IObit Smart Defrag is a free defragmentation tool with features that allow you to optimize automatic defragmentation.

The two defragmentation tools, I reviewed previously (MyDefrag, Disk Defrag), have good features for manually controlling the defragmentation process. By contrast, IObit Smart Defrag certainly lives up to its name because automatic defragmentation is its strength.

Most defragmentation tools support scheduling, and so does Smart Defrag. However, this feature is disabled by default. This makes sense because Smart Defrag has something better to offer: Automatic Defrag.

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Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free defragmenter with features that give you better control over which objects are defragmented.

A few days ago, I reviewed MyDefrag, a script-based disk defragmentation tool. A downside of the tool is that its GUI is somewhat limited (although a reader commented that there is a better third-party GUI available). The free disk defragmenter Auslogics Disk Defrag definitely has a nicer GUI. It has the common features that most disk defragmenters support, such as fragmentation analysis and disk defragmentation scheduling. In addition, it comes with some special features that I will discuss in this post.

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MyDefrag is a free disk defrag tool that allows you to script defragmentation.

In the past, defragmented disks were the major reason why computers became slow over time. Since Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support scheduled defragmentation, this problem is no longer that serious. However, the fact that Microsoft offers a defragmentation API shows that room still exists for third-party tools.

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The free Fast Duplicate File Finder not only allows you to find duplicate files, but it also lets you delete duplicate files easily.

What is the first thing you do if a user tells you that he reached the quota on the file server?

A.  Assign more space.

B.  Tell the user to delete all his games and movies.

C.  Find duplicate files in his home folder.

If your answer is A or B, you can now head to your well-deserved Easter weekend and search for eggs instead of files. If your answer is C, you need to stay a little longer.

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StarWind iSCSI SAN Software is a storage solution that turns a 64-bit or 32-bit Windows server into a fail-safe, fault-tolerant, and active-active high availability SAN.

StarWind Software is raffling a license of their iSCSI SAN product. The winner will receive a license for StarWind Enterprise CDP Edition, worth $995 USD. More information about this contest can be found at the end of this article.

We had a review of StarWind 5.0 last year on 4ysops. Even though version 5.6 was just released, James Bannan’s article is still worth reading because it gives a good overview of this iSCSI SAN storage software for Windows.

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DiskCountersView is a free NirSoft tool that allows you to collect hard disk drive system counters in your network. This data can help you to estimate the lifespan of a hard disks in your network.

It’s hard to believe that in the 21st century we are still using storage devices that rely on mechanical components. Even though tech enthusiasts have predicted for some years already that flash drives will replace hard drives at any time, I think we still have to live with these old-fashioned spinning disks for a while.

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Bleachbit is a free tool that allows you to free disk space and delete Internet history. It has a few advantages over comparable tools: It is Open Source, supports many applications, is portable, has a command line interface, and helps you to wipe disk space.

BleachBit is a free tool that allows you to clean disk space, on Windows (and Linux). For many third-party applications you can free disk space and to delete compromising files such as Internet history data.

Thus far, CCleaner has been my favorite cleaning tool. I haven’t yet had much experience with BleachBit, but the free tool has a good chance of getting a permanent place in my toolbox. Like CCleaner, BleachBit allows you to free disk space by deleting unneeded files from various applications. However, there are a few differences between the two free cleaning utilities.

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The free disk analyzer Xinorbis offer many different views on a hard disk: space usage of categories and file types. Time-based and size-based views, diagrams and many more.

Xinorbis is a free disk analyzer that is easy to use and provides a lot of valuable information about hard disk usage. There is an installable and a portable version.

Contrary to other disk analyzers, Xinorbis allows you to specify precisely what folders and files you want to include in the report. This is useful because sometimes you only need disk information for a small portion of a large disk. You can choose specific folders, exclude folders and files, and combine folders from different drives in one scan operation.

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Universal Viewer is a free file viewer that can be integrated into Windows Explorer's context menu. It supports many different file types.

Submitted by Robert Morris

Universal Viewer is a free file viewer that allows you to view many file types without having to have the application installed. A portable version is also available, so Universal Viewer can be part of your USB toolkit.

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I wonder why Windows Explorer still has no tabs. All Explorer replacements and enhancements I have seen so far offer this feature. For me, the tabs were always the main reason to use an alternative file manager. However, after a while I always switch back to Windows Explorer, mainly because Explorer extensions often start up too slowly.

QTTabBar might be the first free Explorer extension that I will continue to use. It is lightweight and doesn’t slow down Windows Explorer. Even though the Open Source tool has quite a few features and settings, it can be used intuitively without studying a manual first.

After you install QTTabBar, you have to restart Windows Explorer. This makes not only the Explorer windows disappear and reappear but also all the other running applications. So it probably makes sense to close all applications before you install QTTabBar.

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AutoAdministrator allows you to remote change passwords, remote Windows registry editing, remote file copy, and to remote edit the ODBC configuration.

In the last part of this series, I covered AutoAdministrator’s remote execution features. Today’s post will describe the remote editing functions.

Note: 4sysops readers get a discount on AutoAdministrator of $20 USD until the end of 2010, which means that you pay only $49 USD instead of the regular price of $69 USD. indicating that you are a 4sysops reader.

Remotely manage passwords

This is one of my favorite AutoAdministrator features. It allows you to verify, change, and reset passwords remotely on multiple machines. This function is especially useful if you want to change the local administrator password on all your machines. Since managing local passwords on multiple machines is somewhat cumbersome, most admins don’t change local administrator passwords often enough.

With AutoAdministrator, you can perform this important security task with a few mouse clicks. The verify function enables you to check if all computers received the new password.

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The free tool SolarWinds Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory allows you to determine effective NTFS permissions and share permissions remotely.

A few days ago, SolarWinds released Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory, a new free tool that allows you to determine the effective NTFS permissions and share permissions for a network share and for a particular user or user group.

When a user has problems accessing a network share, the first thing to check is whether he or she has the appropriate NTFS permissions. The common way is to navigate to the folder and check the security properties with Windows Explorer.

Assuming that you follow common practice and only assign NTFS permissions to groups and not to single users, you can’t see the effective NTFS permission this way. Moreover, since groups can have other groups as members, it can get tricky in some scenarios to guess the effective permissions.

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Submitted by Igor Vinnykov

In a previous article I discussed how to unlock locked files and folders using the Unlock IT. This utility can unlock a resource by closing the file/DLL handles that point at the locked resource or by terminating the processes that hold locks. Both of these approaches require modification of the current environment, which is not always possible. Just imagine, for example, that you need to replace a system file, but you just cannot terminate a system process. Is there a standard approach for this?

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Free EMCO UnLock IT utility is one helps you resolve problems with locked files and folders.

Submitted by Igor Vinnykov

Since the first release of Windows 95 fifteen years ago Microsoft has released several generations of the Windows platform, but the well-known “Access Denied” error, which occurs when one attempts to modify, rename or delete locked file, is still there and it still confuses even experienced IT veterans. This error is an example of unfriendly error messages, as Windows only reports that the resource is locked by some applications, but doesn’t indicate which particular applications hold locks and doesn’t offer any solutions.

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1-4a Rename is the feature king of the batch renamer tools.

Many batch renamer tools exist. Michael recently reviewed ReNamer which offers enough features for most users. However, the feature king of the batch renamer tools certainly is 1-4a Rename. If you visit the tool’s homepage, you will see that this tool is quite old and hasn’t been developed further in recent years. Nonetheless, it runs perfectly under every newer OS including the 64-bit versions.

What does this batch renamer offer you that others do not? When you launch the tool for the first time, nothing spectacular awaits you:

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