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Firemin

Kind of meh

It squashes out excess RAM but it makes your CPU work much harder. Anyway, the way most websites and apps are built today the bottle neck is the obscene amount of disc thrashing they force in order to get the limitless gobs of awful java and javascript to run Price: Free

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Google Chrome

It's a utility for google apps

As a heavy user of Google apps and Google cloud printing you NEED Chrome. Fair enough. It works well, isn't too bloated and runs fairly elegantly. My only two quibbles is that font rendering is weak AND, 'running in the background' doesn't always work nor do Google Now Alerts. Price: Free

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NoScript

Yes and no

Here's the thing. It's brilliant and your web pages do very well with it and it's faster and all that. Problem is that today javascript is so pervasive that in order to do ANYTHING including view most pages, print, you have to turn on SOME Javascript. And by the time you sift through the PAGES, the 30 or 40 different Javascripts, the nested layers of recursive script, you may as well saved yourself some time and simply turned off the add-on and loaded it all. Price: Free

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Reduce PDF Size

I guess if you really really need it

Seems to work to squeeze out about 50 of the file size which is on average about 50 better than zipping it. Price: Free

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LiLi USB Creator (Linux Live)

Works great but UI is weird

Some USB drives cannot be identified by other similar programs but this one has no trouble. Works equally well for downloadable and already downloaded ISOs. Would HIGHLY recommend though you don't use this to download ISOs since torrents work about a thousand times faster. The UI is weird and strange (borderless) and is NOT a resize-able window. You must use 1024x768 or higher to use this tool. Price: Free

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Gmail Drive

It's nearly as good as

Google Drive. Except without all the Office type apps, cloud printing and general usability. Price: Free

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Adobe Acrobat Reader

Kept alive by MS Office

If it weren't for the fact that embedded PDFs have to be opened by Adobe in MS Office and there appears to be no way to change this, there would be zero need for it. Adobe seems to think that if they pile on dozens of features no one wants needs or uses that that somehow will make it great. But, hey, at least we're not talking about the Android version here which is absurdly bloated. Price: Free

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Wise Disk Cleaner Free

Ok, but...

Works fine. The defrag feature is nice albeit it does a different job than Auslogics - so it's unclear if it's better or worse. The real beef I have is the nearly daily torrent (not literally) of updates. Price: Free

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ORPALIS PDF Reducer

If it's something you need - get it

PDF files are generally pretty efficient sizewise. But if you really need to shrink them and it's a large file and you avoid zipping them then by all means do this. The amount of compaction isn't consistent but it clearly works for very large files better than small ones. Price: Free

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Picasa

It's ok, i guess

I suppose it's adequate but why would you want to use it? It's more or less the same thing as Picasa on the web. And the controls are different, in different places so you you have to learn two ways to do almost everything. Price: Free

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MP3 Diags

It does a lot but who knows what?

It scanned a folder of 950 mp3 files and found 47 with anomalies. But there's no way to tell what that means, if they're significant or even what fixing them accomplishes. Playing back the fixed files sounds identical to me. Price: Free

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Tweaking.com Windows Repair

A bit hard to tell precisely what it does

It's more or less a 'clean the counter' approach. That is, it purports to fix a slew of things and executes its repairs on them whether they're actually broken or not. Moreover what it DID do was a little bit scary. For example it reverted the XP Desktop to Windows 2000 style desktop. It eliminated the hide icons from the taskbar - not the icons just their hidden aspect (I think this is functioning as intended). It wiped out Adobe Reader 10 and Flash (as in they were de-installed). It messed up my VPN dialer. I was able to recover the VPN dialer by (and this is weird) repeatedly cold booting the machine 3x. So I'm back to where I started. I'm not sure what if anything was repaired or how the machine is less broken now. Price: Free

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Software Reviews by EmpressTrudy

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