Windows in general can a be a pain in the ass. There’s tonnes of software on the market that’s pricey depending on what you want get done. Sometimes you need an enterprise class solution for your vexing problem and it can only be achieved by dropping a few thousand dollars.
And sometimes, just sometimes you can peruse the freeware section of a website and be astounded by what is lying in wait that can be your perfect solution. The problem therein is which website offers the safest surfing experience? Can you trust a websites freeware? Is it really malware just waiting for you to execute? There’s never an easy answer. So here’s a sure fire list of websites that offer freeware that I know and use on a regular basis:
Gizmo’s freeware http://www.techsupportalert.com/ A real nugget of free applications that do everything. All content is nicely organized in categories that make sense. Most freeware is crapware free and each software has independent reviews based on a 5-star rating system. All pro’s and con’s for each software is listed, and offers up screenshots for any software you’re wary of installing.
NirSoft http://www.nirsoft.net For all the IT Administrator essentials, most are packed away in this must-have website. Utilities range from wireless sniffers, DNS checkers, password recovery options to system tweaking tools. Everything is laid out right on the main page heading style. This website scores extra points as all software is developed by the same programmer Nir Sofer, and most are stand alone executable files that do not require installation!
Major Geeks http://majorgeeks.com/ One mother of a download site, Major Geeks has been a staple of the internet and continues on with it’s tradition of offering all it’s freeware hosted locally on it’s internal servers. Just about anything can be found right here.
So go on, give it a shot and see what you can download.
Here’s a protip: Save your contacts! Should your computer need to be reformatted or upgraded, you run the risk of losing the contacts you email on a frequent basis.
Why is this?
When you start typing a name in your address field and Outlook offers completion suggestions, that’s called auto-complete – and that does NOT get backed up anywhere.
Solution?
Copy that person into your address book. When you get a new person’s email, right click on their name in your outlook, and choose “Add to Outlook Contacts”
It’s really that simple: plus it takes away [some] the woes of your IT Administrator.
Internet Explorer has come long way since version 6, the super buggy security nightmare. Being a free browser it wasn’t considered edgy or avante garde enough for most IT geeks tastes. Most of you probably made the jump to Mozilla Firefox and never looked back.
As most IT savvy consumers, IT administrators and professionals would agree; none would be caught dead using a built in browser. Because there’s so much it can’t do compared to the free browsers out there.
So I’m here to point out a few things about Internet Explorer that most folks gloss over:
Most companies use IE because it can be customized from a GPO (Group Policy Object) at the domain level. This means custom safe zones, ability to pop in proxy servers, and control over who can install active X components. It’s no surprise that IE is the go to browser for business, it offers customization and tracking. What company doesn’t want that?
2. Most web development firms use IE as their display of choice.
Web firms and design companies also understand that most businesses use IE, which means they have to program a friendly website that’s IE compatible. Mozilla Firefox, even offers a built in “IE tab” emulator for PC’s. Some code simply will not compile nicely with other browsers, so you’re back to IE when you want to see how a website is supposed to be natively displayed.
3. There’s more security updates for IE than any other browser.
Opera, Firefox, Chrome (and derivatives) and sometimes Safari are months behind when it comes to security updates and exploits. Internet Explorer certainly isn’t bulletproof, but it offers built in updates with the Windows operating system updates; so you get to kill two birds with one stone.
4. There’s quite a bit of functionality behind IE
Internet Explorer has a nice tab feature that’s color coded: with each new tab opened under a ‘parent’ tab, the child tabs are color coded so you know which tab is related. Pretty cool? How about the ability to pin Favicons to your taskbar?
HTML5 promises to do many things; among them is replacing Adobe’s flash player. HTML5 also can do a multitude of other things such as enable DirectX video acceleration and full text rendering. Javascripting and and CSS are and will be faster than the free browsers. IE is embracing modern web standards, and is helping to make the internet a prettier place to be.
What does this mean to you? Internet Explorer was once the poor man’s choice for browsers – you want something for business with built in support for such things such as Citrix Xenapp clients, VPN Active X runtimes, Java integration and web design comfort, IE is your best bet.
If you’re in the IT industry, there’s a certain expectation of you. This expectation trickles down to all the folks of a company, and evetually the questions start to surface. At one point, I’m sure I was even guilty of these things, assuming my IT administrator knew what to do. But at the end of the day, I’m just another Joe, just like you. And I’m not a genius. But I have to act like one sometimes.
Knowing every little facet of every software product. EVER made.
