CloneSpy is a very efficient program that finds duplicate files on your PC, allowing you to free space on your hard disk. This ensures your operating system to run better and even faster, depending on the type of duplicate files you had.

You almost surely have doubled music files which occupy uselessly space on your HDD.. This happens when, for example, you borrow a music CD from a friend and you copy it all without realizing you might already have some of the songs included in your friend’s CD.

Before you can start scanning your system though, add a folder in the ‘pool1’ section. When you browse the directory you want to analyze, bear in mind you need to press the ‘add selected folder’ or the ‘add all sibling folders’ button, otherwise the process will not work, and you will be left with a feeling of not knowing what happened. If you don’t change settings, the program will ask you every time before deleting a file, always showing you the two supposedly duplicate files..

Although ConeSpy’s GUI is surely not so user friendly, the program is so useful that we can close an eye on that. It helps you find all duplicate files on your computer to free space on your hard disk and make your PC work better.

After installing a few dozen software tools you've probably ruined your file association, meaning you no longer control which app opens which file types.

FileTypesMan can help you sort this out by displaying a list with all current file types and extensions currently registered in your system. You can edit each file's properties right on the program's interface, thus fixing broken associations or removing non-working right-click entries, just to mention two possible interesting usages.

FileTypesMan doesn't require any installation and while it may seem a bit too technical for novice users, it's definitely a very convenient file type manager that comes in especially handy when your file associations are overrun by any app.

Repair and restore current file associations on your system in a quick, easy way thanks to FileTypesMan.

You probably don't realize how much drive space you're wasting with duplicate files until you scan it for the first time with a program like NoClone.

This tool has been especially designed to find any duplicate files on your hard drive, with a quite high percentage of success. You can choose between scanning the whole disk or just one certain folder, and of course, select the template used by the program to decide which files are duplicate and which not.

I think these templates are the main strength of NoClone: there are quite a few to choose from, including duplicate email messages and duplicate MP3 files. Also, you can create your own template by deciding the elements and features NoClone should compare in each file to decide whether they're duplicates or not, which is very useful is none of the templates included suits your needs.

Once NoClone finishes scanning the system, it displays a list with all the duplicate files found and enables you to delete them straight away, saving precious hard drive space. There's even a contest on the developer's website to see who saves the most space thanks to NoClone. The program also exports the list to several formats (XML, CSV or XLS; no HTML or TXT, surprisingly).

NoClone is a quick and easy way to find duplicate files on your hard drive, delete them and bring all those megabytes back.

Power users often find the standard Windows File Explorer too limited and need a more complete file manager to suit their needs. If you're among them look no further because we've got the right app for you.

Q-Dir is a multi-pane file manager for Windows that makes file management more convenient and above all, far more comfortable for you. Having several windows pointing to different locations on your hard drive makes it much easier to move or copy data from one folder to another, and also makes browsing faster. Q-Dir supports different layouts with 2, 3 o 4 panes and each one of them can be configured separately.

The program doesn't really add any extra function to the ones already featured in Windows Explorer, but there's one special feature I did like: the possibility to show files in different colors according to the file type, such as blue for images, red for music and so on. Plus, this color code is totally customizable.

Q-Dir doesn't require installation and can even been run from a USB stick.

Though it doesn't feature any special tool, Q-Dir is still a more complete file manager with multiple panes and customizable color codes for file types.

Locating and removing duplicates can easily become a time-consuming nightmare, and may eventually even take away the fun of taking pictures. Difficult lighting and exposure problems, camera shake and digital noise can pollute your images. If you encounter difficult shooting conditions, you are probably taking a few duplicates with somewhat different settings. Selecting the best shot out of a few duplicates is relatively easy, but what if you have hundreds of duplicate shots?

Image Comparer helps you out of this predicament by analyzing your digital images and automatically selects the best shot out of many duplicates, allowing you to move or delete them in a couple of mouse clicks. Image Comparer is slightly different from similar programs in that it does not just look for exact duplicates. Instead, it analyzes and recognizes an image's content, and groups pictures that look alike. You can specify the level of similarity that is sufficient to consider pictures to be duplicates. View them in pairs or see the top ten similar images and keep the best one!

