Here is a very nice free product that gives administrators the ability to compare files and folders for differences.

This can be very useful if you are not using replication, but would like to have the ability to check folders for inconsistencies this can be very helpful. As an added plus this also has a command line interface so you can script this if needed.

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ComponentSoftware Diff (CSDiff) is a free advanced file difference analysis tool for Windows. Use it to analyze what changes have been made between two revisions of the same file, folder or archived folder. CSDiff is commonly used to analyze program source files, HTML documents and MS-Word documents.

I am an avid photoshop user, but you can't afford to have photoshop on every computer you own.  I have started to make the change to GIMP, an open-source alternative. 

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely
distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching,
image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating
systems, in many languages.

This is the official GIMP web site. It contains information about
downloading, installing, using, and enhancing it. This site also
serves as a distribution point for the latest releases. They try to
provide as much information about the GIMP community and related
projects as possible. Hopefully you will find what you need here.
Grab a properly chilled beverage and enjoy.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C# on the Microsoft .Net platform. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site.

The files are saved straight to a folder of your choice in the format you specify or to the clipboard or printer. No more 'Print Screen'... open image editor... paste from clipboard... crop... export. Just double-click the form or press enter, and whatever is visible below the form is captured.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using it's built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

This software can capture Video, Audio, and has a built in editor to allow for captions to the video (if you so choose).

You can download and use it completely free for your personal and commercial projects as CamStudio and the Codec are released under the GPL.

More information and download locations can be found at CamStudio.org

YamiPod (Yet Another Manager for Ipod) is a freeware solution for people that want to manage their Ipod from multiple computers at the same time without installing programs such as ITunes.

Here's a brief description of the features in YamiPod:

# stand alone program, no installation required
# mp3 and AAC files can be copied to/from iPod
# read/write access to mp3 id3 and AAC infos
# playlist support (On-The-Go included)
# playlists import (PLS,M3U)
# playlists export (PLS,M3U)
# full unicode support
# auto-download new versions

Most people think that VPN's are only for corporate networks or Computer People. The truth is VPN's are very easy to set up and they provide a level of security that is really needed in today's world.

There are may ways to set up a VPN, some of these options are more difficult then others. You can set up a VPN using client side software, or you can be a little more conplex and set up a domain at home and use your router to pass authentication to a RADIUS server.

Today, I will talk about a program called "Hamachi" that will allow you to have a very secure VPN, with almost no work at all.

Recently I was looking for a good free file compression utility. I needed to have the ability to distribute the program to companies, and also have built in command line support.

I ran accross this little jewel called IZArc. This program is freely distributed and has all of the good freatures that you normally see in WinRAR and WinZIP (without the cost). The ability to deal with multiple formats is also a major plus.

IZArc is the ultimate archive utility supports many archive formats like: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO. With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support.

GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).

This is the perfect solution for someone who needs to resize partitions on a Hard Drive, but doesn't want to spend the money on a commercial software such as Partition Magic.