WASHINGTON: These days, the best Windows utilities tend to be those that perform a single function and perform it well. The trouble is, you might download, install, and try out hundreds of tools before finding a handful that fulfill their promise and earn a permanent place on your hard drive.
Take a shortcut to utility nirvana by trying the tools mentioned here first. All of these apps are among the best in their categories -- and some are free.
File synchronisation
With external hard drives, flash drives, CDs, and DVDs, you probably have multiple copies of important files scattered across your storage media. That's a good thing. What's not so good is that all of those files are likely out of sync, which is where a file synchronisation tool comes in.
Microsoft has taken multiple stabs at the file synchronisation problem, from the now oudated Briefcase model in Windows XP to SyncToy (http://bit.ly/17AYut), which is still available, to Live Sync (https://sync.live.com), which utilises online file storage as an intermediate repository.
None of these solutions, though, has offered either the power or simplicity of third-party applications. Super Flexible File Synchronizer (http://www.superflexible.com) stands out as one of the best. Available in a 30-day trial version, this tool packs synchronisation options in a wizard-based package that's easy enough for novices but full-featured enough for experts. What's more, it can be installed as a Windows service, which means that you can ‘set and forget’ file synchronisation jobs that will run automatically at pre- defined times.
Quicker copies
With each new version of Windows, Microsoft changes the look and feel of the Windows Explorer file manager, but it hasn't done much to improve Windows’ often frustrating file copying behaviour. The free TeraCopy (http://bit.ly/dTLC) does.
TeraCopy claims to speed up copy and move operations in Windows, and subjectively, it seems to. However, the greater benefit of TeraCopy come in the power it gives you during the process of copying large amounts of data.
First, with TeraCopy, you can pause and resume file transfers -- something that, amazingly, is simply not possible with Windows' standard file copying utility. Equally important, TeraCopy will not abort a copy operating when it encounters a problem file, as Windows does. Instead, the tool will try multiple times to copy a file. If that fails, it will skip over the file and continue with the rest of the copy operation.
Failed file transfers are reported after the operation is complete, allowing you to troubleshoot issues and copy the file later.
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