Category: Geek Software of the Week

Another neat Nirsoft goodie for you! Find those locked files on your system!

Nirsoft OpenedFilesView

“OpenedFilesView displays the list of all opened files on your system. For each opened file, additional information is displayed: handle value, read/write/delete access, file position, the process that opened the file, and more…

Optionally, you can also close one or more opened files, or close the process that opened these files.

This utility is especially useful if you try to delete/move/open a file and you get one of the following error messages:

• Cannot delete [filename]: There has been a sharing violation. The source or destination file may be in use.
• Cannot delete [filename]: It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

When you get one of these error messages, OpenedFilesView will show you which process lock your file. Closing the right process will solve this problem. optionally, you can also release the file by closing the handle from OpenedFilesView utility. However, be aware that after closing a file in this way, the program that opened the file may become unstable, and even crash.”

Want to know what is starting when your system boots! You need WhatInStartup from Nirsoft… and it is FREE!

Nirsoft WhatInStartup

“This utility displays the list of all applications that are loaded automatically when Windows starts up. For each application, the following information is displayed: Startup Type (Registry/Startup Folder), Command-Line String, Product Name, File Version, Company Name, Location in the Registry or file system, and more.

It allows you to easily disable or delete unwanted programs that run in your Windows startup. You can use it on your currently running instance of Windows, as well as you can use it on external instance of Windows in another drive.

WhatInStartup also supports a special “Permanent Disabling” feature – If a program that you previously disabled added itself again to the startup list of Windows, WhatInStartup will automatically detect the change and disable it again.”

Have you ever wanted to “reveal” the passwords that you used, and stored, in your Web Browser? Well, now you can!

Nirsoft WebBrowserPassView

“WebBrowserPassView is a password recovery tool that reveals the passwords stored by the following Web browsers: Internet Explorer (Version 4.0 – 10.0), Mozilla Firefox (All Versions), Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. This tool can be used to recover your lost/forgotten password of any Website, including popular Web sites, like Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and GMail, as long as the password is stored by your Web Browser.

After retrieving your lost passwords, you can save them into text/html/csv/xml file, by using the ‘Save Selected Items’ option (Ctrl+S).

False Virus/Trojan Warning

WebBrowserPassView is a tool that retrieves secret passwords stored in your system, and thus your Antivirus may falsely detect this tool is infected with Trojan/Virus.”

Check out Picasa! I downloaded it for it’s “red eye remover” tool. It worked perfectly! I needed it to remove “red eye” from some wedding photos I shot for my nephew. Picasa is free, and was just what I was looking for!

Picasa Web Site

What Wikipedia says about Picasa: “Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time may have resided at Idealab) in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. ‘Picasa’ is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa (Spanish for ‘my house’) and ‘pic’ for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from its original author and began offering it as freeware.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X (Intel only) are available from Google. For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version, but this version is severely out of date (the latest Windows version, however, can be run with Wine; see the Linux section). There is also an iPhoto plugin or a standalone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.”

Windows search got you down? Can’t find that file that you KNOW is there? Use “Everything!”

Voidtools “Everything”

• Small installation file
• Clean and simple user interface
• Quick file indexing
• Quick searching
• Minimal resource usage
• Share files with others easily
• Real-time updating

“Everything” is an administrative tool that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows.

Unlike Windows search “Everything” initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name “Everything”).

You type in a search filter to limit what files and folders are displayed.

“Everything” only uses file and folder names and generally takes a few seconds to build its database.

A fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (about 20,000 files) will take about 1 second to index.

1,000,000 files will take about 1 minute.

“Everything” does not search file contents, only file and folder names.

The World Fastest & Lightest PC Cleaner. Don’t make Malware, Adware, Pushy software change your browser settings.

YAC (Yet Another Cleaner!)

YAC’S BROWSER TRACKING PROTECTION

‘YAC’s Browser Tracking Protection Is Currently Available for Large Daily Users to Stay in Control of Their Privacy As They Browse the Web.’

• Discover All of the Trackers and Provide Complete Transparency & Control
• Clear Browser History to Protect Your Privacy and Block All the Malicious Plug-Ins
• Enable to Block Tracking Activity That You Do Not Trust and Allow the Ones That You Do

‘YAC’s Boosting Ball is a registry cleaner and PC speed optimizer.This product is a must have for PC users!’

• Remove Junk Files and Update Your PC’s Drivers
• Prevent Crashes & Freezes and Keep Your PC Fast & Stable
• A Free Tool That Detects Errors Which Impact Your PC’s Performance

ONE-CLICK YAC’S MALWARE CLEANER

‘YAC’s Malware Cleaner is to Secure Your PC Against Viruses and Offer Users Premium Protection from Internet Threats.’

• Detect and Remove Specific Malware from Your PC
• Kill All Infected Running Processes & Delete All Infections from the Disk
• A Handy and Efficient Malware Removal Tool for Windows Users”

Want to hide anything and everything that you are doing on your computer? Concerned about your privacy? Now, you can protect your personal computer privacy!

Privacy Eraser – Clean Your Tracks & Protect Your Privacy!

“Privacy Eraser is an all-in-one privacy suite that protects your privacy by cleaning up all your Internet history tracks and past computer activities. It supports popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

With simply one click, Privacy Eraser can quickly erase the Internet cache, cookies, browsing history, address bar history, typed urls, autocomplete form history, saved password and index.dat files of your browser, and Windows’ run history, search history, open/save history, recent documents, temporary files, recycle bin, clipboard, taskbar jump lists, dns cache, log files, memory dumps, error reporting and much more.

