This is a guest post written by Rono, a freeware addict and friend of this blog.

The importance of web browsers has risen in the past years especially with the shift from desktop applications to web based applications. Web browsers are not just tools anymore that can display websites on a computer system, they can be used for a wide variety of services which makes it important to be prepared for disasters that can strike anytime.

FavBackup is a freeware web browser backup and restore application for the Windows operating system that supports the five popular web browsers Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and Google Chrome. Users can use FavBackup to backup and restore web browser settings and files.

FavBackup displays a list of options and web browsers in its interface upon startup. It should be noted that this freeware program is fully portable and does not require an installation. The options include creating a backup of the selected default web browser installation, of all selected web browser installations and to restore these settings again. Only one web browser can be backed up or restored at a time. It is for example possible to backup all different versions of Firefox or Google Chrome using the safe backup option. Backing up Firefox and Internet Explorer on the other hand would require two backup runs.

The difference between the backup and safe backup option is that the former only backs up the default web browser installation while the second will backup all installations of the selected web browser. FavBackup will display a list of settings and files that can be backed up after making the selection. This includes backing up bookmarks, cookies, plugins, extensions, preferences and history among other things.

One interesting aspect of the program is that it is possible to restore less data. It is for example possible to only restore bookmarks or cookies although a full browser backup has been created during the backup phase.

There are a few things that should be improved by the developer though. The first would be to provide an option to backup multiple web browsers at once. This is more comfortable than having to start the backup software multiple times to backup all installed browsers. An option to backup portable versions of the web browsers would also come in handy. Finally support for Opera 10 has to be added so that it can be backed up as well.

FavBrowser is a free portable software program for the Windows operating system that can be used to backup and restore web browsers easily.

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Overview

Create Synchronicity is a fast and lightweight open source program that can help you to synchronize and backup your files. It also is very easy to use.

Review

Create Synchronicity was recommended to me a few days ago by one of the readers of this blog through the contact form. After I checked the program website I became very curious to test this free software mainly because it’s open source and it promises to be lightweight and easy to use. So let’s see how it is.

You can say it’s lightweight right after downloading it, the whole package is around 200 KB! And you don’t even have to install it, just unpack the zip file to a folder of your choice and get going. You have to create a profile to start using the program.

You can set which folder you want to be synchronized and where and pick one of the three methods available, mirror, incremental and two-ways incremental. And that’s about it, you’re ready to synchronize the files and folders of your choice.

It only took me about 5 minutes from installing the program to successfully synchronizing the first folder, it’s amazingly easy to use and it does the job perfectly.

You can also specify some file types that you want to be excluded from the process (or included for that matter), and that could be useful if you want to synchronize a music folder on your PC to an mp3 player. You’ll just have to include only .mp3 files and that’s it, easy and fast.

Version Tested

1.0.0.0

Author

Clement Pit Claudel

Operating System

Windows

Download link

Summary

Easy to use, lightweight and fast.

It’s open source.

Rating

Verdict

Create Synchronicity is just what you needed, fast, lightweight and easy to use, a wonderful piece of open source software for any user that doesn’t want to get complicated when synchronizing or backing up files and folders. And if you think that it’s only the first version of this program there are high hopes this one could become a must have open source program for a lot of people around the world.

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If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!

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Overview

RightWebPage is a freeware program that can verify and correct certain aspects in a website or web page in order to make it comply with the internet standards available today.

Review

I’m not a professional webmaster or web designer, I only learned a few basic HTML, CSS and PHP elements since I started this blog. But at the beginning, over a year ago, I knew absolutely nothing about all that. Now that I’m still learning I found a freeware tool that might help me correct the eventual problems that this blog might have. RightWebPage is a free program that can verify a website and report the things that are not compliant with the international best practices or with the internationally recognized standards like W3C.

You can scan a website or a local page stored on your hard disk. Then you have to choose which tests you want to run. The program will also test your page against most web browsers that are available on the market today and that’s a great thing because you can never test it on so many browsers.

I chose to run all the possible tests and the whole thing took about 10 to 15 minutes. After that I had a full report available, with hundreds of suggestions to take a look at. Some of them were quite obvious and I can say that I was aware of those problems but many of the aspects that the program pointed out were entirely new to me.

For now I don’t see RightWebPage as something that could get my website to be compliant with all the standards in the world but I see it more as a tool that can help me learn how and what to do to correct the errors that might appear. It can display balloon tooltips with contextual help and a lot of features that can guide you through if you’re not an expert.

Version Tested

0.12.1

Author

Luis Andre Dutra e Silva

Operating System

Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Download link

Summary

Easy to use even for a newbie.

It’s open source and multi platform.

Sometimes the program just freezes with no explanation.

Rating

Verdict

If you’re not an expert RightWebPage might be a freeware program that could be used to learn and to understand the various standards and best practices policies that are available today. And since the program is open source I expect it to have a good development in the future.

