software

FosiX and SpaceMonger are pretty good free windows disk space usage analyzer's, but if you are looking for a simple and fast pie-chart of your disk usage, Give open-source utility "Scanner"a try.

The small (just 164 KB) free utility creates a concentric pie chart displaying disk space usage on your computer media, The chart shows all major files and folders from all directory levels at once, the utility also provides a simple explorer extension to perform quick analysis of a folder.

Drives Background Image 2.0 is a nice little free utility to set custom Windows Drives Icons and Windows explorer Background image, the software lets you easily select and set your favorite image as background image and Drives Icon at your will.

You can have different backgrounds and icons for each drive and get relived from the same old plain explorer white background and default Windows drive icons.

Banks and big companies always do their best efforts to secure end-user computer's from online threats and one such step is to offer free security software to ensure safe online transactions, In a similar attempt to secure consumers WestPac bank in partnership with online security specialist PC Tools is offering 12 months free access to latest versions of popular security softwares - Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus, Privacy Guardian and PC Tools Firewall Plus.

Apple iPhone and iPod Touch offer lots of storage space which can be utilized for storing files, backups or as an external disk drive, but unfortunately Apple removed the ability to use the device as an external storage, However as always software's have been developed to bypass this restriction.

DiskAid is one such free software for Windows and Mac enabling owners to use their iPhone or iPod touch as an external disk drive, With DiskAid you can transfer files and folders between your iPhone or iPod Touch and your Computer with ease, DiskAid auto-detects any plugged in supported device and offers an easy to use Files & Folders Browser with drag and drop support for fast and easy operations.

You don't need to jailbreak iPhone or iPod and the softwares works well with all the firmware versions including the latest iPhone Software Update 2.0.

"Sean Carving" is one of the coolest digital imaging trick you would have ever seen, the new content aware image-resizing method is used to resize images non-uniformly, removing only less important pixels. Developed by two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir the algorithm makes it possible to select important areas of an image that needs to be preserved and change the aspect ratio of an image without effecting the main content look. It's better to see the video presentation below to see what exactly this method can achieve.

IntuImage - is one of its kind free software to make use of this amazing technique on your desktop, this easy to use tool utilizes “seam carving” or “liquid rescaling” allowing significant change in image size and proportion while leaving the important image elements intact.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is a well known professional partition manager for windows, the software allows you to create, edit, merge, backup and restore partitions on your hard-disk.

The software costs $49 to buy, However, a British computer magazine "Computer Active" offered free legal license to the software using a special link which was supposes to expire on April 11, 2007 but is still active and allows you to register your copy of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 for free legally.

TeraCopy is a must-have free replacement for default Windows copy/move operations, providing a much easier and faster way to copy/move files with advanced features not provided by Windows.

Major advantages of using TeraCopy:

1. Copy files faster using dynamically adjusted buffers reducing overall seek times.
2. Using TeraCopy you can simply pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and Resume with a single click.
3. In case of a copy error, Unlike Windows TeraCopy will try several times and if not successful just skips the file without terminating the entire transfer.
4. Convenient Windows Explorer integration offering easy access to last used copy/move destinations for faster copying.

Digsby is a feature rich, easy to use free desktop client offering multi-protocol instant messaging with email and social networking integration aimed at bringing all major online communication services and social networks under one roof making things simpler to manage and use.

Currently Digsby supports:

• Instant Messaging Services : AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber Accounts.
• Email Services : Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts.
• Social Networking Services : Facebook and MySpace (support for more services coming soon).

Digsby is in private beta now and you need an "Beta Invite Code" to use it (see end of the post for special invite codes for our blog readers).

We have written about DriveImage XML and Seagate DiskWizard as free alternatives to commercial hard-disk cloning software's like Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, but both of them lack support for multicasting cloning (cloning many computers in a network simultaneously) as provided by Norton Ghost Corporate, so here it is not only free, but a open source solution for your unicast and multicast cloning needs - "CloneZilla" is based on DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux providing systemless environment for client machines), Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allowing you to do bare metal backup and recovery with ease.

CloneZilla supports ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, FAT and NTFS filesystems, providing you freedom to clone GNU/Linux or MS windows. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is also supported by Clonezilla.

Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!