Trashmail.net

Internet and Communication - Email and messaging

New:
Trashmail.net: gives you as many disposable email addresses as you need. All email to this address will be forwarded to your real email address. No need to register, just fill in an account name, enter your real email address, set the number of forwards (1-1000), set the lifespan of this account (1 day – 6 months). You can enable the Challenge-Response Spam Filtering system or leave it disabled. The option to be notified when the account has expired is enabled by default. Once you clicked the “create disposable email address” button, you should receive an email on your real address with all the information about that account: login, password,...You can always login and change the settings on that account or even delete it! When logging in on an account you can reach options to use the whitelisting feature or not. Emails from whitelisted people wont count for the number of forwards. The Trashmail service is also available trough a Firefox extension.. When installed: Click the right mouse button in an editable field. A menu will appear with the option to paste a disposable email address

Poster Forge

Graphics - Posters and banners

New
Poster Forge: allows you to quickly make your own posters without any efforts. You can print your big size posters or publish them on the Internet (myspace, livejournals, flickr, etc.).

Launchy & SmartStartMenu

System - Program Starters

New
Launchy: indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes! When you run Launchy, it is completely hidden. You activate it by pressing [Alt-Space], and dismiss it by pressing [Esc]. Enter the first few letters of a file or program, and Launchy automatically displays the rest of the name. You simply press [Enter] to open or launch it.

SmartStartMenu: is a program launcher that turns the task of opening any program, document, folder, or website into a two or three key-stroke effort! It scans your start menu and other locations on your hard drive to locate items . Scanning can be done anytime you want... even during system startup. Once scanning is completed you simply type a few letters and SmartStartMenu will use type-ahead technology to generate an alphabetized list of items that match the criteria for you to select from...."

SneakEmail & Spamgourmet

Internet and Communication - Email and messaging

New: two disposable email services.
SneakEmail: is a disposable email service. You can link a free account to up to 10 real email addresses and you can apply rules for delivery. Maximum message size:150KB, maximum monthly bandwidth:10MB , unlimited Sneakemail addresses, does not expire, messages per day: 500, Bandwidth per day:10MB. Your real address is hidden by Sneakemail even in replies! This service is very useful for giving away your email address for online registrations. Set up an alias in sneakemail for every registration you make. Email messages are being forwarded to your real email address. Once you start receiving spam on that address you will know from whom it comes. Just delete that specific sendemail alias, and the spammer bytes the dust! No more spam on that address!

Spamgourmet: protects your personal email account from spam using a disposable, selfdestructing email account. Create a spamgourmet account and enter the email address you want to be protected. Spamgourmet will forward to this address all the emails sent to your spamgourmet addresses. The disposable addresses are like: someword.X.user@spamgourmet.com where someword is a word you have never used before, x (optional) is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (up to 20, and the number 3 will be used by default if you leave it out), and user is your username. You can receive no more messages then the optional number you assigned to the Spamgourmet address. This service is very useful for giving away your email address for online registrations.

Runscanner

Security and Privacy - Antivirus and Antimalware

New
Runscanner: scans your system for all configured running programs and autostart locations and detects autostart programs, spyware, adware, homepage hijackers, unverified drivers and other problems. Startup analyzer utilities are hard to use for novice computer users but this one is easier because it has online malware analysis, MD5 hash calculation of files + online file rating and online lookup of scanned entries. All this makes RunScanner easier to determine which entries are likely to be malicious. The “beginner mode” is for users with little computer knowledge that want to do a scan and upload their results to a forum or send their results to a malware specialist. You can import and export your results and let a specialist helper help you to solve your problems. It also has a powerful process killer, Host file editor, backup and restore. “Expert mode” is for advanced users for tweaking startups, scanning, reporting, filtering. Delete features are made available in expert mode. Always consult an expert before fixing entries on your system...unless you are one of course.

OS:Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista

FileZilla

Internet and Communication - Website building

New
FileZilla: is a fast and reliable FTP client with lots of useful features. It includes a site manager to store all your connection details and logins as well as an Explorer style interface that shows the local and remote folders and can be customized independently. It supports resume for both uploads and downloads, timeout detection, SSL, SFTP, firewall support and many more.

Windows 2000, XP and Vista are supported.

Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition:

Security and Privacy - System Security

New
Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition:
The Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition is a powerful virtualization technology that completely mirrors your actual computer setup and it can create a virtual storage disk within your PC where you can save documents, data, and files while using the System Protection feature. Very simple: protection is ON or OFF. A restart of the system is the only way to turn Returnil’s protection off. When the Virtual System Protection is OFF, you can install or remove programs, save documents within the Windows disk drive, install security upgrades and software patches, alter configurations, and update user accounts. When it is ON, no actual changes will occur on your primary partition. While Returnil works extremely well for temporarily installing and testing programs within the virtual environment, programs that require a restart to install cannot be tested with Returnil as the restart switches off the virtual layer!