Subscribe to the full RSS feed to get the latest articles fast and easy! You can also subscribe via email!

If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!

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This is a guest post written by Rono, a freeware enthusiast and fan of this blog.

SharePod is a great piece of free software which will be really useful for those users who own an iPod.

If you want to add and remove songs from your iPod and you do not want to synchronize it with your PC, you need SharePod.

From now on and thanks to SharePod, you will be able to copy music and videos between your iPod and computers usually without having to install anything on the computer. It is very easy to use. You only have to download SharePod and extract the contents of the zip file to your iPod drive. After that, your iPod will appear as a Removable Drive in My Computer when it is plugged in.

You can also create Winamp playlists from the music on your iPod. Furthermore if you share the iPod drive on a network, other users can run your copy of SharePod from their own computers and download music directly from your iPod. It’s fantastic. You’ll have your multimedia player on the go.

Finally we should highlight that all this is done throughout a beautiful and intuitive interface with drag&drop features and that the program is run directly from your iPod, so you do not need to install anything in the computer you are using.

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Overview

Update Notifier is a small freeware program that scans your computer for installed software and then searches for updates to the respective programs. It’s easy to use and it also has a portable version that can be run from an USB stick.

Review

I’ve been using Software Informer as my favorite free software update program for a few months now and overall it’s been a good experience. It’s a very good freeware program but as you already know I’m always ready to try something new. John wrote a comment a few days ago recommending Update Notifier and asking me to compare it with Software Informer. Okay John, here we go!

After installing the program Update Notifier will scan your system for software and then look for the updates. The process took around 3 minutes on my PC. A great thing about Update Notifier is that you can run it from an USB stick, no need to install it if you don’t want to.

After those three minutes Update Notifier found 76 programs installed and told me that 38 of those programs are ready to be updated. I know for sure that I have more than 100 freeware programs installed on my PC if you only think at the recent 94 freeware programs that I presented in the 2009 Freeware Mission Megapack. The interface looks neat though…

I immediately opened Software Informer to see how many programs it can find and indeed it found 130! You know, I have many freeware programs installed and waiting to be tested, some of them have been waiting for months Just an example of a program that was present in the Software Informer report but was totally absent from Update Notifier: the great open source game called Freeciv!

Although it looks nice and generally works like a charm Update Notifier can’t compare with Software Informer’s performances just yet. Maybe the future versions will be better but so far Software Informer is way ahead.

Version Tested

1.1.6.141

Author

CleanSofts

Operating System

Windows 2000, XP, Vista

Download link

Summary

Small and easy to use.

It has a portable version that you can run from an USB stick.

Way less powerful than Software Informer.

Rating

Verdict

I hope that John is satisfied with the comparison although his recommendation didn’t really work out. However, Update Notifier looks quite promising, a good interface and the portable version might be a good start to build a better program.

Subscribe to the full RSS feed to get the latest articles fast and easy! You can also subscribe via email!

If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!

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This is a guest post written by Rono, a freeware fan and a faithful reader of this blog.

Firefox, Word, Thunderbird and several other applications all have a built in spell checker that warns the user if a word that was written was not found in the dictionary file. There is however no general spell checker in Windows which means that users have to write their texts in programs that have a spell checker and copy paste them into the software that has none. Or they could write their texts without spell checking.

Both methods are not really practicable. The author of the freeware program called Tiny Spell seemed to have the same thoughts and decided to create a software that would work as an universal spell checker in Windows using the least amount of resources possible.

Tiny Spell checks all words typed in Windows against an English-American dictionary with more than 110000 words. This is done on the fly and the program plays a sound and changes its icon in the system tray whenever it discovers a word that seems to be spelled wrong.

The clipboard is monitored as well. It is then possible to take a look at the suggestions by either clicking on the icon in the system tray or pressing a hotkey that lists suggestions. The selected word can optionally be automatically copied to the clipboard or pasted into the document of the misspelled word.

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This is a guest post written by Rono, a freeware addict and a faithful reader of this blog.

Non-Premium users of direct download hosting sites like Megaupload, RapidShare, Mediafire, SendSpace or zShare are used to wait for a while and enter difficult and annoying captchas in order to download any file.

It is true that you ‘only’ have to wait for a few seconds, but we always desire not to wait and download files automatically, sometimes those waits are too long.

SkipScreen is a free add-on for Firefox that will make those waits and captchas disappear. If you install this add-on you can say goodbye to those annoying moments. Click the download link and SkipScreen will skip those unnecessary pages.

SkipScreen supports a lot of hosting sites. Here you are a short list: Rapidshare, Megaupload, Mediafire, Uploaded.to, zShare, Sharebee, DepositFiles, Sendspace, Divshare, Linkbucks and Link-protector.