This one is annoying because some client will walk up to me, start blabbering about why their real player files won’t convert properly into iTunes, then ask me to convert those files for them. Usually for free, because, “hey, this is the IT guy, he probably knows what I’m talking about”. This isn’t the case folks. I don’t use the same software as everyone, in fact I like using software that’s easy to manage, easy to understand and doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. In other words, I don’t obfuscate matters by getting some mundane software that requires a new plugin for every file, or visualization feature. And there’s no way I could understand why or what you’re doing with whatever freeware you’ve downloaded online will do with your machine, or how it will perform with your other programs. Seriously, most reputable freeware downloads offer a Q+A section, or a forum, or a ‘How To’ portion of their website, dedicated to click-happy people. This leads back to “If you don’t know, what makes you think I do?”
Backups happen MAGICALLY
I can get my word doc’s off this, right?
Situation: you create a word document on the server at 8:00AM. You nuke it at 8:30PM because you didn’t like it. You come to me at 9:00AM asking me to restore it. This is where my frustration begins, because people can’t seem to fathom the idea that Backups and storage space is somewhat limited. There are times when backups happen, say at night when things are slow or when you’re supposedly not working. Shadow copy is an option, and for the most part I can get what you need, but c’mon. It’s not like I have my finger precariously hovering over a button marked ‘restore’.
Not understanding Scope of IT contract
Where’s the section for hookers and blow?
It’s Sunday night, you get a virus pop up onto your computer. You call your IT guy in a panic. You describe the situation in great detail, something akin to: I was innocently surfing this particular website with slave Leia costumes when BAM! You just downloaded a virus. Now you can’t go onto Ebay to check hockey ticket prices because your IE only has pop ups instead of the usual dicking around you do. After the lengthy explanation, I log into your Antivirus server and notice there’s no new infections on your work machine. I do a lengthy check, update dictionaries, run a malware scanner in the background and you’re still okay. It is around this point that you mention this is your home computer. I somehow gather the strength to bite the insides of my lips in silent rage and calmly tell you that just because you do work on your home computer, it does not mean that I am, in any way, an adminstrator of your home media machine. There is a very clear example I want to use: If your Ford car breaks down, do you take it into the Chevrolet dealership and demand they fix it for free?
Using your gray matter effectively
“Please push all buttons at once”
It’s no secret that some people are just a little more gifted than others. At one point in time I seriously thought the ‘lights out’ conversation between a support guy and a less than intelligent lady was false. Boy was I wrong. If something isn’t working properly, or isn’t starting like it usually does, do a little detective work. It certain saves the time it takes for me to respond, by coming down and turning on your fucking monitor or hitting the red button on your power bar. Just little things like that, or if your mouse isn’t working, try plugging it back in.
Expecting change to happen instantaneously
Is it hammertime yet?
Machines are built to do one thing: take instructions. But that instruction set is bogged down by many contraints: such as availability of memory and hard disk space. Clicking a thousand times in the same ‘OKAY’ box doesn’t help. When your screen doesn’t refresh and dragging a window creates a ghost image, what else do you do? You panic. If you bothered to look at your task manager and found out that itunes was chewing through all your memory, you’d realize if you stopped a few programs you’d actually be able to get some work done. Just give your computer a minute to catch up; take this moment to stare outside or refocus your eyes on something that’s not refreshing every .05 of a milisecond.
If you’re a Chrome user like me, beware of the latest Google Chrome update preceeding 16.0.912.63. This version has a problem with the way the database is sorting through web traffic. It was putting over 20 GB of data of .sst files in
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\IndexedDB\ directory.
SST files from my experience is like a developer’s placeholder file. Something that acts like cache and gets destroyed as soon as you’re done with it. However, in this case the file never gets destroyed and actually multiplies.
Personally I didn’t even notice until my antivirus seemed like it was stuck in the same directory for over 4 hours. It was then that I noticed the size it was chewing up on my hard drive.
Here’s what didn’t work:
1. Uninstalling – even removing the registry keys with Revo uninstaller for 64 bit machines
2. removing Google sync services and re-applying as I figured it was trying to grab my bookmarks and history
3. Moving the directory elsewhere -it’s not the size of the volume that’ the problem it’s the number of files. Each one being around 2KB, it calculated it would take close to 8 hours to move.
Here’s what did work:
1. Uninstalling Google Chrome
2. Manually deleting the files via an elevated command line (akin to del *.sst)
It does take some time, mine was little more than 4 hours on a Solid State Drive, but it did all eventually disappear. On the new Chrome releases it appears okay. So hopefully this fix saves your bacon and hard disk space.
-Dexter
