VC’s Techie CockTail

I usually back up my work into my Western Digital Passport 80 GB the manual way i.e Copy & Paste and if it asks for over write I say ‘Yes’ . But this I found to be cumbersome and trying some free back-up softwares didn’t cut the ice with me.

But when I read about Microsoft’s Sync Toy V2.0 , I was curious enough to download and try it. First of all its free and relatively a small download package at 8 MB. The installation was easy & straight forward but additional services like Microsoft Sync Framework runtime & services.

After running the software, it first asks to create a Folder pair with one on the left (usually my HD folder) & other on the right (my portable drive folder) and then it gives 3 options

1. Synchronize - Renames & deletes both sides
2. Echo - Renames & deletes only on right side
3. Contribute - Renames and updates on right side no delete.

After that, the task can be previewed or run. It was able to run in the background without majorly affecting any other tasks and the time it took to run was quite OK. All in all a good software to backup and synchronize your work, files, photos, music etc.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: free software

Its a while back that I wrote some of favorite freeware softwares , so here is some of my current freeware favorites for the year of 2008.

• AVG Personal Edition : I’ve been using this antivirus for almost 3 years now. Its been steadily improving, the only problem which I found was its inability to find autorun based viruses in pen drives. But the 2008 edition with built-in spyware has a better User Interface and scanning engine. My only gripe about this version is that it needs to be daily updated, there is no option to change it as a weekly update and the e-mail scanner works for only 30 days. It also has got a paid Internet Security Suite. And for other free alternatives you can try Avast and Antivir
• CCleaner : Another of my long time favorites. But after my ideapad and its tryst with vista CCleaner is not perfect in its working. Like it reports 8 MB to be cleaned and after cleaning it says 26 MB was cleaned. But still its a nice utility to weed out the junk from my Ideapad
• JZip : After trying a host of compression utilities, JZip has been proved its a nice utility with the ability to view zip,rar,tar,iso archives. Its a lightweight and free software

Hopefully these softwares will be useful to you or if you have any other free alternatives let me know. And for the reminder of 2008 I am eagerly awaiting for the full release of Firefox 3 and Open Office 3

written by Vignesh \\ tags: free software