Free download managers

Some of the best downloaders available on the internet are IDM(Internet download manager), Download Accelerator Plus, FlashGet etc. But in this post some of the useful free download managers will be reviewed.

Internet download manager is a nice downloader tool which can download many different type of files. It can also download flash videos from YouTube, metacafe and many other media sites. It has an easy to use interface and useful features like - resuming download, setting speed limits, excluding file name extensions, downloading files in queue and many other useful features.

Free download manager also is a good freely available tool which also has provision to download torrent files. But the video downloading has not been as satisfactory as IDM. GetGo downloader and Orbit downloader are some  other downloader softwares which have good features and do not require licensing.

But there are better options avalaible in Mozilla Firefox in which you can add free plugins which can provide you all the required features like IDM. Some of these plugins are Download them all, Video DownloadHelper etc. Both of them together will satisfy all your downloading needs.

Converting documents into PDF

Documents can be converted into .pdf format using Adobe Acrobat Licensed softwares and  services. There are professional software like Global Graphics gDoc that provide better editing features. Some freely downloadable tools do claim to convert PDF files for free but they add watermarks. 

So the best way to create and edit PDF files using free software is by the use of "oracle-pdfimport" plugin with Open Office. Once installed you can open PDF files in Open Office Writer and save it as .doc/.docx format. You can also open .doc or .odf documents and then export them as PDF files.

Open Office is complete set of tools like Microsoft Office but it is free to use even commercially. Open Office is licensed under the GNU public license.

Partition resizing software

Having multiple partitions in Harddisk, sometimes we require to change the partition size. The most common way is to delete the old partition and create a new one with the required size. But this method be comes cumbersome when data in the partition is too large. Backing up data, then deleting drive, creating new one and finally copying back the data takes up too much time. Playing with partitions can also risk the whole partition structure of your Harddisk.

The easier and safer option is to use a partition manager software. EASEUS partition master is one of the software required for this job. It can be downloaded form EASEUS website. It offers free home edition as well as professional editions with support. It provides easy understand view of the partition structure and provides simple interface to create/delete/resize partitions.

After doing necessary changes it also provides the facility to cancel an operations. It asks to confirm the operations and then sometimes restarts the system to apply the changes done to the partitions.You should know that moving large amount of data can take up considerable amount of time. You should not stop the operations midway. This way you can avoid accidental corruption of your disks.

Lock your hard disk data using encryption

Your harddisk can be safely locked using encryption software to stop unauthorised access of your data. Disk encryption programs work at the lowest level of data storage and change the stored information in a way so that only the autherised user can access them using password authetication. Encryption softwares available use advanced encryption standard (AES) techniques which are so strong that it may take many days for fastest supercomputers on earth to break the encrytion using brute force attacks.

HDD Lock, Disk Password Protection etc are some of the softwares which can be used for locking hard disks using encryption. A word of caution : as these encryption techniques are very hard to break you must not forget the passwords in any case. If password if lost then you have only two options :-

       1. Costly brute force attack using professional decryption services
       2. Forget your data forever !!!

  But some softwares do provide backdoor entry to your data i.e. if your password is lost then you can contact the software providers for help. They will verify your request and then provide special password to open the locked data. But the disadvantage is that providing back-doors can sometimes create new vulnerabilities in software which can be exploited by hackers.

GPU caps Viewer to find Graphics hardware details

GPU Caps Viewer is an OpenGL and OpenCL graphics card utility for Windows. It is available for download on oZone3D.Net website. It gives detailed information about system Graphics. You must have some technical know how to understand the details. Even so it presents information in a clear way so as to quickly access what is required to know.

It has the following features :-

• quick view of the graphics configuration (graphics card / GPU type, amount of video memory, drivers version)
• display the main OpenGL capabilities (OpenGL version, texture size, number of texture units, etc.) 
• display OpenCL capabilities and NVIDIA CUDA level support 
• system details like CPU and RAM clock speeds,GPU speed and temprature info
• allows to overheat the GPU in order to test the graphics card stability