This is an extremely useful program for professional or amateur photographers that take duplicate photos with very similar settings. However, for the average user, it's fairly unnecessary because it's designed for those that have hundreds, not just a few, duplicate images.

Searching for text in Windows is not as easy as it should be - while searching for files is relatively easy, when it comes to word searching, Windows leaves a lot to be desired.

However, Text Filterer does a decent job of fixing these shortcomings by allowing you to search for single words, partial words, Boolean word combinations or exact phrases within a hierarchically organized collections of documents. The interface is based on Windows Explorer which does make it look a bit plain and boring but at the same time, makes it very easy to navigate and use. If MS Word is installed on your computer, Text Filterer can search in DOC and other MS Word supported files for specific word. This is great if you are faced with a lot of misnamed documents and need to locate one on a specific subject without going through them one by one. Text Filterer can even search and extract documents stored inside ZIP archives at any level of compression and this includes those documents and texts that include BMP, ICO, GIF, TIF, PNG and JPEG images. While the program is simple enough for beginners, the advanced options are quite complicated and require quite a bit of study before being able to use them effectively.

For researchers or those trying to manage huge numbers of documents, Text Filterer is a powerful utility that could save you hours of wasted time.

Here’s a simple but very effective program that you’ll love. ResourcesExtract allows you to extract, from an exe or dll file, all the pictures and videos contained in it. For example, if you’ve always wanted to have the icons that a particular application uses, this program lets you access them in seconds.

From the main (and only) program menu, select the path of the application you need to extract the images from, then select the destination folder and choose what do you want to get: icons, cursors, bitmaps, avi files, etc. Press the ‘Start’ button and ResourcesExtract will open a folder with all the files extracted, ready for you to use almost immediately.

The software’s layout is really basic and there are not many options you can choose from, but on the other hand, the program is simple and effective. It would have been good to have a preview of the files contained within the exe file in order to choose just the images we needed and to avoid extracting things we don’t really want.

ResoucesExtract is a powerful tool that lets you extract images, icons and AVI files contained in an application. This can be very useful for web developers, but also end users who want to have a particular image of a program they like available to use.

With increased sizes in external disk storage, splitting files is increasingly less necessary but it is useful if you are limited in where you can save your files.

Splitty is a highly optimised file splitter that's designed to split and divide files quickly, securely and efficiently. The program produces very reliable results due to a a checksum algorithm that verifies the length and consistency of the split file. This prevents the problem of splitting files and then realising they have been corrupted or damaged during the splitting process.

The interface is very simple and allows you to drag and drop files into it from your hard drive. Then you simply click "Split" and the program does the rest. What's really useful about Splitty though is that it can can generate self-extracting split files so once they are executed, they immediately split into two. You can also attach comments onto split files which is useful for if you are working on a multimedia project that requires constant file division or splitting. In addition, it works across networks and supports splitting from external drives - very useful for those who are working with big multimedia files that won't store on your hard drive.

If you're short of hard drive space and need to ensure that any files you split are done with maximum accuracy, Splitty is an ideal solution.

Has it ever happened that you try to delete a file, only to receive an error message telling you that the file is in use, or that you don't have permission to access the file, or that the file is write-protected: you can't delete it!

But now you have a new ally. It's called Unlocker and is a simple program capable of detecting the applications and processes that are blocking the file you want to delete, free it and allow you to delete without any problems.

muCommander is a lightweight, cross-platform file manager featuring a Norton Commander style interface and running on any operating system with Java support (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris...).

Here's a non-exhaustive list of what you'll find:

• Virtual file system with local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP and Bonjour support
• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files...
• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives
• Universal bookmarks and credentials manager
• Multiple windows support
• Full keyboard access
• Highly configurable

Have you ever suffered an unreadable hard drive and subsequently lost essential files that were stored on that sector?

