format posts

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

USB Drive Fresher automatically tidies your flash drives

by Lee Mathews Aug 19th 2009

On my service bench, we've got a handful of USB flash drives that get cluttered up on a daily basis. By the end of the day, they're often loaded up with drivers, backups, thumbs.db files - you name it.

Yesterday, I found USBDriveFresher. It's a free utility designed to clean up flash drives with minimal fuss. You can create your own cleanup routines. Cleanup can even be done automatically, which is useful if you constantly need a clean drive like I do.

You're not limited to cleaning up flash drives, though. Fresher's custom cleanup option lets you run your tidy-up routines on any folder on your computer.

USBDriveFresher is a free download and runs on everything from Windows 98 forward. It only uses about 6mb when running - well worth it if you need to keep a number of drives clean and ready-to-use.

Tags: cleanup, clutter, erase, format, usb-flash-drive

Filed under: Macintosh, Office, Apple, Commercial

Pagehand lets you compose PDF files natively

by Jason Clarke Jul 25th 2009

Have you ever wondered why you can't simply author PDF files directly in a word processor? Most word processors like Microsoft Word use their own proprietary format, or a standard format like RTF. But Adobe's PDF format is the recognized standard in cross-platform page layout file formats; if you send someone a PDF file, you can be virtually guaranteed that they will be able to open and view it. And better yet, what they see will be exactly what you intended.

Though it may not seem like the world needs another word processor, the folks at PageHand decided that the ones that are currently available left something to be desired. And thus, PageHand, the word processor, was born.

PageHand has to be the most approachable word processor I've ever seen. When you first launch it, a sample document opens that is essentially a written tutorial. You are encouraged to change and edit the sample document as a way to get comfortable with PageHand's features, and can always revert back to the original sample document right from the Help menu item. With this tutorial, a new user could be comfortable navigating PageHand and using its various features very quickly.

TUAW previously covered PageHand prior to its release during WWDC, when they posted a first-look preview video. It's now in release, and is available for a limited time for $39.95, after which it will go back to the regular price of $49.95. There is a 30 day trial version available, and a money back guarantee.

Tags: file formats, file-formats, FileFormats, format, microsoft word, microsoft-word, MicrosoftWord, page layout, page-layout, pagehand, PageLayout, pdf file, pdf-file, PdfFile, rtf, sample document, sample-document, SampleDocument, trial version, trial-version, TrialVersion, word, word processor, word-processor, WordProcessor, wwdc

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Troubleshooting, Windows x64

Portable DiskDigger provides free file recovery for Windows

by Lee Mathews Feb 18th 2009

It never hurts to have one more data recovery utility in your portable toolkit, especially when it's free.

Like Recuva, Disk Digger is dead simple to use, and does a good job at recovering the deleted files most users really care about - photos, music, videos, and documents. The preview pane supports most image types and some documents, and you can choose to recover a portion of files DiskDigger finds. Scanning speed and restoration success was on par with Recuva in my testing.

On Vista and Windows 7 make sure you run DiskDigger as an Administrator, otherwise you might run into problems. Though I received an error message after launching it on Vista Ultimate x64, it ran without further problems after clicking continue and did a good job locating and restoring lost files.

In case you have issues getting the file from the author's page, it's mirrored at Snapfiles as well.

Tags: data-recovery, deleted-files, file-recovery, format, portable, recuva, undelete

Filed under: OS Updates, Utilities, Windows, Microsoft

Access Windows 7, Vista exFAT partitions in XP

by Lee Mathews Jan 29th 2009

Since a lot of you weren't (and still aren't) too excited about Windows Vista, you might not have noticed the exFAT file system before.

It's the heir apparent to FAT32, and it can finally cope with large files and drives. What's new? For starters, exFAT has been tweaked to provide faster access and allocation, adds support for UTC time stamps, and provides increased compatability with flash media.

Gone are the 32gb drive and 4gb file size limitations. The only problem is that exFAT isn't native to Windows XP - which the vast majority of you are probably still running.

Problem solved. Microsoft has released KB955704 to address the issue. Download it from their site and install it, and you'll be able to seamlessly work with exFAT partitions in XP.

[ via gHacks ]

Tags: exFAT, format, partition, windows-7, windows-vista, windows-xp

Filed under: Business, Text, Utilities, News, Windows, Office, Productivity, Microsoft

Microsoft's converter for previous Office versions

by Ryan Carter Oct 23rd 2006

Microsoft has (finally) put out a converter tool for use in Office 2000, 2002 (Office XP) and 2003 to use the new OOXML document formats. This means you can open and edit documents from Office 2007 in previous versions of Office. This "compatibility pack" works for PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents which is a godsend for anyone who is currently (or planning to) straddle the Office 2007 fence. You could say that this little app serves as the link from the new world to the old world, or the link between crazy, early-adopter, beta-testers to those less inclined to purposefully install "guaranteed-to-crash" software for the blissful fun of it. I know a lot of us have been looking for something like this, because colleagues, friends, and let's not forget our other machines have older versions of Office. So, there you go, served up nice and fresh for you at Microsoft digital headquarters. The converter is around 27MB to download, is free (one would hope it would be), and for once doesn't require you to sign away your new hummer and give a quart of blood and a urine sample just to get it. Click the version for your language and it will begin downloading. Let me know how the converter works out for you, since I have the 2007 beta installed, so I am converter-disabled at the moment. Note that you must have at least Office 2000 SP3, Office XP SP3, or Office 2003 SP1 and Windows 2000 SP 4, Windows XP SP 1, or Windows Server 2003.

Tags: document, excel, format, Microsoft, Office Open XML, OfficeOpenXml, OOXML, powerpoint, word

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

Media-Convert: Web-based converter for most everything

by Jordan Running Oct 5th 2006

Media-Convert is a fairly impressive web service that will convert a file from one file format to another. That sounds pretty benign, but what's impressive is how many formats it supports. There's a good chance Media-Convert supports almost every document on you computer, including dozens of audio and video formats, a ton of common and obscure image formats, documents from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and others, compressed archives, and more. One particularly neat trick it can do is convert PDF documents to Adobe Flash (SWF) movies. It can also capture web pages as images, convert Microsoft Access databases to Excel spreadsheets, and, in case you're into this sort of thing, convert text documents to morse code. Of course, it's not lightning-fast. You have to upload your file or enter the URL of a file and then wait awhile while it's converted, but far as convenience and price (free!) goes it can scarcely be beat.

[Via Lifehacker]

Tags: convert, format, free, mediaconvert

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