Platforms: Windows XP/ Windows Server 2003/ Windows Vista 32-bit

Badongo.com & Filefront.com: free big file hosters

Internet and Communication - Free storage and sharing services 500MB and more

New: Two file hosters.
Badongo.com: Max file size to upload is 1GB. No restrictions on file type and unlimited uploads. For registered users: unlimited downloads but 12GB/day limitation, max downloadspeed is 500kbps, files will expire in 45 days of inactivity, maximum Parallelle Downloads is 1. For not registered users the download limitation becomes 4,8GB/day and files get deleted after 25 days of inactivity.

Filefront.com: UNLIMITED storage space.Max file size to upload is 1GB. No restrictions on file type and unlimited uploads. After upload you get a link to share your file. If you sign up (free), you can manage your files. No info found about file inactivity.

Font Frenzy

System - Fonts and Tools

New
Font Frenzy: Every font that gets installed on your PC slows down the boot-up time and slows down your normal operational speed. Font Frenzy is a free font manager that helps you to view, install, and uninstall your fonts. Font Frenzy allows you to strip away all your excess fonts and restores your system to only the fonts that are essential to Windows with one button, make a snapshot of your installed fonts, restore a snapshot...

Folder Marker Free

System - Installation Configuration and Tweak

New
Folder Marker Free: Lets you mark any folders with color-coded icons to find them easy on sight. This free edition of Folder Marker is an older version then the newest edition and contains basic functions: Support of 32-bits icons, assign an icon to a folder from: ICO, ICL, EXE, DLL, CPL or BMP file, change folder color, ...If you extract it with Universal Extractor, it works standalone.

Folderico

System - Installation Configuration and Tweak

New
Folderico: A program like Folder Marker. Folderico allows you to change the default icon of any folder. And even if you plugged the hard drive into another computer, the icons will remain as you made them.

IE Privacy Keeper

Security and Privacy - Privacy

New
IE Privacy Keeper: automatically ( or manually ) cleans up all traces of your IE, Firefox and system activities. Very flexible cleaning options. Offers also a portable “TakeAlong” Version.

Should I Use a Registry Cleaner? (Winxp – Vista)

Should I Use a Registry Cleaner? (Winxp – Vista)


Most MVP's dont advocate the use of any Registry cleaners.
Read what Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals and Sysinternals, now a senior Microsoft employee has to say about this.

Question:
Hi Mark, do you really think that Registry junk left by uninstalled programs could severely slow down the computer? I would like to 'hear' your opinion.

Mark Russinovich answers:
No, even if the registry was massively bloated there would be little impact on the performance of anything other than exhaustive searches.

On Win2K Terminal Server systems, however, there is a limit on the total amount of Registry data that can be loaded and so large profile hives can limit the number of users that can be logged on simultaneously.

I haven't and never will implement a Registry cleaner since it's of little practical use on anything other than Win2K terminal servers and developing one that's both safe and effective requires a huge amount of application-specific knowledge.

Additional problems: Applications installed on a machine that is used by more than one person can creates entries for each user in their private registry store: HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Because registry cleaners (and REGEDIT.EXE) operate under SYSTEM permissions with the logged-in user security token, they cannot access these other registry entries.

Mark Russinovich wrote:
Uninstallers typically delete their application’s system-wide settings from the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE part of the Registry and any per-user settings of the user running the uninstaller from HKEY_CURRENT_USER. But what happens to the per-user settings of the other users that used the application? You guessed it, Registry junk gets created - and possibly file system junk in the application's Application Data folder in the \Documents and Settings directories of other users. An uninstall is only thorough if the user performing it is


You have these issues with a registry cleaner:
-If an application is installed and used only by one user, a registry cleaner run by another user will remove "invalid" entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and disable the application from working by the other user(s);

-If an application is installed by User #1, and used as well by User#2, the registry cleaner operation run by User#1 cannot remove the instances of the application created by User#2.

-On top of these technical issues there is the argument made by Mr. Russinovich: only if the registry cleaner has a sophisticated database of all application software installation registry changes would it have a chance of being safe to use.


So what should I do about the registry then?
The best thing you can do is to enable System Restore and add to your Autostart applications a registry backup. Strongly recommended for this is ERUNT (freeware):
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
It's listed in my freeware selection on http://decomp.110mb.com/ .
A utility such as ERUNT can be used to restore the System hives even if the computer cannot boot.

Be aware that ERUNT has its limitations. There are security barriers to backing up all NTUSER.DAT files in other user profiles from that of the logged in user. ERUNT saves only registry files which are in use by the system. It obtains information about these files from registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ hivelist.
Registry hives not listed there, for example those of other users of the computer, cannot be saved by ERUNT.

Having said that: System hive corruption is fatal for all users. The individual's NTUSER.DAT if corrupted is annoying, but not fatal. ERUNT can save your day!


