Geek Software of the Week: Returnil!
So, what if you could have your system “frozen in time” so that whatever you did while surfing the web was as easy as rebooting to undo? Well, that’s the idea behind “Returnil.” It is FREE to home users, and basically is the ultimate in system protection, because it freezes your system in a state in which it was working and can return to that if you get “pwned!”
Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition
“The Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition is a powerful virtualization technology that completely mirrors your actual computer setup and it can create a virtual storage disk within your PC where you can save documents, data, and files while using the System Protection feature. Returnil Virtual System’s protection concept is very easy to understand. It provides a simple, effective, and smart way to prevent unwanted or malicious changes from being made to your supported Windows Operating System and the drive where Windows is installed. You operate your system in a virtual environment, so anything you do will happen in the virtual environment, not in the real PC. If your computer is attacked or gets infected with Malware, all you need to do is simply reboot the PC to erase all changes. Once restarted, your system will be restored to the original state, as if nothing ever happened! Meanwhile, Returnil Virtual System can create a virtual storage disk for you; the purpose of this partition is to provide a place for you to save your data when the Virtual System Protection mode is turned ON, and you can customize the size of this disk to meet your individual requirements. When the Virtual System Protection is OFF, you can install or remove programs, save documents within the Windows disk drive, install security upgrades and software patches, alter configurations, and update user accounts. All changes made will remain following a restart of the computer.”
“Attribute Changer is a power user tool to change all kind of file and folder attributes, date, time and even NTFS compression. Basic features include changing file and folder attributes within en masse. A really useful feature is the compression/decompression of files stored on the Windows NT/2000 and XP NTFS file system. Furthermore, date and time on files and folders can be partially changed. In this case, you can advise Attribute Changer not to change the whole object data, but only parts such as day, month, year, seconds, minutes or hours. The progress can be monitored in realtime on the ‘Activity and Results’ tab. Filters and exceptions should be used to fine tune the process. Filters include attributes, size, date and time while exceptions are used to filter out files and directory entries using wildcards (* and ?).”