Links zwei-drei-vier

Avant Browser - Firefox - Thunderbird - ORFilter - Adaware - Spybot - Opera - BSPlayer - SysInternals - VIM - BigFix - Daemon tools

For them who are interested: here's some links to tools I use to either keep my computer running smoothly or repair if and when necessary.

The internet is a nice tool. I used it all the time to find everything I don't know but would like to know. Sometimes however I accidentally close IE when I'm not done yet with a site, and then I curse for half an hour while looking for that valuable information I wasn't done with yet. Now I'm using Avant Browser, which is basically just an add-on for Internet Explorer. It remembers the last sites you opened, so if you close it (be it accidentally or not) and open it again, it will show you the sites you visited last. And neatly organised too, it keeps all windows in one box (tabbed browsing that's called) so you don't have like six IE windows open. You just have one Avant Browser open that contains six IE boxes. It also has a popup stopper, but even better: a publicity stopper that kills banner for ya! You can also prevent it from loading Flash, ActiveX or Java video animations, because those just take up most of your time and bandwidth.

Another alternative for IE is Firefox. One thing it's really great for is that it's lightning fast. It beats IE any time. Oh yeah, and it also has tabbed browsing and some other nice features. But the main reason for which you should install it is because it makes browsing the web really really really fast.

Thunderbird is the free e-mail program by Mozilla, the same guys who made Firefox. Very nice work indeed. Handy because safer. Czech it out!

For all you administrators looking for a cheap and good antispam solution: use ORFilter. Some Dutch guy created this tool and he did a good job at it too. It works for Exchange or other smtp servers and you don't even need to install it! Just open it, allow it to register itself on the system and then configure it. You can point it to online blacklists and then the ORFilter will check every mail that comes in. If it's spam, you can either delete it straight away or change the message, by adding the word SPAM to the subject line or something. Then your users can configure their mailbox so that all mail that has the word SPAM in the subject is automatically moved to a separate folder. They can then check the folder once a day or something to see if there's no mail that has accidentally been deleted in there. Great stuff! See www.decluded.com for more info on the blacklist stuff!

Spam, you said? Try Cloudmark stuff at home.

The best registry cleaner around is Ace Utilities. Does not only clean up your registry, it also scans your system for garbage files and temporary files that should have been cleaned by Windows. But hey, you know Windows. Also cleans out your temporary internet stuff, like cookies and download junk.

Getting rid of spyware and adware is not easy. There are however some tools around that help you get the job done. Here you can find one of them. Get Ad-aware for free for personal use. Another one is Spybot S&D.

One of the coolest web browsers must be Opera. It's fast and reliable, but sometimes it doesn't like pages that were made for IE and Netscape. But still! Also very interesting because of the automatic 'reload' function. If you're on a page that times out automatically, Opera can reload this page every 5 minutes or so, and then you're session will not time-out. Very interesting for webmail and online knowledge bases.

If you like watching Divx movies with subtitles, you're going to need a player that supports subtitles of the .srt type. WMP doesn't do this, so you need something else. BSPlayer is a good one!

Looking for a utility to monitor your system or your network? Check out the stuff that Sysinternals hand out for free! File monitors, registry monitors, port monitors, you name it, they've got it!

Check this out! Cool software, not all free, but a lot of it is. Check out Diskpie 2 and Trayplay, an ultra-lite variant of WinAmp.

There. Every nerd who's worth that name should take a look at this: gVim. It's an editor (unix-style) that can handle most sorts of code. I'm not even going to try listing the sorts of code it can handle. Just install it, click on syntax and choose a letter.

For those of you who want a safe computer but are too damn lazy to 'windowsupdate' it every week or so (even though you can automatize that), install BigFix. Seriously. Don't forget to subscribe to the OS of your choice!

Another really cool toy is 'Daemon Tools'. This is basically a virtual cd/dvd-rom emulator. A huh? Well, this thing allows you to copy a disc to your hard disk as an image file and then keep it there (maybe because you have a really big hard disk and you don't want to waste cdr's on this or because you know you're only going to use the cd image for a while or because you just ran out of cdr's and need to get some new ones or whatever) and then access it without writing the image to a disc. This allows you to access the images straight away from your hard disc. Cool! :-)