Installing & Using ERUNT:
http://www.winxptutor.com/regback.htm
http://www.silentrunners.org/sr_eruntuse.html


But I backup my registry reqularly using REGEDIT.EXE !
Oh boy! The backups created by Regedit are of no use to you!

It does not export the whole registry (for example, no information from the "SECURITY" hive is saved), nor can the exported file be used later to replace the current registry with the old one. Your re-imported file, is merged with the current registry without deleting anything that has been added since the export, leaving you with an absolute mess of old and new entries.

In summary:
There are many registry cleaners out there, many for free.
I've listed some popular ones in my freeware selection.
But dont bother: it is unlikely they are of some help, but they can cause harm!
There are no real benefits from running registry cleaners. Unecessary entries in the registry do no harm. This should not be done on a regular basis and most certainly if done, should not be automated.

Sometimes a fast registry editor with search is needed to fix a single issue under Expert hands. There is no justification for the regular use of automated registry cleaning tools and they are of dubious merit.
If you decide to use a registry cleaner, make sure it creates backups and hope that you can get into Safe Mode to restore your backup!

References:
Mark Russinovich blog: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/10/02/registry-junk-a-windows-fact-of-life.aspx
XP Myths: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html

Windows SteadyState

System - Miscellaneous tools

New:
Windows SteadyState: Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet cafe, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState, formerly known as Microsoft® Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP, helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them. Features: Windows Disk Protection, User Restrictions and Settings, User Account Manager, Computer Restrictions. Supported OS: Windows XP Home and Pro Edition ; Windows XP Service Pack 2; Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. In short: it restricts access on the computer, wipes away any changes a user makes to your computer and removes any files they leave behind. Even if something defeats this profile security, Windows Disk Protection wipes away all changes made to the hard drive at each reboot. Some write it is compatible with Windows Vista, although a release date for the Vista version has yet to be determined. I would NOT try it, unless you're up for an adventure i guess!

Multi file tool

Files and Folders - File attributes

New:
Multi file tool: Multi File Tool allows you to batch manipulate various properties of selected files/folders. Functionality: set the attributes and date of all files and folders, create a list as text file of all files and folders, calculate the MD5 signature of all files, search for duplicate files, ...
Vista compatibel, portable.

110MB.com and Joynic.com

Internet and Communication - Website building

Removed: Sitesled.com as free website hoster

Added:
- 110MB.com: 110MB.com free Webhosting: Free personalised Webadres: yourname.110mb.com. 5 GB Webspace , 300 GB Bandwidth, PHP 5, MYSQL 5, CGI/Perl... Max File Size Upload Limit is 6MB.
-Joynic.com: Register your personal domain now - absolutely free of charge! If your Webspace hoster changes: Your Domain always remains with you and can be forwarded completely simply to your new Webspace provider!

Website moved to http://decomp.110MB.com

For a week now, Sitesled has vanished of the earth without any warning and my website was not accessible. I'm a patient man, I know I get what I'm (not) paying for, but it starts to look ugly now! This looks like a crash and burn.

I tried to move my website to Awardspace.com that gets good reviews.
Boy, was that a bummer! In short: they have a SECRET list with forbidden words that they use as a filter for security reasons. If a page has one or more forbidden words on it, it is not showing and being replaced by an Awardspace webpage. In the faq they mention forbidden words like AOL, PAYPAL.
The list with forbidden words is kept secret, so your completely left in the dark.
Come on guys!

So today, I moved my website from Sitesled.com to free website hoster 110MB.com.
My new website is located at http://decomp.110MB.com.
Website hoster is: http://www.110MB.com
110MB.com offers at the moment:
-5 GB Space - FREE
-300 GB Bandwidth - FREE!
-PHP 5, MYSQL 5, CGI/Perl ,...

Thanks for having me 110MB.com!

Logon Screen Saver Changer

System - Installation Configuration and Tweak
Added Logon Screen Saver Changer for Windows Vista, XP, 2000:
Logon Screen Saver Changer is a tool that you can use to change the logon screen saver (the one that pops up when no user is logged on) avoiding changing it manually with regedit in the registry. You can also use it to adjust the logon screensaver settings (such as the timeout period). No installation required. Small file.

The registry settings involved are:
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
-the SCRNSAVE.EXE string value : for setting the screensaver file
-the ScreenSaveTimeOut string value : for setting the timeout time (in seconds)
-the ScreenSaveActive string value : for enabling (1) or disabling (0) the logon screensaver
So You can change these setting manually with regedit, if your up to it.

Go-oo.org

Productivity and Office - Office Suite

Go-oo.org : OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites. The go-oo version of OpenOffice.org is designed to give a foretaste of new features in development and includes functionality not yet accepted up-stream. Simply download the en_us file, and your native lang-pack, and install them one by one.
Is a bit quicker then Openoffice.org and provides more functionallity.