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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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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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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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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Unlike a normal desktop organizer, BumpTop helps us to arrange our files and icons in a realistic 3d space.We can arrange, pile up, sort and organize our files as if we do it in our real desk. BumpTop includes hell lots of features including uploading pics to facebook/twitter, pile similar files in desktop, enlarge frequently used files and custumizable with themes.

BumpTop released its Beta tag recently and is up and running in full- fledge.

Video Demo

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After uninstalling any software which had temporarily installed for testing purpose, will leave some traces in our PC as registry modifications or in the form of flat files in the OS folders. These unwanted files consumes disk space and might ultimately slow down our PC. WhatChanged is a tiny tool which is a must have for people who install and uninstall softwares frequently.

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While trying to extract large files (say in GBs) with 7zip (Or any compression tools) and you don’t have enough space in your C drive (or whereever your OS is installed), you might probably notice something like this….

And what you do is clear the temp files or search for some less important applications which you can uninstall. But you would ultimately fail by not finding the required space. The solution is to change the working folder used by 7zip. By default the working folder will be the root drive where OS is installed.

Change the temp folder is easy, Open Options from Tools Menu and select Plugins tab, now click Options and then Folders tab. Now change the temp folder as shown below.

And commandline options for geeks, the command is

7z x _FiletoExtract_ w_WorkingDir_ o_OutputFolder_

x : Denotes extract
w : Working Folder/Temp Folder (e.g. wD:\tmp\)
o : Output Folder (e.g oD:\Files\)

For more options check here

Note: Changing tempdir is not the feature available only in 7Zip, but its mentioned here because 7Zip is the most popular archivial tools available in the market.

I always hate to use the stock defrag tool which comes bundled with windows, due to couple of reasons 1. It takes hell lot of time to complete the process and 2. It eats up all of my RAM that my PC will be dead for sometime. I’m sure that many would have faced the same problem and one good solution that I can suggest is to use a third party, free defragmentation tool. After a long search I found out one and that is SmartDefrag.

SmartDefrag is one of the best free and award winning defrag tools available in the market.

SmartDefrag Screenshot

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Font matcher compares the font of the text embedded in an image with the set of fonts found in your fonts directory and displays the match percentage. This can save our precious time in quickly finding out a similar font rather than scanning through our font archives. This is available in portable as well as in installer versions.

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