Useful Freeware

Drill down into your disk space usage with SpaceSniffer

SpaceSniffer is a neat little portable application to help you understanding where all disk space goes to.

Here are the main features:

• Fast, simple and intuitive user interface;
• Data is presented as a clickable TreeMap;
• Powerful filtering by size, tag, name, etc.
• Adjust level of details displayed on the screen;
• Portable – no installation needed – just a single executable;
• Drill up and down in the data;
• Export to text file of the selected results;

SpaceSniffer is pretty fast (I have about 200GB out of 640GB taken on my hard drive and the scan took about 1.5 minutes).

Version Reviewed: 1.1.2.0

Works on Windows 2000+ including Windows 7

Recover deleted files with Piriform Recuva

Recuva is a fast, reliable and easy to use application to help you discover and undelete files already removed from the Recycle Bin. It scans your hard drive for files, that have been deleted and allows you to restore them.

A nice feature is that it also allows recovery from memory cards (for digital cameras, etc.) as well as portable USB drives.

By the way the makers of Recuva are the same guys that brought CCleaner to you. Nice.

Take control over your CD/DVD Burning with CDBurnerXP

CDBurnerXP is a program to burn CDs, DVDs, BlueRay and HD-DVD discs. It is easy to use and has a very nice and responsive user interface. It is a worthy replacement of many commercial burning applications. Here are some of the most important features:

• Supports single and dual layer DVD-R and DVD+R, CDs and also rewritable media
• Supports for multi-session disks
• Creates, Converts and burns CD/DVD images
• Supports buffer underrun protection
• Creates audio CDs (from mp3, ogg, flac, another audio cd, etc.)
• Multi-language interface
• Online updates

In my experience an excellent application, definitely worth a try. I’ve been using since version 2.

TrueCrypt – on the fly encryption

TrueCrypt helps you to create and operate an encrypted file, which you can mount as a volume (data storage device) on your computer. In other words you can create the encrypted file and mount it as a drive letter and it behaves as yet another hard drive on your computer. The beauty of it is that you can copy files to and from it like between normal drives on your computer.

Here are some feature highlights:

• Files are automatically encrypted and decrypted on the fly;
• The entire filesystem is encrypted (file allocation table, files, directories, etc.);
• Never saves any unencrypted data to a disk;
• Support for “hidden” volumes. It is a encrypted volume inside an encrypted volume, but you need to know the volume name and the password before you can access it. It is not visible otherwise.
• Support for multiple encryption algorithms (AES, Serpent, Twofish) and even a cascading combination of them;
• It can prepare for you a CD/DVD volume, so you can use it as a read-only encrypted medium;
• Format, encrypt and use a normal hard drive partition as well as a file as a TrueCrypt encrypted volume. It can even encrypt an entire USB drive. Sweet!

Overall an extremely useful program.