Description: EjectUSB is an open source program that is run from a USB device to close all programs running from the device and eject the drive for safe removal. It will also remove registry entries and recent document shortcuts that refer to the USB device.

If you’re not to keen on Windows’ default method of safely ejecting USB devices (the little icon in the system tray) and/or if you encounter the dreaded "The device cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later" message more frequently than you care for, EjectUSB might just be exactly what the doctor ordered. Running the EjectUSB executable is simple and easy and can provide a one-click solution for getting all file/program contingencies resolved

Here are more notes on this program:

• How to use: extract the EjectUSB folder onto your USB, and then when you are ready simply run the "EjectUSB.exe" executable to eject. If you would like to have a shortcut on your USB’s root folder that runs EjectUSB check out this posting (link coming soon).
• Does it work: mostly, yes, with some exceptions. There are times when EjectUSB will keep trying to eject the drive and/or close running programs or files but fail. I would suggest that you close open documents and programs as you would normally then use EjectUSB to eject the USB after that; this always seemed to work on my system (to quote the author "EjectUSB was designed to eject the drive as quickly as possible, not to manage programs that the user hasn’t saved data in yet").
• Note on performance: some performance kinks have been ironed out across various releases of this program, and I expect future releases will continue the trend.
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Description: Click&Clean is a free tool that works alongside CCleaner to provide 1-click hard drive and browser cleanup from within Internet Explorer, Firefox, or the desktop Quick Launch bar. It can perform an instant, complete uninterrupted cleanup with CCleaner without exiting the browser or dealing with prompts and dilags.

If you use CCleaner to clean your hard drive (temp files, internet activity, cookies, history, etc.) you already know that it is an indispensable and excellent program. What Click&Clean does is simply provide a 1-click complete cleanup using CCleaner from within Internet Explorer, Firefox, or the desktop Quick Launch without having to interact with any of CCleaner’s prompts or dialogs. Moreover, if Click&Clean is used from within a browser, the cleaning operation will be performed without the need to shut down the browser first. Here are more notes on this program:

• Adding browser buttons: in IE right click on the IE toolbar then ’customize command bar’ then ’add or remove commands’. Select the blue ’Cleaner’ icon and add it to the IE toolbar. For Firefox, right click the toolbar and select ’customize’, then drag the blue Cleaner icon to the Firefox toolbar. A desktop “quick launch” icon is added by default upon installation.
• How it works: clicking on the Cleaner button in a browser or otherwise launching it from the Quick Launch bar will start the process. In Firefox, Click&Clean seems to also kick-start Firefox’s “clear private data” option (seems to be a workaround designed around CCleaner’s inability to clean the Firefox environment without shutting it down first). To configure Firefox properly, go to Tools > Options > Privacy, clear a check mark beside “Ask me before clearing private data” (see this page for more info).
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Description: Pathsync is an open source drive or directory synchronization tool that can compare two paths and provides a number of options for copying files back and forth across the two. It offers a number of useful options such as filtering by user-defined filename mask or extension and user-defined buffer size for the copying operation.

There are many scenarios where you will find this tool useful: if you need to synchronize files between a laptop and your main computer, if you backup files on a network or external drive. However it has to be noted that its purpose is synchronization; if you are looking for a backup tool that can schedule automated backups there are many freeware options such as Karen’s Replicator, Cobian Backup, Jaback, or SyncBack.

This program is as straightforward as can be, but offers some good options as follows:

• Sync directions: bidirectional, single direction (left to right or right to left), or single direction without deleting missing files or folders. These relate to whether the user wants to give primacy over one directory over the other, and whether there was activity to be updated on one of the directories or both.
• Filename masks: you can specify which file extensions Pathsync should consider or alternately which ones not to be considered. Examples: *.mp3;*jpg;*avi will only sync mp3s, jpeg images, and avi videos. !*.mp3;* will include everything except mp3 files, !music’;* will include everything except the directory named "music", and *proj_A* will only sync files that have "proj_A" in the filename.
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Description: Copy Handler is an open source program that resides in memory and significantly enhances the copying or moving of large files in Windows. It introduces the ability to pause and resume copy/move operations, can speed up transfers by up to 6-7 times, and adds filtering functions that determine exactly which files and folders to copy or move.

