Operating Systems | Technology Blog

Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: USB Safely Remove

December 15th, 2008

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Day 15 of the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. We got 10 more software products for you for which we will hand out licenses. Today’s software program is special as it is the first one that can will be handed out to everyone who wants to try it.

USB Safely Remove is a USB device manager that can be run on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. USB devices like removable hard drives, memory sticks or even connected digital cameras become increasingly common but Microsoft failed to add the means to manage the devices effectively. The software program works basically with any hot-plug devices like USB, SATA, Firewire or PCMCIA devices.

One of the problems that Windows users might encounter is that most devices that get connected to the computer will use the name USB mass storage device. That makes it difficulty to safely unplug a specific device from the computer system. There is also no option to hide important devices that (never) get disconnected from the system.

Software Updates Week 38 2008

October 8th, 2008

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It is already October which means that we have reached the final quarter of 2008. This week’s software releases have been rather uneventful. Lots of applications have been released as yet another beta or release candidate but almost none as a final version.

Notable updates include the third release candidate of Notepad 2, the fourths of Open Office and a new version of the popular software uninstaller Revo Uninstaller. A new alpha version of Tor has been released as well.

The update of the week award goes to Screamer Radio which is a nice little tool to record Internet radio.

Windows Wallpapers From MSN

October 1st, 2008

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Windows Wallpapers from MSN is a beta application and web service that provides Windows users with wallpapers from Microsoft. The software application will automatically check in intervals if new Windows wallpapers are available and download them automatically to the computer system. At the time of testing 156 Windows wallpapers were downloaded to the computer.

Wallpapers from MSN is not your usual wallpaper manager though. It displays the Windows wallpapers in an image library and gives the user options to add his own wallpapers to the application. Each wallpaper can be processed before it is being used as the Windows wallpaper.

The user can use basic photo editing functions like cutting, rotating or cropping images. More interesting that that is the option to add elements to the wallpapers. Three types of objects are available that can be added to a selected wallpaper: Foreground Images, Graphic Elements and Text.

Web Video Downloader And Converter

October 1st, 2008

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Web video is so popular that Internet Providers throughout the world are feeling the network bandwidth increase and trying to find ways to lower the bandwidth consumption. The popularity of web video caused a strong increase in web video downloaders and converters that download videos from video portals to the local computer.

TubeMaster (via Download online video using TubeMaster Plus) is one of those applications. The portable application supports more than 100 video portals including the ever popular Youtube and Dailymotion but also some unsuspected ones like Hulu, IGN or ESPN. Not all web video portals could be tested because some will only show the videos to users of specific countries. A test of downloading web video from Hulu would be greatly appreciated.

The application uses its own browser that can be used to display the video portal websites. Videos will be automatically downloaded when they are played on the portal. This is unfortunately the only way to download videos from the various websites.

Avanquest Software AutoSave Essentials Competition

September 29th, 2008

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AutoSave Essentials is a new commercial backup software developed by Avanquest which can be used to backup important data easily with minimal user interaction. That is the biggest selling point of the software. It comes with three predefined backup plans for music, documents and photos minimizing the time a user needs to configure the backup software if he stores his data in the My Documents directory in Windows (because files in that location will be backed up in those plans).

Additional options are available to save the complete My Documents folder in one backup plan and to save Web Settings which will essentially save Firefox and IE cookies and user data. Those predefined backup plans are great for inexperienced users who don’t feel like configuring a backup software.

Custom backup plans can be added which offer two additional options. The first is to create a backup plan for specific folders, partitions or drives of the computer while the second creates a backup plan for specific file extensions. The latter will backup all file extensions of the type on all connected drives. Configuring those custom backup plans is a breeze compared to other backup solutions on the market. Everything can be configured with just a few clicks.

Run Linux Live CDs In Windows

September 23rd, 2008

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Testing Linux distributions could not be easier already. All it usually takes is to burn the image of the Linux distribution to CD and boot from the CD to experience that distribution. There is not a possibility to save configuration data usually but that is not the point of Live CDs which provide a testing environment without installation. They do serve other purposes as well, for instance booting into a secure environment on a computer.

An alternative to burning Live CDs would be MobaLiveCD which is an application for Windows operating systems that emulates the process using Qemu. This essentially means that Windows users can run Linux live CDs in Windows without having to burn them to CD first and boot the computer from the CD afterwards.

This means it offers a quick way of testing a Live CD without having to boot the computer. It actually takes only two clicks to start a Linux live CD in Windows with Moba Live CD. This obviously requires a Live CD in ISO format on the computer. A good repository for Linux Live CDs is the LiveCD List.