Raymond.CC Blog

Some people like the Portable Document Format (PDF) and some are not great fans. The certainty is that at some point you will come across one to read. Not a problem because there are some good PDF readers around. Foxit Reader, Nitro PDF, SumatraPDF to name a few, and that’s assuming you don’t want to use Adobe Reader. If you want to edit or alter a PDF file, a popular way of doing it is to convert the document into Microsoft Word format and then do your editing from there.

There are a few tools around to convert PDF documents to Word or plain text but quite a few are either shareware or not great at the conversion with the results being unsatisfactory. A freeware utility called First PDF aims to make converting from PDF to other formats an easy and painless task. Apart from the Word document conversion, it can also convert to plain text. Something else First PDF can do is convert the document into a variety of image formats which is very useful if you just want to keep a few pages from a large document or place some pages onto a web page.

The standard Windows file copy and move function does what it’s supposed to and gets the job done, but it isn’t exactly what you would call great at it. As file operations such as copying and moving are something most people will use frequently, you would think over the years Windows would have become as good at it as you could hope to get. Sadly this is not the case and in some copy scenarios, Windows Vista and 7 have actually got slower and lag behind XP.

Some things that would be nice would be the ability to perform functions such as pausing the copy process while you attend to something else temporarily and being able to resume afterwards. Or being able to skip a large file if you change your mind without stopping the whole process and having to start all over again, which is what would normally happen. At least Microsoft has gone some way to rectifying this in Windows 8 with an enhanced copy dialog incorporating pause and skip functions, but for everyone else, it’s either a case of being stuck with what Windows provides or use a third party utility.

If you spend a lot of time doing file operations, and Microsoft says around 50% of the average person’s time in Explorer is taken up copying, moving, renaming, and deleting, it could really save some serious time using something which handles some of those jobs far better than Windows itself. There are quite a few copy utilities around that put the ordinary Windows dialog to shame in both functionality and performance as do many copy functions included inside file managers. Tera Copy, Fast Copy, Extreme Copy or Unstoppable Copier are just a few that are faster and more useful and could provide a real benefit.

Most people have at some time used the built in search function that Windows provides allowing quick access to your files. And it does have some advantages such as the indexing of the files and retaining the information about them to speed up subsequent searches. Unfortunately the indexing feature itself also has a few disadvantages such as creating a bit more disk activity than it perhaps should while building and maintaining the index. It also appears to consume more system resources than you’d like. You also need to know your search syntax pretty well to get the most out of it. Because of that, quite a few users turn off Windows search completely and simply stop it running in the background, and I’m one of them.

With SSD’s becoming pretty common now, Windows Search with the indexing feature is perhaps only really of use on standard hard drives anyway. But with huge capacity hard drives and the possibility of the number of files in a system running into the millions, it is still a real benefit to have something to be able to quickly and efficiently search through your files. One such utility called Instant File Searcher Professional can perform fast searches but doesn’t consume any unnecessary resources when you don’t need it.

Ever since Google rolling out the Panda update which targets low quality sites, it has caused many webmasters to lose massive traffic and revenue as well. Many has claimed that they’re innocent and should not have been affected by the Panda but I strongly believe that they’ve unknowingly violated some guidelines that caused the penalty. One of the violation that is categorized as high risk is Cloaking. In simple terms, cloaking means showing different content to users than GoogleBot. This can be easily done by checking the Googlebot IP address or user-agent and feeding with different content. Many webmasters does not realize using some forum plugins that forces the users to register or login to view the content can be a cloaking violation.

For example, you searched for a keyword in Google and visited one of the webpage from the results. Then you are presented with annoying messages that restricts you from viewing the content.

Sorry, but you do not have permission to use this feature. If you are not logged in, you may do so using the form below if available.

Guests cannot see links. Registration or Login is required.

Now you have to go through the process of signing up in some forums that you would probably never visit again and you may even lose track of the origin URL at the end. The user will definitely start to blame Google on indexing useless restricted pages but the truth is, the forum has actually implemented some cloaking techniques where different contents are being presented to Googlebot and users. There are proper guidelines provided by Google on the correct implementation method for registration/subscription sites so a webmaster should definitely refer to it if they’re running such service on their website.

Some of you might have noticed the articles that was recently published here are written by hal9000 and I have been quite inactive at the forums. I have been very busy for the whole month fixing up some problems on this website and I couldn’t afford to entrust this task to anyone else because of the risk involved as I don’t want to make any mistakes. The good news is the task has finally completed and I should be back researching and posting new articles starting from early next week. Since I managed to finish the job early, I checked the forum and found an interesting thread posted by william_of_palerne where anyone can get a free registration code for PowerArchiver 2011.

If you have not heard of PowerArchiver, it is an archive utility similar to WinZIP, WinRAR and 7-Zip that allows you to open and extract or create compressed files. It has actually been around for a while and it used to be a freeware but turned into a shareware at a later time. If you have been using 7-Zip, you might want to give PowerArchiver 2011 a try since the stable version of 7-Zip 9.20 was released more than a year ago and has that nasty bug where you cannot view images by double clicking from the program.

When you mention the word ‘security’ to most people, they will immediately think of something like an Antivirus or Firewall. And of course, this is correct and an essential part of keeping you secure while online. There are however, many other forms of security connected with computing that people should be aware of. One of these is making sure important or private files and data on the system is protected. This is usually handled by software that encrypts the files keeping your most valuable data safe. An area that does often get overlooked by lots of users though, is when they delete data and think that’s ok, it’s gone and I’m safe.

A lot of reasonably experienced users will know that when you delete a file, it isn’t actually completely gone from the system and can often be recovered with undelete software like Recuva or Wise Data Recovery. This is especially true if you are giving an old system away or selling it because the new owner could easily recover data you thought was gone, posing a major security risk. The number of people I have seen getting rid of their old system but have not wiped or done anything at all about what’s currently on it, including not even removing their personal files, is quite shocking. Even a quick format and reinstall in that situation doesn’t mean all the old data is completely safe from being recovered by others. The same thing applies to external storage media like USB sticks or memory cards, and these are perhaps more important as they are far more likely to change hands than internal devices.

If you ever find an occasion when you don’t have access to a web browser or the internet itself, having a hard copy of a particular web page could be useful. Whether it’s simply wanting to read an article or piece of information from your favourite websites, or getting a couple of pages of the day’s news, being able to access this while being offline is helpful. The obvious answer is to save the page through the browser but saving as an htm/html file includes all the images etc. in a folder as well, which could be quite a few files depending on the page content.

Another way of getting a copy of a web page is to save it as a single file such as an image or document. This has a few advantages in that you don’t need a browser to view it, just an image viewer will do, and it’s one all encompassing single file. A program called Web Page Saver is able to do this for you. The version that is available for free allows the entering of up to five web pages to download and convert in one session. You can though run the program multiple times to get a larger number of pages if required.