If you ever attempted to copy a large number of files and folders from one partition to another or across network or external drive(s), you might have run across a number of problems with the native windows copying function: the process can take a very long time, or it can ground to a halt for any minor reason, such as encountering a corrupt file, leaving you with the option to either try to fix the problem and re-do the copying operation (and hope for the best the second time around) or figure out which files/folders were copied and try to copy the ones that weren’t (which can be a very time consuming and precarious operation).

With a program like Copy Handler, on the other hand, the copying process is not interrupted by problematic, but moves on to the next file. Moreover, Copy Handler delivers full control over the copying process; not only does it allow the user to pause, resume, or stop the process at will, but it also introduces a “file basket” type functionality and file filters that can control which files to be copied. It also can result in significant speed increases in the transfer process. More info on this program below:

• Speed: the program can deliver varying transfer speed increases up to 6-7 times faster than Windows. One of the reasons for this is that it employs a non-parallel transfer queue rather than attempting to copy many files at once. Note: these figures are from the program page; I did not measure anything Myself.
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Description: Desktop Media is a free program that can display shortcuts on the desktop to USB drives, CDs/DVDs and other media when you plug them in, and automatically removes these shortcuts when you unplug. It can also alternately create so-called “hard links” to your media instead of shortcuts.

This program is similar to the afore-mentioned “Desk Drive” in that it aims to provide the user with automatic shortcuts to their USB and other drives that appear and disappear from the desktop as the user plugs their media in and out.

Shortly after posting the review for “Desk Drive” I received the following email from the author of this program, which pretty much sums it all: “I just saw your post on the Desk Drive application yesterday, and I thought it was a great idea ….. Unfortunately, I usually prefer not to install .NET apps, so I decided to write my own version of this… It also has a feature that Desk Drive does not, which is support for Symbolic Links via the Junction utility from SysInternals… Please let me know if you run into any bugs and I will be glad to fix them. This was a great idea for an application and I wanted to create an app with a small footprint to make it a little more appealing.”

This about sums it all up. Here are more notes on “Desktop Media”:
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Description: Desk Drive is a free program that adds automatic shortcuts on the desktop to flash drives and other media when you plug them in, and removes these shortcuts automatically when the drives are unplugged. Supported media include (CD’s/DVD’s, removable drives, fixed drives, networked and RAM drives).

The idea behind this rather original program is to spare you the need to go hunting in “My computer” for a flash drive’s letter number in order to access it when you need it, but rather magically make a shortcut to it appear on the desktop when it is plugged in, and disappear when the drive is unplugged. Honestly this should have been an option in Windows.

The not-so-good news: this program takes up 18 megs in memory, which is surely a lot for this kind of program (and requires MS .NET Framework v2). Also, I’m not sure why but this program did not work on my work computer, but worked just fine on my laptop at home; could it be because I have .NET v3.5 at work? Lastly, I would have liked the option to make the tray icon not be shown.
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Description: DocShield is a program that runs in the background and monitors files and folders that you specify for changes. It will create compressed snapshots of your files whenever it detects any changes, enabling you to retrieve your files in case of data loss, and providing a retrievable version history of your files and/or data.

You may or may not be regularly backing up your most important files and/or archiving the most important version changes, and saving your backups into compressed archives to keep your files from growing too large. But chances are that you do this in fits and starts and/or are not as consistent as you like to be, or even have simply given up on this. Wouldn’t it be just great if there were a program you could run in the background that would automate do this for you and manage the process automatically? DocShield is exactly this program.

Although there are a number of freeware programs that do this (e.g. File Hamster, previously featured on Freewaregenius), DocShield features mature functions such as archive management, on-the-fly compression, and FTP backup. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user interface: is very well designed. The main configuration screen is split into 4 tabs and is very easy and intuitive to work with.
• Files monitored: can monitor local files or files on the network. You can point the program explicitly to the files you want it to monitor (drag and drop is supported), or you can define a folder/folders and tell it to scan for certain file-types (you can include or exclude subfolders and use wildcards to exclude certain files). I would strongly encourage the former approach as I have found that pointing the program to a folder that contains a large number of big files can sometimes be problematic.
• Monitoring activity: the program will check for changes in your files and folders at 5 minutes periods by default, but you can set this to anything you like (seconds/minutes/hours). If it finds that a file has changed from the latest version of it in the archive it will add that latest version to the archive. Any changes or versions that may have been created between the monitoring intervals will not be recorded. (You can also trigger the monitoring action manually by pressing the “Shiled Now” button)
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Description: On the NTFS file system, freeware program “Link Shell Extension” provides you with the ability to create clones (called hard links) of your files and folders straight from the context menu.

