Andrew Lee's favorites (1444)

SilentNight Inspector is a file/folder monitoring program that detects and reports the file/folder creation/deletion and changes to attributes, access date, filesize, last write, security etc.

NOTE: site offline, it's available as an archive while the download link points to an external file share host.

WinDV is a small utility for capturing videos from DV device (camcorder) into AVI-files and for recording AVI-files into DV device via FireWire (IEEE 1394) interface. Capturing is very reliable thanks to use of large buffer queue. Timestamps recorded on DV tape by camcorder can be used to automatically split captured video into multiple files. During transmitting to DV, several AVI-files can be joined together to form final video recording.

InstallSpy tracks changes to the registry and file system, and also record all shell notification events (e.g. media inserted), when a program is installed, uninstalled, or run. This can warn you of programs trying to install new services, programs that are set to run on reboot, changes to your home page, etc.

Official site no longer hosts anything about InstallSpy. Linking to Softpedia.

mp4UI is a utility for creating MP4 video files. MP4 files are high-compression ISO-compliant MPEG-4 streams with AAC audio. You are able to edit file/track properties and metadata, as well as import/export individual audio/video tracks.

Power Menu adds "Always On Top", "Minimize To Tray", "Priority" and "Transparency" submenus to all top level system menus. It works really well, and replaces a bunch of different utilities that offer these functions separately. You should, however, be aware that when Windows Explorer crashes, Power Menu does not rebuild the system tray icons.

Advanced LAN Pump lets you send files over the network with pause/restart options, automatic error recovery, even a queue for sending a list of files. Great for copying lots of data, particularly over WiFi networks, where the standard Windows copy function is just not robust enough to deal with intermittent network interference and failures.

Note: This program has gone payware. Last available freeware version available via the download link.

Drive Speed Checker benchmarks the read, write and seek speed of your disk drives.

NOTE: website offline; linking to archive.org.

eXpress CheckSum Calculator is great for verifying the integrity of files downloaded from the Internet. Similar utilities install new shell menus and/or tabs, which I dislike, because experience have shown that badly written shell utilities will make Windows Explorer less stable. Why sacrifice system stability when you can use small, simple utilities like these instead?

ZIP password finder is a tool for recovering ZIP archive passwords. It uses brute force search to compute the password that will unlock the given ZIP file. Since this is a CPU intensive task, the tool allows you to specify the maximum password length as well as the search space (alpha only, alphanumeric, lower or uppercase only etc.) in order to reduce the total computation time.