A collection of utilities 5

I don't want to fall any further behind on utilities, so here's installment #5. For convenience, here's links to installments 1, 2, 3 and 4.

August 2007 Utilities of the Month

This month is suggestion month. The three utilities below were suggested by various coworkers.

Unstoppable Copier: Got a file on a flakey hard drive, CD, or thumb drive that you really need? Windows file copy might error out, but Unstoppable Copier will recover as much of the file as possible: (Freeware, Windows and Linux)

WinGrep: Need to find a string of text in a bunch of log files? Even Notepad2 won’t help you there; try WinGrep. It provides a nice UI for searching through whatever files you specify and will even show the line found in context with up to 5 lines before and after the match. (Shareware, Windows)

AIDA32: This is quite a specialized utility, but invaluable when you need it. Have a piece of hardware you can’t identify so you don’t know what driver to use? This utility will spit out as much information about it as it can gather, which might just be enough to help you identify it. It may save you from having to take the PC apart and certainly comes in handy when you’re trying to identify something remotely. It can even tell you what memory slots are in use and free. The original website has been taken down, but it is still available for download all over the web. (Freeware, home/personal use. Business use requires a “registration request” which points to the website which is no longer available. Windows)

Utilities of the Month for April 2006

I have two utilities this month – a PDF writer, and an alternate to Acrobat Reader.


CutePDF – adds itself as a printer allowing any application that can print to create PDFs. It is free for personal and commercial use with no watermarks, popups, ads, etc.

You’ll need CutePDF itself (2MB) as well as Ghostscript 8.15 Lite (5MB (Go Badgers!)). Both installs are extremely simple wizards.

(Update: I've found PDFCreator to be an excellent free PDF writer too. It allows more customization and automation than CutePDF.)

There’s always the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader 7.0 (now version 8.1), which seems to have fixed the slow startup problems of 6.0. However, Foxit Reader (1MB) is a small, fast alternative PDF reader. It requires no installation, is only about a megabyte download, and starts blazing fast.


As a bonus and just to get them out of the way, be sure to check out Microsoft’s Power Toys

My 3 favorite Power Toys:
TweakUI
Alt-Tab Replacement
Open Command Window Here

Utility of the Month for May 2007

Tired of Exchange complaining about the amount of space your mailbox takes? Check out this utility:

Outlook Attachment Sniffer – Extracts the attachments from e-mails in Outlook and stores them on your hard drive. It replaces the attachment with an .oas file, which is simply a link to the file on your hard drive. It is a great way to keep your mailbox size down without constantly deleting or archiving to a local .pst file. (Shareware - $15 to register.)