a4apphack

There are various harddisk space analyzers which gives us a graphical representation of the files/folders which eats up our harddisk. These tools even provide options to visually navigate through the folders to view the space occupied by its subfolders. Here, we talk about few popular disk analyzers which are portable and worth giving a shot.

Comparison of all those are presented in a table at the end of this post.

Security Perspective: If you are an info sec guy, esp. in forensics, you can utilize the features of the these tools to identify the presence of hidden large files/archives which might possibly contain some sensitive data in it. Most of the time secret truecrypt files are hidden inside some OS folders to make it look genuine.

Note: Most of the apps mentioned here can be downloaded in a portable format. The others can be made portable using the method mentioned here

Comparison Table – here.

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FlashCookiesView is a small utility that displays the list of cookie files created by Flash component (Local Shared Object) in your Web browser. For each cookie file, the lower pane of FlashCookiesView displays the content of the file in readable format or as Hex dump. If you are a security tester, this can help you while testing for flash applications – to analyse the sensitive content in the flash generated cookies.

You can also select one or more cookie files, and then copy them to the clipboard, save them to text/html/xml file or delete them.

Flash Cookie Viewer

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This post talks about few portable ipod managers which can directly run from USB devices and sync with your iPods. If you don’t want to install the heavyweight iTunes in your PC, choose any of the apps discussed here.

Various apps discussed in this post are

1. Floola
2. iDump
3. YamiPod
4. SharePod
5. SongBird
6. MediaMonkey

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MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to “Away” / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back.

MonitorES - Turns MonitorOff/Mutes Audio When You Lock PC

Options are customizable and can be set as per our needs.

Monitor ES Options

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3D TraceRoute is an all-in-one networking tool which has traceroute, whois, ping, nslookup, server header analyser, portscanner, telnet client and hell lot of tools coupled together in a single package.

This is a free portable tool and can run on almost any Windows operating systems (Pro commercial version with enhanced is also available)

Here I’ve documented few of the main features of the free version of this tool; download and experiment with 3D traceroute to get the complete picture of it.

Note: This article is targeted for the readers who have basic understanding or experience with using various networking tools.

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Easily map your frequntly accessed directories in your PC’s to a drive. You can choose the any drive letter from the set of ‘not used’ drives which is displayed in the tool.

Virtual Subst

This can be of very much use if mapping is done for folders with a long path, so that VirtualSubst can act like a bookmark.

TIP:

I usually take backup of my thumbdrive in a particular location, say D:\Usb. Now, when the thumbdrive is not connected, with VirtualSubst I can map the Usb back up folder to a drive letter which would have been assigned if thumbdrive was connected. So my backup folder acts as a virutal usb drive with the advantage of having active linking of most recent files list in my Word or any app. This also helps in creating desktop shortcuts of files present in the thumbdrive, which can be accessed if the thumbdrive is connected or not.

Features

• Tiny and Portable
• Option to enable virtual drives at startup
• Add/Delete any number of virtual drives quickly

Visual Subst Info
App Name	Visual Subst
License	free
Type	portable
App URL
More Info	link

I’m introducing a new category and is termed as ‘Failed’. Here I’ll flag certain posts, where apps are being reviewed, as failed, if I can find a better alternative for the same app.

Proper justifications/comparisons for why a particular app is ‘Failed’ will be mentioned. If you find that the failed app is still better than its alternative, mention that in comments.

Windows Batch files can be used to automate or to run a sequence of operations. This includes starting multiple applications when windows starts up, clearing temp folder when a shortcut key is clicked, Ending certain unwanted processes etc

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BitsMonitor is simple app that uses ‘BITS’ to download files from web. This app has features like resume support, queuing, scheduling, shutdown aft complete etc.

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USBSafeRemove is a very powerful USB Device Manager which has lots of unique features including reconnect the disconnected device, display locked process, stop with hotkey and many useful options.

Note : This is NOT a freeware and is a 30 Day trial product.

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