If so, Durable Copy lets you rescue such files by allowing you to copy those containing unreadable sectors. This can be useful in a wide range of circumstances from those instances when you need to rescue critical system files to simply a movie that you desperately want to see but can no longer view. The problem however is that many programs, such as Word or Excel, won't read files that have been rescued because they are physically damaged but at least you are able to rescue the files for repairing later. Using the program is very simple. In the program's explorer window, you simply browse to and right click on those files you want to rescue. You drag them to the target folder you want to save them to. You'll see the option "Copy with DurableCopy" and the program will kick into action to see if it can rescue the broken sectors. Durable Copy reads various sectors sequentially until you click "Don't read this file" on those sectors that are too badly damaged. In the end, what you will have is a partially recovered file which is better than nothing at all.

This program will not rescue files in badly damaged hard drives but it's the next best thing to a complete recovery solution for corrupted files.

Back up software has gone through something of a boom of late. With the huge increases in storage, more and more of us are on the look out for reliable, stable file protection. GoodSync is such a program - it offers fast, automated back up, synchronisation and restore between multiple devices - all in a relatively simple and easy-to-use environment.

Upon first launching GoodSync, you're immediately prompted to select source and destination folders (essentially, your original file folder and the new one you'd like to use as a backup location). The destination folder could be on the same computer, on an iPod, a network drive or any other external storage device. We tested GoodSync with a network drive and found it exceptionally fast.

Additionally, GoodSync's automation feature does exactly what you'd hope for: automatic synchronisation and backup with a raft of configuration options. If, like me, you're backing up important work documents to a network drive, you can easily pick how often this job should be done, to do it just on shutdown, or to allow the task scheduler to handle the job.

You can choose either to back up an entire folder (or folder system) or just specific files. This, along with GoodSync's effective duplicate controls, means that for a simple tool, this program offers you a highly customisable back up and sync solution, enough to offer any user true peace of mind.

A reliable and effective back up solution. Highly recommended.

Many Windows users stay with the standard applications included in the operating system for their most common tasks, like managing files with the integrated File Explorer. However, there are alternative file managers that can also help you to do the job – and sometimes even better than Windows Explorer! Total Commander is one of them.

First of all, be warned that Total Commander is intended for medium to advanced users, and especially for those who like working mainly via keyboard shortcuts. It's not that Total Commander can't be used with your mouse; it's just that it's optimized to be keyboard-controlled.

Total Commander doesn't have what we could describe as an eye-catching design. In fact, it looks pretty dull. It does, however, support three possible views (Full, Brief and Tree) and also uses a double-pane interface, which seem to be quite a common characteristic among other alternative file managers.

This double pane allows you to perform file management tasks like moving and copying in a much more comfortable way. But Total Commander has other aces up its sleeve. It includes extra integrated applications like an FTP client, a ZIP viewer, a renaming tool, a disk space analyzer and a file synchronizer. Another great tool I found to be especially interesting is one that allows you to control, manage and edit file associations so they're not suddenly messed up by a program that you just installed.

Like we said before, Total Commander is intended to be used mainly with your keyboard. This is why it offers handy shortcuts for common tasks like viewing, editing, copying, moving or deleting files. But if you find it hard to abandon your mouse, don't worry: you can use the icons on the program's toolbar as shortcuts for Notepad, Wordpad and the Control Panel, and also add your own shortcuts to your favorite applications via the Configuration > Button bar menu. In fact, Total Commander has such an exhaustive configuration menu that you'll be able to tweak every single detail of the program.

In all, Total Commander is an excellent application that could almost be described as a professional file manager for the advanced user. If you prefer more simple apps then you’d better stick to Windows Explorer.

You may not know that when you delete files from your hard drive, you're not actually deleting them, but just marking that disc space as available again.

This means that using the appropriate tools, anyone could easily recover your deleted files and therefore threaten your privacy. To ensure this doesn't happen the best option is grabbing hold of a tool like Mareew Free Eraser, an application that enables you to safely delete files by overwriting them a few times and thus making them harder, if not impossible to recover.

