Free Download Manager

Guys here is another downloading tool which is really cool and effective.

Free Download Manager :

www.freedownloadmanager.org/


This tool is a freeware and is really superb in its features.

The options provided are easy to use and makes the download more powerful. They following are the three modes of download available with this software :

1) Light Mode.
2) Medium Mode.
3) Heavy Mode.

The above mentioned three modes are used for download flow.
In some Web sites they provide username and password to download the files from their servers. This FDM helps in saving those kind of username and passwords so that it is not needed to enter them again.

Also, I saw another good option in this tool which is available under "Tools --> Shutdown computer when done." This option will be really useful for us and no need to wait for the download to complete and disconnect the connection for home users. They can set this option and go to sleep for most of the midnight downloaders.

They also have option to take a look at the audio and video file that we download. The inbuilt player is awesome. Another excellent feature I came across is the "Schedule" of downloads. This option will be useful for users who have unlimited downloads in the night time. They can provide the download link and the destination folder and schedule the time they need to download their files.

Help FDM community by donating to encourage and make them grow.

ALSong

Once I was searching for a nice MP3 player, because I was bored with WinAmp.

When searching and trying with a lot of softwares, I came across a nice product "ALSong" .

It is equally good as WinAmp. It has it's own special features with it and one of the highlight feature is power options that we can set with it.

The company ALTools is doing great products like this. They also have an Media Player equivalent with the name ALShow.

Here comes their list of products, which you may try:

ALSong

ALShow

ALZip

ALFTP

ALSee

ALPass

Great products!!!! Keep it up guys.

HDCleaner

Everybody is keen in maintaining their computers from junk files, viruses and spywares.

I was googling for some utilities that will cleanup my computer's junk files and make it faster.

After a good search I got "HDCleaner" utility, which was nice.

I didn't have trouble with the features that were available with this product and it did a good work in cleaning the files.

But, I faced problem when I was using "Clean Duplicate files" feature. It showed me some duplicate files and I thought it was real and deleted them. Only after restarting the computer I came to know that the feature has done something wrong with my computer.

The first thing I noticed is my login screen "Ctrl+Alt+Del" window was streaching throught my window. I came to know that video driver is corrupted. After logging in, I saw sound driver, wireless driver, and other drivers were too corrupted. This happened only after using the duplicate file deletion feature that is available in HDCleaner.

It also corrupted most of the programs from even starting. I used Mozilla browser and had a lot of Bookmarks in it. It failed to start. Coming are the list of programs that got corrupted by using HDCleaner:
1. Mozilla browser.
2. Yahoo Messenger.
3. Yahoo Friend.
4. Touchpad.
....
....
....
The list goes by.

My advise to the users is that use the features other than the delete duplicate files one.

IDE vs SCSI vs iSCSI

A lot of us are having this question in mind.

Let us clarify that here:

IDE:

The popularity of SCSI is increasing rapidly, but I believe this is due to a misunderstanding. It is often thought that SCSI automatically blows IDE away when it comes to performance. While SCSI does offer a faster throughput, one's activities on the machine affect just how much this performance will really matter. Several factors must be considered when determining which is better for you.

Performance

Most PC's use IDE drives because they are cheap and they perform well. But, to look at performance, you need to look at the entire drive.

Many manufacturer release identical model drives in both IDE and SCSI formats. If you look at these drives, they are identical except for the logic board. this means that the HDA and other drive mechanics are the same. The difference lies in the logic board. The IDE logic board has the disk controller and the built on AT bus interface. The logic board on the SCSI drive contains one extra SBIC chip. Basically, this chip is a SCSI adapter to allow the drive to operate on a SCSI bus. So, structurally, IDE and SCSI drives are the same.

The performance overhead of SCSI over IDE comes from structure of the bus, not the drive. The nature of the SCSI bus allows it much better performance when doing data hungry tasks such as multi-tasking. The SCSI bus controller is capable of controlling the drives without any work by the processor. Also, all drives on a SCSI chain are capable of operating at the same time. With IDE, one is limited to two drives in a chain, and these drives cannot work at the same time. In essence, they must "take turns".

Comparison

In some computers, SCSI is better. As mentioned above, SCSI is a smarter bus than IDE. There are many steps in the SCSI data transfer. But, on OSes that allow multitasking, or if you often use several programs at once, the SCSI drive is a better choice because this extra intelligence of the SCSI bus is used.

SCSI devices can communicate independently from the CPU over the SCSI bus. This is due to the fact that each device has its own embedded controller. Data can then be transferred at high-speeds between the devices without taking any CPU power. IDE, likewise, uses controllers on each device, but they cannot operate at the same time and they do not support command queuing.

Last Thoughts

Finally, let me say that for most people, IDE is just fine and offers very good performance. The reason I believe one does not need to get SCSI, though, is that most users do not use their system in a way that would actually justify the SCSI bus. While the nature of the bus is faster, it takes certain situations to actually need it. Couple this with the significantly higher price, one can see that they can easily live with IDE.

SCSI vs iSCSI:

Let us assume you are asking about parallel or serial attached SCSI vs. iSCSI. iSCSI is the SCSI protocol mapped to TCP/IP and run over standard Ethernet technologies. This allows Ethernet networks to be deployed as SANs at a much lower TCO than Fibre Channel (FC).

Parallel SCSI and serial attached SCSI (SAS) are technologies designed to be inside a box such as DAS or within a storage array. They are not viable SAN technologies at this time.

The iSCSI on Ethernet (10/100/1000/10000) is a good viable external interconnect between application server initiators and storage targets. Parallel SCSI and SAS are good internal interconnects between the server and its internal storage or between the array controller and its drawers of hard disk drives (HDDs).