Save your Hard Disk Space by Optimizing Photos

Today digital cameras comes with mega pixels and one of the problem with these high pixels is that the size of the photo it occupies on hard is very much larger than normal ones, some of the photos are 3-5MB in size. If you maintain a good collection of photos on your hard disk, then it might take considerable amount of space as well. Photo Vacuum Packer is a free tool which frees up your disk space by optimizing your photos. The photo quality is not destroyed and more over you can select the max pixel size using this tool while optimizing.



You only need to select the folder and it can automatically include all the sub folders, find out the number of photos and their current size. In the settings page, you can actually chose whether you want high quality photos.



Now once you start the process what this tool does is optimize all the photos selected into a temp folder (you can change the temp folder) and then confirms you if you want to replace the optimized photos with the original ones. This is one special feature we liked about this tool. The optimization of photos are really good and the quality is top notch.



We tested this tool using 1GB of photos and the results are amazing, it optimized the photos without loss of quality to 314 MB, a saving of 70% of hard disk space. We would give 9/10 for this tool except for the fact that the tool is ad supported.

Download Photo Vacuum Packer

Source: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=476479185391

Convert Torrents To Direct Links And Download Them With IDM

Nowadays torrents are widespread for safe and robust public file sharing. Every body today uses torrents to share data to a large audience. But as we know downloading of torrents requires a torrent client to be installed on the destination machine or the machine that needs to download the content of the torrent. But at many places like schools, colleges, access to the internet by these torrent applications is disabled. So in those situations you can easily convert a torrent to a direct link and download it anywhere. These direct links also support download managers like  IDM.

How To Convert Torrent Files To Direct Download Links :

1. Download any torrent from any popular site like torrentz.eu or kat.ph or anyone of your favourite torrent sharing website. You can also copy the URL of the torrent file in case you know how to do it. Normal users must adhere with downloading of torrent file.

2. Go to zbigz.com. You will see a screen like below. If you copied the URL then paste it in the box and click the “GO!” button. Else click the  ”Upload .torrent file” button, browse the torrent file you downloaded and click the “GO!” button.

3. On the next screen you will be asked for the “Free” or the “Premium” option. As the name suggests premium is a paid feature with some added advantages. Choose free if you want to proceed without purchasing the premium package.

4. Now your torrent will be cached. It will take just a few seconds because zbigz caches the torrents at a much faster speed.

5. After your torrent is completely cached it will be available to you in a zip format. Click the .zip button. If you are a free user you may again be asked to choose from the “free” or the “premium” service. Just click the “free” button and your download will be started. If you have IDM installed as the default download manager then the file will be automatically added to the IDM Downloads queue.

Difference Between Free And Premium Service :

There is not a huge difference between the free and the premium service for a normal user. You get a benefit of speed with premium option if your connection’s bandwidth is more than 1.2 Mbps. Maximum size of the torrent can exceed 8 GB of size, which is not required in most of the cases. Your file will be available for 7 days in your account (free), we do not need it for more than that. You will obviously make a file only when you are going to download it. You can download 2 files simultaneously using zbigz. Here you can consider for a paid membership if you need to download a lot of torrents and that too simultaneously. Ads do not make a difference, so you can continue being a free user.

VERDICT

Converting torrents to direct links has many advantages. You can use any download manager of your choice, my favourite one is Internet Download Manager. You do not need to seed anything, that means it saves your bandwidth. The best part is that you get the maximum speed whatsoever, that means the website caches all the files in one go, it doesn’t really matter if there are no seeders when you download. Many of the files get stuck at the end because seeders stop seeding that file. This can never happen with the direct links. So visit zbigz.com and convert all the torrent files you want to download to direct links.

Source: http://www.tricks4web.com/2013/05/convert-torrents-to-direct-links-and.html

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Viruses should be a concern for Mac users

Earlier this month Sophos released a free version of their product for the Mac, Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition. Since then, they have been gathering data from their users. They recently released some statistics from the clients on their Naked Security Blog and found that users should be concerned about what might be hiding on their hard drive.


So far Sophos says that they have 150,000 Mac users and of those users nearly 50,000 have already reported finding malware on the computer. Interestingly enough the most common malware that the software detected was Mal/ASFDldr-A, a malware targeted at Windows machines. Mal/ASDFDldr-A takes advantage of a flaw in Windows Media Player which allows the infected media file to open a malicious web page rather than display the desired content.

They found though that the majority of attacks detected were Java exploits which are cross platform and were typically found in the internet cache on users computers. But lower on the list they did find some OS X specific pieces of malware OSX/Jahlav-C and OSX/DNSCha-E. OSX/Jahlav-C is a variant of OSX/DNSCha-E which happens to be a piece of malware that known as a DNS changer. When a DNS changer hijacks your computers DNS settings your web surfing can be almost completely compromised. Even if it looks like you are at Google.com and the page looks like Google's home page your DNS settings may have sent you to a server in China where malicious code is being executed in your browser.

The results show that the majority of files are more dangerous on Windows than on a Mac but that doesn't mean the virus goes away. If you plan to share files with a Windows computer it would be a good idea to maintain some sort of anti-virus protection just to be sure you are not spreading a virus to a more vulnerable operating system.
 

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/viruses-should-be-a-concern-for-mac-users

A Free Utility to Backup all your Windows Drivers

When you buy a new PC, the vendor will almost always provide you with a “driver CD” that has the device drivers for all the hardware that’s inside your new machine. The CD comes handy when you are reinstalling Windows from scratch or are trying to recover your machine to its original state after, say, a system crash.

There are however two drawbacks with the driver CD.

First, you need to remember the physical location where you placed that CD months ago and second, it may have outdated device drivers. Hardware vendors continuously release new and improved versions of drivers but if you are restoring drivers from an old CD, you are bound to install the old and outdated versions which may be both slow and buggy.

An easy solution to this problem would be that you take a backup of all the device drivers that are currently installed on your system and put them on a CD or another drive. Double Driver is a free utility that can help you with this process.

Double Driver scans your Windows system and creates a listing of every since device driver that’s installed on the system. When you click the “backup” button, the tool will place all the drivers in separate folders – the modem drivers will be in one folder while the display related drivers will be in another one and so on.

This will make it easier for you to restore the relevant drivers without having to remember any of the file names and other technical details.

Double Drivers is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit edition of Windows.

Important: Double Driver is portable and requires no installation. However, if you are using it under Windows 7 or Vista, make sure you run the tool as an administrator (Shift + Right-click) or see this screencast.

நன்றி : Amit Agarwal, www.labnol.org