Work With Files Faster
Like car keys, house keys, and bicycle keys, files sometimes get misplaced, mislaid, or mixed up. Here are a few tools to help you find, control, and manage the files in your life.
Copernic Desktop Search
Windows Vista comes with a great indexed search tool. Google offers a pretty good one, too. But Copernic gives away the best one of all.
Copernic keeps an index of words contained in your e-mail messages, productivity files, music, pictures, videos, contacts, favorites, and history, and it uses that index to report its findings almost instantaneously. One especially nice feature: Copernic has a preview pane below the file list that shows you the contents of the currently selected file along with the location of the search string within that file.
Price: Free
Download Copernic Desktop Search.
Rename Master
Anyone with a digital camera has undoubtedly felt the need to rename a whole bunch of files at once. Windows can perform this chore easily, but not well. The result is a bunch of files with the same name, differentiated only by a number in parentheses.
That's where Rename Master comes in. This freebie, brought to you by Jackass JoeJoe's Freeware Utilities (hey, folks, I pick the software, not the names), offers a cornucopia of mass-renaming options. You can add text at specific points in the names, replace text, remove unwanted strings, and even specify how you want the file names capitalized. You also have considerable control over the way the counter distinguishes one file from another.
And you can see the changes you're making before they become set in stone.
Price: Free
Download Rename Master.
Ycopy
Ever try to copy a large number of files to a new location? Everything goes swimmingly until Windows finds a file that, for one reason or another, isn't copiable. Then, instead of the taking the obvious step of skipping the balky file and going on to the next one, Windows stops the copying process dead in its tracks.
Ruahine.com's free Ycopy gets around that annoying frailty. You simply tell Ycopy what folder you want copied and where you want it copied to, and then you click Start Copy.
When it's finished with the entire assignment, Ycopy will inform you of the files it couldn't copy.
Price: Free
Download Ycopy.
SendTo FTP
If you manage a Web site, you probably upload files to Internet servers via FTP.
Peili Chen's SendTo FTP makes this chore about as simple as possible. Just right-click a file (or a selected group of files), and choose Send To•SendTo FTP. A dialog box will let you define a destination or pick an already defined one--and up your file(s) will go.
SendTo FTP hasn't been updated in several years, and we couldn't reach Peili Chen for comment, but the program still works. We noticed some minor problems that the utility had with Vista, which wasn't around when the program was last updated, but nothing serious.
Price: Free
Download SendTo FTP.
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