Posts Tagged by Freeware
Reset BIOS Password Without Taking Out CMOS Battery
| 17 April 2011 | Posted by whiztech under Tutorial |
2 popular ways to reset BIOS & BIOS password are using the BIOS reset jumper and taking out CMOS battery for more than 15 minutes. Sometimes, taking out CMOS battery form the motherboard to reset BIOS might not be the solution for you, especially when it is a laptop system.
CMOS De-Animator is a software based solution that allows you to clear and reset your system’s BIOS configuration, thus clearing the BIOS password. The software is very useful since you don’t have to open the computer casing to look for BIOS reset jumper or the CMOS battery. The only downside of CMOS De-Animator is you will need to be able to boot to Windows with administrative right.
To use CMOS De-Animator, just run De-CMOS2.exe, choose the ‘Clear CMOS’ (1) option and hit ‘Proceed’ (2). Your BIOS configuration will be cleared instantly.
CMOS De-Animator will work on major BIOS. So far, I’ve personally tested it on a few Generic Phoenix BIOS, Acer’s, HP’s, TC’s (Terengganu Computer E-Book) and Toshiba’s, and CMOS De-Animator is able to clear the BIOS configuration for those systems.
CMOS De-Animator is freeware and available for Windows.
Side tips: If you are not able to boot to local hard drive Windows, but you are still able to boot from CD, you might want to try Hiren’s Boot CD. Copy CMOS De-Animator to a USB flash drive and execute it from Hiren’s Boot CD.
[CMOS De-Animator] [via: Raymond.cc]
CMOS De-Animator
Developer Description: CMOS De-Animator v2 is a service utility for your system’s CMOS RAM. Unlike its predecessor, the CMOS De-Animator 1.0, this new version includes a graphical interface and CMOS-backup options along with the “Clear CMOS” procedure, which was the original version’s only purpose. The application supports all 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems except Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51; for these old systems you will have to use De-Animator 1.0.
Version: 2.0
Size: 206 KB
License: Freeware
Operating system: All 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems except Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51
Website: st-ware.com
Quick tip: Mount Folder as Drive (Windows)
| 15 June 2010 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
Windows only. If you are looking for a way to mount your frequently accessed folder as a drive (and you don’t feel like having a shortcut on your desktop), Visual Subst might be the application for you. Visual Subst is a simple and small application that will let you mount any folder as virtual hard drive easily.
How to use Visual Subst to mount a folder as a virtual drive
1. Choose the drive letter that you want to point to the folder. (1)
2. Select the folder that you wish to mount as virtual drive. (2)
3. Click the add button to mount the folder. (3)
Visual Subst is freeware and available for Windows. Portable version available.
[Via: LifeHacker]
Visual Subst
Developer Description: Visual Subst is a small tool that allows you to associate the most accessed directories with virtual drives.
XMedia Recode: All in One Video and Audio Converter, Encode Video for Mobile Devices Easily
| 20 May 2010 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
Since I don’t do much video encoding for mobile devices, I have to admit that I am comfortable to use a simple video encoding tool that just works to do the job easily without much hassle. If you are looking for an all in one video/audio converter software, especially to encode video for mobile devices playback, XMedia Recode might be the software for you.
Figure 1
Basically, XMedia Recode is a GUI for FFmpeg, an open source complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. XMedia Recode can encode and decode major video/audio containers and codecs such as 3GP, 3GPP, 3GPP2, AAC, AC3, AMR, ASF, AVI, FLAC, FLV,H.261, H.263, H.264, M4A, M1V, M2V, M4V, Matroska(MKV), MMF, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, TS, TRP, MP2, MP3, MP4, MP4V, MOV,QT, OGG, PSP, SWF, VOB, WAV, WMA and WMV. XMedia Recode can also use unprotected DVD as the video source.
What makes XMedia Recode really great to encode video for mobile devices is the built in presets setting, and there are a lot of them. As for version 2.2.2.9, there are more than 530 built in presets.
Free Partition Manager for 64 bit Windows (XP, Vista, 7)?
| 8 February 2010 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
Here is the story. A few weeks ago, my brother asked me to re-partition his new laptop’s hard disk. It is a Dell Studio laptop. At the beginning, I tried to use the popular EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition since it received a lot of positive reviews, but unfortunately the laptop is running on the 64 bit version Windows 7 Home Premium and EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition works only on 32 bit Windows. Then, I tried GParted Live USB, a Linux based partition editor. Again, it was not a success because GParted gives me error whenever I tried to re-partition the hard disk. I don’t exactly know what caused the problem but I can see there is a Dell Backup Utility partition and maybe it had caused the error.
After searching for the alternative, I found Partition Wizard Home Edition. Partition Wizard Home Edition is a free partition manager software for Windows. It is free for personal/home use and the best thing is, it supports the 64 bit version of Windows. Basically, Partition Wizard will let you perform partitioning actions such as create, format, convert, explore, resize, move and copy a partition, like any other partition managers. Partition Wizard is very simple and easy to use.
Because it is free, it is not as powerful as other paid partition manager such as Partition Magic. For example, Partition Wizard only supports FAT, FAT32 and NTFS partitions. This means you cannot use Partition Wizard to create, resize or move Linux EXT2 or EXT3 partitions. As you can see from the image below, the partition (1) is actually a EXT2 partition, and it is shown as other in Partition Wizard.
