Essential Software: CODEC Chaos

In this first part, I’ll discuss in basic terms; a) The common system used in Windows to handle codecs and b) The problems associated with codec utilisation in Windows.  Part II article will focus on essential software used to counter codec issues posed by the system described in Part I..

Essential Software: Zip File Repair

Quite a while back, I had a whole lot of data to transfer to DVD-R media.  Upon failure of each disc write verification (something that is important to do) in the Nero disc burning application, I realised that it must be an issue with a low quality medium or perhaps a brand incompatibility (requiring a firmware update of my burner).  Anyway, later on I came across a neat program, allowing the repair of damaged .zip archives and found that I still had one of the poorly written DVD-R’s lying around, so I decided to test out a damaged archive from the disc..

 

Essential Software: Copy When It Says You Can’t

I have already written about the YCopy tool which allows one to copy files en masse without the process cutting out at a given point if a file read error is encountered.  Here is another tool that offers the same convenience, but with data recovery options and more..

 
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Essential Software: EaseUs Partition Master

I know that Vista offers the ability resize partitions either by shrinking or extending, but to extend the basic disk’s partition, the partition must either be NTFS or raw (unformatted) and there must be contiguous space to expand into..

It is an all too common thing not to plan for these little idiosyncrasies of different version operating systems.  It is nice to be able to get some control back with a 3rd party partitioning program – that’s free!

Sites & Services: Odiogo Text To Speech Service

I was browsing one of my favourite blogs a while back and noticed a button on each post, allowing one to download and listen to an audio version of the text content of the article in question, provided by a service called Odiogo.  I was reasonably skeptical because I had listened to the quality of other TTS (Text to Speech) convertors before and they seemed a bit awkward to listen to with all the fluctuation in tempo and pitch (or emphasis on words)..

Essential Software: Transfer Media From iPods

I am only speaking from personal experience, but this seems to be a recurring thing: a friend has an iPod with tracks (video, music etc.) on it that I like, I want to transfer some of the media to my PC but the iTunes media management software will only allow me to see (or manually manage) but not copy these to my PC.  You can copy the iPod_Control folder from the iPod (after enabling disk usage), but that isn’t the best or efficient way and certain information isn’t retained…

Essential Software: Start-up Delayer

This essential piece of software fits the bill for almost any Windows PC user out there.  Anyone that has performed a fresh install of Windows, loves the responsiveness they have, especially in stark contrast to the likely prior system state.  Even with the knowledge of how to keep your registry and hard disk data contiguously arranged and clutter-free, it is human nature to neglect this mundane task.  As time passes, you often wind up with more and more start-up items that simultaneously compete for system resources, making for a crawling system start-up.

Here is a stop-gap measure if you need to have all the start-up items running at some point or another..

Essential Software: Data Recovery

A while back, I wrote an article on a data recovery utility known as FreeUndelete.  There was one lacking feature (that you would normally pay for in other software) at the time: the ability to bypass the file-system to access data from maybe a previous partition or partition with damaged formatting. 

Brief Notice

Thank you to all those who frequent this site!  Recently my time has been occupied by events surrounding work and regrettably, I have reduced my blog submissions to a couple of times a week.  This is not indefinite, just until I have more time on my hands.

Thank you. 

Essential Software: Text Translation Software

From time to time, I get foreign language posts to my blog, and being the courteous person I am, I like to at least put the effort into understanding what they are saying, rather than just curb their posts to the spam section of site admin, or leave them there because auto-spam says so!