While the idea behind Mareew is certainly good, I found the program lacks the most basic options. It's great to have such an easy-to-use tool but that doesn't mean it shouldn't include features like the possibility of previewing the files you're about to delete or a delete command being embedded in Windows Explorer's file context menu. Marew Free Eraser doesn't include any settings window where to tweak deleting options.

Mareew offers a safer way to delete confidential data, but lacks many basic features found in other similar applications.

If you've been working on a Word document for a long time then it's a nightmare when it suddenly corrupts or won't open.

The reasons for this are numerous and usually it's not your fault. If you've ever received any of the following messages then you'll know what I'm talking about: "The document name or path is not valid. Try these suggestions. Check the file permissions for the document or drive. Use the File Open dialog box to locate the document."; "Word cannot open the document."; "Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges."; "When you attempt to open a Microsoft Word 97 document into Microsoft Word version 6.x or 7.x, the document contains garbage characters." Repair My Word can come to the rescue if you've suffered any of these error messages and has the ability to repair Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, 97, 2000, XP, and 2003 for Windows. To use it, you simply open the corrupt Word file, preview the recoverable text in the preview window and save this text to a new error free Word file. However, don't expect miracles from this software because it doesn't work in all cases and in addition, even if it can, the rescued document is often a jumbled mess of words of symbols.

If you've ever lost a Word document to corruption or file error, then this is definitely worth a try.

There's nothing more frustrating than having to rename several files at once and then finding that you have to go through them one by one.

Mass Renamer allows you to change and rename files easily and quickly but not just that, it allows you to change some of the information contained in the document properties. It's particularly useful if you've been in a position where your files have been deleted and you need to restore them to their original state but don't have enough time to go through them all separately. Mas Renamer goes beyond renaming just file names however and also allows you to change whole directories (including subfolders) in one step. You can define rules for file changes and setup complex tasks to be carried out automatically while you are away from your PC. The problem is that this program seems mainly designed just for changing documents rather than other types of files. So for example, you can change documents according to Keyword, Template, Last Author and Revision History, but you wouldn't be able to change music or multimedia files.

A useful mass renamer but only for those that are editing mainly documents and need to search by a specific key field.

JBatch It! is a Windows based GUI Batch Image Processor which handles the popular image format, JPEG. JPEG is the image format used for storing and displaying of 24 bits (true color) photorealistic images. This is widely used by digital cameras and web site displays. It can work with BMP, PNG and GIF Images too.

JBatch It! is made to be a simple to use program. All you need to do is to load the images, set the necessary conversion processes and click 'Process All' and let it do all the work. In minutes, you will have accomplished what you would have taken hours or days to achieve.

Be it to change filenames, resize images, add text captions , JBatch It! can handle it for you with ease.

Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer.

This includes files emptied from the Windows Recycle Bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or even MP3 players.

It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses.

Deleting a file by mistake is one of those stupid accidents you feel ashamed of explaining to others, like locking yourself out of home or having to pay extra because you forgot your season ticket.

In the case of deleted files however, don't worry because there's a solution. It's called Glary Undelete (yes, the same guys who created Glary Utilities) and it can help you recover any file you've accidentally deleted from your system, even if you have already emptied the Recycle bin.

That said, bear in mind that this kind of software apps must be used with caution, in the sense that they are not magical tools that will recover your files no matter how much time has passed since you delete them. There are other factors that influence the percentage of success in file recovery in addition to time, like drive usage and cluster movement. But if you use Glary Undelete right after the "accident" occurs, chances are you'll be able to recover your files without any problems – and without anybody noticing it.

The program scans the selected drive, among which you can include removable devices, and displays a list with all deleted files along with their recovery status. You can also use filters to refine this search or look for specific files, which comes in really handy as the list is sometimes too long.

Did you just erase a file by accident? Don't worry: Glary Undelete can help you recover it.

Smart NTFS Recovery is a data recovery tool for Windows operating system that supports the NTFS file system. The software easily recovers data from hard disks and any type of storage media - flash drives, USB drives, memory stick, PC card, multimedia card, secure digital card with NTFS file system. Smart NTFS Recovery can recover any deleted files, including MS Office files, photos, mp3 and zip files, even if the partition table is lost!