How To Password Protect Your Personal/Private Files, The Easy Way
| 11 December 2009 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
There are various tools available to help you encrypt and protect your personal private files. On-the-fly-encryption (OTFE) is one of the popular methods used by disk encryption software. This method allows the data to be encrypted just before it is written to disk and decrypted after it is read from the disk transparently on the background.
R-Crypto is an easy-to-use disk encryption software for Windows to protect your personal and private data, in fact, it is very easy to use. R-Crypto can protect your personal confidential files by creating encrypted virtual disks and each disk is a single file-container. This virtual disk is protected with password. A user can only access the files inside the virtual disk when the correct password is provided. After a user provides the correct password, the virtual disk can be mounted and the user can use the encrypted virtual disk just like a normal drive.
To use R-Crypto to protect your personal files, you must first create a new R-Crypto encrypted disk. R-Crypto encrypted disk is a container file which can be mounted as virtual disk. The container file is stored on your system just like a normal file.
1. In R-Crypto Management Panel, click ‘Run new encrypted disk creation wizard’ [1] and click ‘Next’.
2. Specify the name of the container file [2] and choose the location where you want to store the encrypted disk container file [3]. Choose the size for your encrypted disk [4] and click ‘Next’.
Unlocker Alternative to Force Deletion of Locked Files in Windows
| 5 December 2009 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
If you are using Windows, you probably ever encounter error message saying that a file is being used by other person or program when you are trying to delete, move or rename a file, or ejecting a USB drive. For example, if Windows Explorer is viewing the thumbnail of a video, then the video file is likely being locked by Explorer.exe. Before this, I use Unlocker to force the delete and move operation of these locked files, or when trying to eject a USB drive with opened files. Unfortunately, I can’t get Unlocker to work on Windows 7, even on the 32 bit version of Windows 7.
LockHunter is a similar tool to Unlocker. LockHunter allows you to release a file or directory that being opened by other application. LockHunter integrates itself to the right-click menu just like Unlocker. LockHunter also allows you to kill or even delete the process that is opening the file that you want to delete.
Keep Software On Your Windows System Up-to-date
| 30 November 2009 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
Keeping software installed on your Windows system up-to-date with the latest version is important. One of the main reasons to keep software updated with the latest version is because the latest version usually come with bug and security fixes. Security fix is very important because unfixed security flaws in the software installed on your system may lead your system to be compromised by hackers. Keeping software with latest version will also allow you to use new features that came with the latest version of the software. Checking each software that installed on your system manually for latest the version is a tiresome thing to do.
While Linux operating system have their own package manager that connects to software repository that allows users to keep the installed software on their system up-to-date with the latest version easily, Windows users don’t have this. Update Notifier is a small utility that checks if there are updates available for the software installed on your system and display the updates to you in a simple way. If update is available, you can click the download button and you will be directed to the download page for the software. Then, you can download the latest version of the software using your web browser.
Update Notifier is easy to use and straight forward. Update Notifier can be installed as portable application.
Use Keyboard Light Emitting Diode (LED) As Network Traffic Indicator
| 20 November 2009 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
Standard keyboard has 3 main light emitting diode (LED) which are used to monitor if you activate the ‘Num Lock’, ‘Caps Lock’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ function. If you feel like changing these LEDs function into something else, you can use it as a network traffic network indicator. Talking about the good old Windows 98 dial-up tray icon days =)
A small tool called Network Lights will allows you to use your keyboard LED as network traffic indicator. When there is download or upload network activity, Network Lights will make the ‘Num Lock’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ LEDs blinking. You can impress your friends with your new cool network activity indicator LEDs. Network Lights also works on laptop’s keyboard LEDs (tested on my friend’s Compaq Presario v5000).
Network Lights is small, version 1.1 is less than 100KB. When you run Network Lights, it will sit on the system tray. The program uses around 1.3MB of memory. Network Light is freeware and available for Microsoft Windows operating system.
[Download: Network Lights via Raymond.cc]
Guide: How to Properly Burn CD/DVD Image (ISO) to CD/DVD
| 3 October 2009 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
Recently, 3 of my friends asked me how to burn a DVD image (the ISO file) to a DVD. Basically, a CD/DVD image (ISO) file is a archive file just like 7z, RAR or ZIP. Unlike normal archive file, a CD/DVD image file sometime contains boot code and it is usually a complete sector-by-sector copy of a CD/DVD.
(source)
In this post, you will find out how to properly burn a CD/DVD image. I will use the Ubuntu 9.04 CD image as the example. Latest disk burning software should support ISO burning to disk. The keywords to burn ISO file to disk usually sounds like ‘Write image file to disk’, ‘Burn ISO image’ or ‘Burn image’. You can use your favourite CD/DVD burning application as long as it supports burning from CD/DVD image. In this post, I will use CDBurnerXP, a free CD/DVD burning application for Windows.
How to Batch Resize or Convert Multiple Images Easily
| 16 August 2009 | Posted by whiztech under Uncategorized |
- Photo effects such as “Sepia”, “Black & White” and “Negative”
- Preset list of photo resize sizes for iPod, iPhone, and Sony PSP screen sizes.
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