Clones, if you’re wondering, are not copies of a file or shortcuts. Cloned files look like normal files (except for a little inverted blue arrow) and what they are are multiple instances of a file that point to the same exact data. So, for example, you can have a cloned file reside on your desktop as well as in another directory on the same drive (or even in the same directory under a different name), but in reality there is only a single copy on your drive, with two files pointing to it. Opening any one of those two clones will access the same data, so that if you save a change to the file on your desktop for example it will be reflected in the other one as well. The process of creating these clones is referred to as hardlinking.

How this can be useful: hardlinking can be useful whenever your primary method for organizing your files is within a folder structure. As an example, you might organize your MP3s such that each folder represents an album and contains the constituent song files. But let’s say that you also want to have a “best of” folder that contains your favorite songs; instead of making copies of the MP3s and putting them in the ’best of’ folder (or using shortcuts that need to be maintained and might not be recognized by media players) you can use hardlinked clones such that any single song in the “best of” folder will actually exist in both the “album” and “best of” folders at once. This way your songs take up hard drive space only once, and any change you might make to the tags/metadata of one file will be instantly the case for the other (because they in fact the same file), instead of having to be performed twice.

How to perform hardlinking using “Link Shell Extension”; after installing “Link Shell Extension”, you can create hardlinks as follows:
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 0.91

Description: JkDefrag GUI is a graphical user interface program for the open source hard drive defragmentation program JkDefrag. It enables users to easily use JkDefrag’s powerful defragmentation operations, schedule defrags, perform system file defrag operations on startup, as well as set a wide spectrum of defrag options. It can also be used to quickly install JkDefrag’s screensaver defrag, an option that kicks in the defrag process and displays it as a screensaver whenever the computer is idle.

I don’t usually think about hard drive defragmentation programs as being exciting, but this one is an exception. JkDefrag itself (rater than the GUI) has a number of features that I have not seen in other free defrag programs, and JkDefrag GUI is a well designed program that makes these accessible and easy to work with. Here’s a quick listing of some of these:

• The screensaver option: although JkDefrag does not continuously defragment your hard drive as a process in the background, the screensaver option goes one better in that it kicks the defrag process into action at those idle times when normally your screensaver would run (and will show the visual representation of the defrag process as the screensaver). Extremely cool! This is my favorite feature simply because it provides an automatic install-and-forget solution to hard drive defragmentation. (Note that you can install the screensaver from the ’install’ tab in the GUI).
• Space hogging files: JkDefrag will push files certain files behind directories and regular files to make system operations faster. These space hogging files include files that are 50 megs+, most compressed archive filetypes, data in the recycling bin, and a number others (for a list of the default space hogging files go to the JkDefrag site and look for “what are spacehogs”). Note that you can use the GUI to manually add more filetypes (e.g. avi, mpg, etc.) to the list of Space hoggers if you want.
• Portable: a U3-specific version of JkDefrag GUI is available.
• Safe: ok, so this isn’t a unique feature but a good one to highlight all the same. JkDefrag uses Microsoft’s standard defragmentation API library (which most defrag programs use) and is extremely safe. When interrupted, the defragmentation process will finish the immediate task at hand in the background and shut down. Read more »

Here’s a quick description of how you can use “Unlocker“,one of my favorite freeware programs, in order to safely remove a USB or external drive whenever Windows refuses to do it.

One of the things that I find most annoying about Windows is when I use the “Safely Remove Hardware” function to disconnect a flash or external drive and it doesn’t work. What bugs me more is when I am in a hurry and that happens (e.g. I want to grab my USB drive and rush off to catch the bus in time, and Windows announces that “the device … cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later”).

I don’t know what other people’s experience is, but I would say for myself that I get this more than 50% of the time, which is why I decided that I would write a posting on how to use Unlocker to work around this issue. Here are the steps (assuming you tried the ’safely remove hardware’ dialog and it didn’t work).
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