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Overview

HandBrake is an open source and multiplatform program that can transcode video files. It is able to handle the most popular video file types and containers and it’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

Review

When it comes to video transcoders there are a lot of freeware options available right now, from simple straightforward programs to more complex and advanced software. You might already know about MeGui or the “classic” AutoGK, or maybe you were impressed by Rono’s review of XMedia Recode a few days ago. And these are only a few of the plethora of free video transcoders that are available nowadays. With all this competition it could be tough to find the right one for your specific needs and that’s why I decided to publish another review of such a program, so that you’ll have more information about various software and hopefully you’ll be able to make the right decision.

Although there are a few advanced options available in the program, HandBrake is pretty straightforward and easy to use. First you have to select your source and it can be a DVD, a disc image or a DVD VIDEO_TS folder. And there’s more: you can use as a source file basically any multimedia file it can use libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode, and that means dozens of popular or not so popular file formats and codecs.

Once you have selected your source you can pick one of the presets that are available in the right sidebar, from iPod specific files to the “classic” avi or mkv files. I chose the normal preset which I tweaked a bit  to get a xvid avi file with an average bitrate around 1500 kbps. Although the picture in the DVD files that I selected as source was 16:9 HandBrake informed me that it was a 4:3 video. But since I had the same experience with other transcoders before I was sure that the output file will come out 16:9. Which it did after all

The process took about 40 minutes to turn an hour long film from DVD to avi using a 2-pass encoding process. As I said the output file came out quite alright, good quality and the correct aspect ratio. As for the output file types that you can select there are a few options: avi, mkv, mp4 or ogm using MPEG-4 (Xvid or others ) or H.264 encoders.

The thing that disappointed me a little bit was that HandBrake can’t extract the subtitles from the DVD like AutoGK used to do. So if you select a subtitle stream it will be hardcoded into the output file, you can’t have it create external subs. In this case I have to use a third party program, SubRip, to get the subtitles as I want them.

Version Tested

0.9.3

Author

HandBrake.fr

Operating System

Windows XP/Vista, Linux, Mac OS X 10.5

Download link

Summary

Open source and multiplatform.

It’s easy to use and it can handle a wide range of file formats.

The latest version was released in November 2008.

Weak subtitles support and a few clumsy-looking aspects.

Rating

Verdict

Although I don’t see how HandBrake would become my favorite video transcoder (I’m still a MeGui fan) I have to admit that it’s a solid freeware program that can appeal to some users because it’s pretty straightforward and simple if you want to keep it that way. Since it’s an open source program I hope that the community around it will come up with improved future versions because I feel that there is room for significant improvements.Until then, try it and maybe tell me your views.

Subscribe to the full RSS feed to get the latest articles fast and easy! You can also subscribe via email!

If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!

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This is a guest post written by Rono, a freeware enthusiast and faithful reader and commentator of this blog.

iKill 1.2 is a freeware program that protects your system from viruses in your removable drives. The program scans your system, searching for removable drives.

If found, it scans for any autorun.inf file in those drives. Then it scans them. If they´re dangerous, it asks you if you want to remove that files. (If AutoProtect is selected, it will automatically delete the files, without asking.)

In most of the cases, there is no use of the autorun.inf in you removable drive. It´s very rarely used by some applications to provide some added functionality, like the Wireless Config tool to help setup a home network. But very often they act as a virus launcher.

The autorun.inf file executes itself whenever you try to open a drive by double clicking. Right clicking on the drive icon will launch autoexec.inf.

If autoexec.inf is set to run a virus executable, your computer will became infected. To avoid that, iKill 1.2 scans the files in autoexec.inf and deletes them if it identifies them like virus or trojans.

Overall it´s a useful program, devoted to provide security in a sometimes forgotten area, the removable drives.

It works on Windows 98, 2K, XP, Vista

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This is a guest post written by Rono, the enthusiastic freeware reviewer.

Windows users definitely do not have a shortage of video converters at their disposal. That’s great on the one hand but on the other hand it could make the selection process quite difficult. The video converter applications differ greatly in complexity, some require minimal user input and knowledge of video terminology while others do require advanced knowledge about bitrates, codecs, filters or framerates.

XMedia Recode falls into both categories. The free video converter comes with several pre-configured profiles that can be used to convert videos with just a few clicks and no background knowledge at all. There are profiles available for gaming systems like Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s Playstation 3 and for mobile devices like Apple’s iPod and iPhone series, dozens of Nokia cell phones and other devices. Way more than 100 profiles are available to select and there is the option to select custom settings as well in case the device is not in the list.

Custom settings are very extensive. Dozens of video and output formats and codecs can be selected to convert the video into a different format.

Video files can be opened from the computer’s hard drive or directly from the DVD (or video_ts folders located on your hard disk drive)

XMedia Recode provides features that most video converters do not. Most of these features are located in the Crop / Preview tab. This includes the option to cut part of the movie, change the resolution, crop the movie, deblock, invert or correct the colors.

This freeware program uses a German interface by default but it can be changed in Optionen > Sprache to English, French, Japanese and Italian. It also has a portable version.

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