Ezine 153 - One Good Utility Leads to Another
Have you ever noticed that if you find one good utility the trail leads you
to discover
more? Or if you complete one task successfully the next one seems
easy?
Good Utilities
At present Undelete Plus is free program, (it used to be $29.95).
As the name suggests Undelete's mission is to restore files which 'Mr
Nobody' accidentally deleted. It also recovers files that have been
zapped with Shift + Delete. So, rather than conducting a witch hunt to
see who deleted the files, just get on with life, and install Undelete Plus.
It works on a large range of file systems: FAT and NTFS, also with
CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards.
Three more pleasant surprises with Undelete Plus
- The install could not have been easier.
- It even works on Windows Server 2008.
- The biggest surprise of all, it could recover files deleted BEFORE I
installed Undelete Plus. Perhaps if I had thought about how
Undelete works, this would not have come as such a revelation.
Before we get carried away, let me inject a dose of realism.
Undelete Plus is unlikely to recover intact files that you zapped 2 years
ago, especially if you saved lots more stuff to disk since the original
delete.
As I was testing Undelete Plus, a thought struck me, 'I should be
protecting some of these data folders with Volume Shadow Copy and its
accompanying Previous Version'. Then I got to thinking, this is a good
time to review my entire backup strategy. Funny how one good idea
(Undelete), leads to more good ideas, Volume Shadow Copy and test backup and
restore.
Download
your free copy of Undelete Plus
Ez GPO provides power management for XP. The idea is that you
configure the GPOs supplied to control the Power Settings. The result
is you have a central point where you can regulate all your XP machines' Hibernation, Sleep and Standby settings.
Time spent on power
management is particularly worthwhile for laptops with a short battery life.
Naturally, the overall goal is to save electricity with all the associated
financial and 'Green' benefits.
Then I got to thinking, there is a good reason why Ez GPO does not work with
Vista; namely you can control Vista machines through existing
Microsoft Group Policies. Consequently, I took the time to configure my
Vista machines to reduce their power consumption.
What attracted me to ipMonitor was its bank of lights which indicate the status
of each resource on each server, it's like I imagine mission control at
Houston. What you have to see for your self is the mind-blowing level
of extra detail; just double click on the icons
and drill down to see the performance of resources such as memory, CPU, disk.
You can also remotely monitor hardware, for example, fan, temperature and
battery.
One key benefit of the console is that you don't have to remember thresholds
for when available memory is critical, or when CPU utilization is abnormally
high, ipMonitor sets the counters automatically. And yes you can
change values once you know what you are doing. What's more, you don't
realize how much you are learning about the operating system, the hardware
and their dependencies.
Download your free evaluation copy of ipMonitor
Benchmark has a whole raft of tools for monitoring disks. Many are
Freeware.
Active SMART
I tested Benchmark's Active Smart, mainly because it was the first on the
list and it looked like the most expensive. Active SMART claims to
predict when a hard disk drive is about to fail.
I have to say that Active Smart did not work with Windows Server 2008,
but neither did its blurb claim support for this operating system.
However, it does work with Vista and Windows Server 2003.
Once again testing a utility spawned an interesting idea.
I could write a PowerShell script which would filter the System Eventlog for
disk errors. While this is not as good a solution as Active Smart, it
will tide me over until they, or a competitor, produce a utility which works
with Windows Server 2008.
Before I move on, just to remind you that there are
loads
more utilities in Benchmark's suite, one or two are bound to give you ideas.
For general network utilities try
Tools4Ever.
They have a professional stable of products for example, SpaceGuard Disk
quota manager, Self Service Password Reset, and my favourite FreePing.
Tools4Ever use the popular internet utility model where we download a trial
version, and if we like it, we return and buy the full version.
KidZui (Kids User Interface) cannot access the internet, but that is by
design. KidZui's whole concept is safe
browsing for children. And KidZui free. It works by accessing only URLs in an approved
database. To get started the parent downloads the KidZui application,
they then configure an account for their children to access the pages in a
controlled database.
As of October 2008 there are over 1 Million entries in the url
database, thus something safe for every kid. One clever trick to encourage children to browse
(as if they needed one)
is the use of avatars. Once they have their avatar, called a Zuis, they
earn points by browsing. I expect you have worked out the last part
already, they convert points into gear for their Zuis.
My wife and I don't have children, thus KidZui is not for us,
nevertheless I was fascinated by the technology and the way that kids use of
the internet is developing. One conundrum that I have is why don't
they teach children to type in school?
Get your free copy of
KidZui
Summary of One Good Utility Leads to Another
There is an ever growing supply of internet utilities. Paul DeBrino has
a knack of finding treasures amongst the myriad of offerings. One surprise
that struck me this week is the way that one utility sparks off ideas for
improving other areas of one's computer system.
Will and Guy's Humour
This week Will and Guy are hoping that the financial crisis is over, one sign
is the volume of 'black humor' that is springing up, here is our offering on 'Bank
Crisis - Black Humor'.
See more interesting network computer utilities
• E195 Router Security •
E158 Network Apps •
E153 Network Utilities •
E149 Performance Monitor
• E138 Network Utilities •
E137 IPv6 •
E121 NCPA for Network Connections •
E111 Mobile Devices
• E98 Nmap •
E16 Perfmon •
Network Performance Monitor
• Kiwi Syslog Server Review • Ezines
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