Furthermore, Privacy Eraser supports plug-ins to extend cleaning features, you can easily delete the tracks left by any applications by making your own plug-ins. Privacy Eraser embedded more than 200 FREE plug-ins which supports the most popular programs such as ACDSee, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office, WinZip, WinRAR, Windows Media Player, VLC Player, eMule, BitTorrent, Google Toolbar and many others. With the flexible, highly customizable and open plug-in architecture, you can even customize your own exclusive Privacy Eraser!

Privacy Eraser works on Microsoft Windows 8.1/8/7/Vista/XP/2012/2008 (32/64-bit) and supports Microsoft Windows FAT16/FAT32/exFAT/NTFS file systems, completely implements and exceeds the US Department of Defense and NSA clearing and sanitizing standard, to gives you confidence that once erased, your file data is gone forever and can not be recovered.”

Here’s his email:
___________________

Greetings Benevolent Silicone Gray Beard Dewd,

How’s that for a suck up intro?

Hi, I’m Richard Craver from over in Clemmons NC. I’ve been listening to your netcasts for a few years now. I started playing with Linux in 1999 and made the mostly full switch about 10 years ago. I keep Windows around for doing my taxes….uck.

Back Story Begins Here

Anyway I have been using a couple external drives for my backup needs over the years, and my backup regimen consists of ‘Whenever I have a boring evening and think about it’, so not often enough.

What I have embarked to do it put a box in my shed in the backyard (I have to run power and CAT 5 or possibly wifi to beam data, setup an FTP server and send weekly backups ‘off-site’ as it were in the event the house burns. Each device in the house will have it’s own home folder.

For my wife’s Win 7 computer I propose to use Corbian to Zip and Encrypt the Documents and Downloads folder before sending incrementals to the shed. However for Linux I have yet to find a Automatible GUI tool to do such a thing.

My R&D box currently has a minimal install of Debian to which I have installed Webmin so I can access it remotely to manage files, manage ProFTP and SSH(next project). I did not encrypt home directories or filesystem because I want to run it headless, if it reboots for whatever reason I will have to log back in (?) to allow TrueCrypt to unlock.

Real Question Begin Here

Anyway, I tried Googling your GSOTWs and the series of pipes, but don’t seem to be finding a Corbian like linux app, do you have any suggestions? The features of Corbian I like are: Simple, Incremental ZIPs, Encrypted ZIPs, Schedule-able and of course, Free as in Coffee.

Then….I’ll address backing up my and my wife’s Android phones and tablets………….

Kindest Regards,
Richard

___________________

My answer:

Thanks for watching/listening! I like the intro to your message!

I mainly have set up rsync to backup from Windows to Linux, and from Linux to Linux:
https://rsync.samba.org/

A “big time” backup system (mainly for system admins) is Blacula, it is really full featured:
https://bacula.org/

However, I think this may be the best choice for what you are doing… it is simple and easy:
https://launchpad.net/sbackup

___________________

Follow-up:

I found this one, that I thought would be good because it is for Linux AND Windows, but I tried to install on Windows 7 64-Bit, and found it a pain to install… not saying it might not be worth it, but yeesh, what a pain!

https://www.diffingo.com/oss/fwbackups

I know, I know, I do a lot of GSotW releases that are video converters. But, there really is a big demand for this kind of tool! Freemake is free, very important… and it is easy to use, and has a lot of features other converters don’t have!

Freemake Video Converter

Here’s what their web site says:
“Convert video free to AVI, MP4, WMV, MKV, 3GP, DVD, MP3, iPad, iPhone, PSP, Android phones. Video to MP3 with one click! Rip & burn DVD. Convert YouTube to MP4, AVI, etc. with Freemake! Guaranteed result.”

(I suspect English isn’t their first language! But, it is great software!)

From LifeHacker – Make Sure TRIM Is Enabled for Your Solid State Drive in Windows 7 for Better Performance By: Whitson Gordon

“One of the best ways to take full advantage of your solid state drive (SSD) is to use the performance-maintaining TRIM command. Technology blog GHacks shows us how to make sure TRIM is enabled in Windows 7.

While using something like Intel’s previously mentioned Toolbox application to TRIM your drive is extremely useful, you need to make sure Windows 7 has enabled it first. And, while Windows is designed to automatically detect most SSDs, sometimes it doesn’t work as intended. If you find the

performance of your SSD is degrading (or just want to make sure TRIM is properly enabled), run Command Prompt as an administrator and type:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

It will give you one of two results, either a 0 or a 1. A zero indicates that TRIM is enabled correctly, a one means that it is not. If you have a TRIM-compatible SSD, but find that Windows 7 hasn’t enabled the command, you can easily do so by running this command:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

Note that TRIM is only supported in Windows 7, so if you have an SSD but are running an older version of Windows, it’s probably a good idea to upgrade.”

This week’s GSotW is “TrimCheck” a tool to test whether TRIM is enabled when you have a solid state drive.

TrimCheck

“This program provides an easy way to test whether TRIM works on your SSD. It uses a similar method to the one described here, but uses sector calculations to avoid searching the entire drive for the sought pattern. It also pads the sought data with 32MB blocks of dummy data, to give some room to processes which may otherwise overwrite the tested deleted disk area.

The program will set up a test by creating and deleting a file with unique contents, then (on the second run) checks if the data is still accessible at the file’s previous location.”