Free Microsoft Antivirus software - security essentials

Microsoft have now released an free for home use Antivirus solution, it is download able from here...

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Backup your PC to your other PC's, or your friends, or online

Needing to backup your files but never manage to get around to doing so because you have to dig out and plug in your USB device?  Well CrashPlan could be the software your looking for.  Using a P2P network between your other PCs and your friend's PCs, you can ensure that you always have a backup to restore from.

It's a system that requires registration but once you have (only email and name is needed), you can start backing up as much data as you like to other PC's you use, either at work or at home.  But the clever bit, is when you can ask a buddy to backup your files to their system.  Of course all your data is encrypted and you can backup their data too.

This is backup software and not syncing software, you would still use something like Dropbox for your working documents folder, however CrashPlan is great for your pictures and your MP3 collection.

Download it now from www.crashplan.com

Panda's Free Cloud AntiVirus

I'm always looking out for better, free and slimmer anti-virus software for my home PC's.  I was excited to here of this Beta from Panda Software.

Panda's Cloud Anti-virus software is a piece of software which rather than downloading the DAT's from the servers companies, it sends some information about a file that it has scanned to it's servers for confirmation that it is clean.

Try it now, it's free while in Beta and according to their Blog, it will be free once out of Beta - although I expect not free for commercial use.

Download it now from... http://www.cloudantivirus.com/

Need to convert PDF to Text using OCR, including images of text

I've been looking around for some clean free OCR software for a while now, and it is a minefield out there.  The web is full of junk when it come to this subject and it took me several attempts to find this Free OCR software.

It uses an Engine that Google have developed called Tesseract OCR (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) and has been made available for anyone to use.

The application is clean and very easy to use, it support importing images either from your scanner or from your disk and it can also take PDFs.

To download this application visit http://www.freeocr.co.uk/.

Web Meeting thats Open source and free to use for up to 20 users with DimDim

This is an open source tool that allows you to host Web Meetings for up to 20 participants for free.  It just uses your browser and flash so there is no need to install anything.

It's easy to set up and comes in extra flavours if you require more people to attend.  Features include screen sharing, chat, video and voice broadcasting.

They are hosting live meeting demonstrating the tool all the time, so visit http://www.dimdim.com/ now and click on a meeting demo on the right hand side.

If you don't like the idea of using their hosting then you can download the system as a VMWare image and run your on managed server, this is free and alows upto 100 users for free.

Find the files taking up server storage with Free Disk Usage Analyzer

Free Disk Usage Analyzer is a free application that enables you to find out how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives and your Windows Systems, it is especially useful for file servers - it helps you find obsolete files and folders.

The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and via a familiar interface just like explorer.

Download it now at http://www.extensoft.com/?p=free_disk_analyzer

Need to open RAR files or any other compressed file? ExtractNow

ExtractNow is a simple and free utility that allows you to extract those RAR files that you have downloaded.

Most people only ever need to extract (open) compressed files, so this application is ideal.  It's a very small download and even faster install, with integration into the Explorer Sgell (Right click menu), it makes opening RAR and ZIP files a dream.  Should you ever need to compress a file, I would recommend using the biult in "send to compressed (zipped) folder".

It supports ZIP, RAR, ISO, BIN, IMG, IMA, IMZ, 7Z, ACE, JAR, GZ, LZH, LHA, TAR, SIT archive formats.

Visit http://www.extractnow.com to download it now.

Introducing Xobni for Outlook

Xobni (Inbox spelt backwards, pronounced Zob-nee) is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding past emails, finding contacts and the best bit finding attachments.

The Xobni toolbar appears in Outlook on the right - when a new email arrives, the sender's full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar, including past conversations, attachments and contact details. Xobni also includes a fast email search tool.

I have found the attachments tool the best, if your using Outlook in your enterprise then it's a must have.  finding those test files that the engineer sent me the other month has never been so easy.

Download it now from http://www.xobni.com

SharePod - manage your iPod or iPhone without ITunes

SharePod is an application which allows you to copy music and videos to and from your iPod, it is only 2mb in size and it can be stored on your iPod for portability.  The user interface is very friendly and easy to start using.

Visit http://www.getsharepod.com to download your copy today.

Store, sync and share your files from multiple computers - Dropbox

UPDATED: Dropbox is an online service which gives you 2GB free online storage to store, sync and share (if you decide to share) any type of file.  Their no nonsence approach means you get a very clean and usable interface both with their desktop application and via the website.

Syncing happens in the background, and basically anything you put in your Dropbox folder on each pc will appear on all your other PC's automatically.  It is a very intelligent system, as if the file you are deciding to store in Dropbox already exists in another user's Dropbox account, then it does not need to upload anything, as it just makes that file automatically appear in your Dropbox in a flash.  Don't worry this is done via file hashing so it ensures that even if your file names are the same, it makes sure that the actual content of the file is the same too.

If 2GB is not enough, you can upgrade to 50GB for $99 a year, the software is currently supported under Windwos, Mac and Linux, visit https://www.getdropbox.com and download it to get started.