Solo Technology

Seems like a good day to share some utils and tools.

Disk Defrag — A freebie from the folks at Auslogics. I’ve been using it on a couple of home machines for the past few months and it seems to be working well. The marketing model appears to be to hook you into their additional tuning tools. I’ve not explored those yet, but this works well (and has no popups or obnoxious nags).

Secunia’s PSI (Personal Software Inspector) — I’ve mentioned Secunia’s Software Inspector back in January of this year and liked it then. That’s the online version. Now we have the Personal Software Inspector which you install direct to your machine. It is free, in beta, and will keep you advised of over 4200 applications. If you have something out of date or with security issues it’ll tell you. [free version is private/home use only]. I’ve just installed it, stay tuned for more. [source: CyberNet News]

YSlow for Firebug — A Firefox plugin that’s integrated with Firebug, one of my favorite FF tools. This will analyze a site and then tell you why it is slow based on Y!’s rules for high performance sites. Running it is both informative and humbling. [source: Slashdot]

IE7Pro — Have to use IE7 and looking for a bit more “oomph”? While I’m actually growing to like Internet Explorer 7, I won’t deny it could still use a bit of help in the “extendibility” department. The latest beta of IE7pro includes something called EasyHome which is a lot like Opera’s Speed Dial feature that I love so much (I didn’t really care for the Firefox clone).
Note: ctrl-shift-E is or right-clicking on the IE7pro icon are the default ways to get EasyHome to show. I need to figure out how to make it default for new tabs.
The beta page says not to link to it… but you can find the address at this CyberNet News article.

Box Apps — The folks from box.net have cranked out some more integration options. Of interest to me is Open Office Enabled. Backup or share direct from Open Office (version 2 and only for Windows it looks like?). The Acrobat one might be interesting at the office. [source: Box.net Blog]

Omnidrive for Windows 0.8 — This is the Windows client used to work with your Omnidrive account. I’ve not tried the release version yet… I had a rough time with the pre-release version of it so I’m a bit gun-shy at the moment. But soon… [source: Omnidrive blog]

7 Responses to “Saturday Speedlinks”

1. Elliott Back on July 28th, 2007 3:29 pm
   

   I saw that YSlow came out last week but it doesn’t really motivate me; Firebug does almost the same thing with it’s object debugger, and the pingdom site test tool is at least as good.

   You’d hope that with more and more high speed internet in America, site designers wouldn’t care as much about the number and size of objects, but that’s just not true yet.

2. Rich Miller on July 28th, 2007 6:52 pm
   

   I’ve also used the Pingdom tool Elliott mentions, and found it useful for identifying which elements are causing pages to drag while loading. It’s called the full-page test tool.

3. Hoover on July 29th, 2007 4:49 am
   

   Used Auslogics disk defrag once, not very impressed with the performance. I still prefer Diskeeper for defragging. Diskeeper defrags faster and comes with a brilliant automatic defrag feature.

4. Chris on July 29th, 2007 8:49 am
   

   Elliott and Rich - thanks for the tip on Pingdom. I’d never heard of it before! Will definitely give it a look.

   @Hoover - which Diskeeper are you using? There seems to be a few with the same name. Is there a “lite” or free version?

5. Jon on July 30th, 2007 9:16 am
   

   I like PerfectDisk for defragmenting. Consolidates free space very well, even under low free space conditions.

6. Hoover on July 31st, 2007 7:58 am
   

   Hi Chris,
   I have the payware ‘2007 Pro’ version. You can get a free evaluation download at the diskeeper site http://www.diskeeper.com if you want to play with it.

   If you want the ‘free’ ie the ‘lite’ version, you ought to head over to majorgeeks
   http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207

7. Chris on July 31st, 2007 10:56 pm
   

   @Jon - thanks, I’ll have to give that one a look.

   @Hoover - Ah ha! I used to use that one. For several years in fact. Now if I could only remember why I abruptly stopped… I don’t recall anything bad happening…

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