Web review

I was looking for a complete solution to keep the office PC with my laptop in sync: SugarSync does more: it offers a free 2.5Gb storage space to synchronize an unlimited number of folders between two computers; in addiction, they gives you a mobile application – available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry – to access your file also in mobility.

You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website

A lot of Google Chrome users are experiencing problems with page scrolling in Windows, that is too fast with several devices (mouses and touchpads). It seems that there isn’t any “official” fix for this behaviour, but you can resolve this with a little freeware utility, KatMouse.

Just download it from the author’s site and install it. First of all, you’ve to open the Wheel Button tab and choose “None of the buttons” from the list (this feature isn’t useful and it can give you usability problems in Windows). Then, switch to “Classes” tab and start Google Chrome: drag and drop the KatMouse “target” icon to the main section of Chrome windows (the one where web sites are rendered); you’ll see a new item named “Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND” in the KatMouse list: double click it and choose “Custom scroll”, then set it to “1″ and confirm with OK.

That’s it!

Vista’s “3D Flip” effect is really nice. Honestly, the entire new graphic of Windows Vista is beautiful… even if the rest of the operating system is disappointing

Anyway, if you want to add this feature to your Windows XP… someone has done it: WinFlip is a little and free addon that is capable to re-create the same effect. Just download it and try!

http://winflip.stylekings.de/

Fliqlo is a simple but really beautyful free screensaver: it simply shows the current time, in a “flip clock” style (do you remember those old office clocks?).
Nothing special, but very nice and somehow useful.

It can be downloaded for free; the same site offers other nice screensavers for Windows.

http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html

I want to suggest a very good work from TredoSoft: Multiple IE Installer (aka MultipleIEs) is a free tool that installs all the previous versions of Internet Explorer (from 3.0 to 6.0) on a Windows PC, allowing Internet Explorer 7 users to use older versions of IE on the same computer.

It was very useful for me, because I have to test my sites on Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 but IE 6 is still popular, so I must test everything (at least) on these 3 browsers.

As a web developer I work everyday with FTP to transfer and update files on several web servers. The process is simple but boring: I’ve to download a page on my hard drive, edit it and then upload it back on the remote machine to test my modifications. These activities must be done with an FTP client like FileZilla, SmartFTP, WS_FTP…

Microsoft Windows can’t mount FTP servers on the local filesystem as network folders (you can do it only with computers that are connected in your local network), so it’s impossible to work with a local application (PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Notepad++…) loading and saving documents directly on the remote server.

There is some software that is able to add this functionality to Microsoft Operating System, like the old Novell NetDrive, that is not freeware but is considered as abandonware by the same software house. Now Novell suggests to use a newer product like WebDrive, but it’s unfortunately a commercial software.

I Googled for a while and finally I found a solution.

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Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free defragmentation tool. It seems to work very well on Windows systems, and several forums on the Internet confirm its efficiency.

Its free version is the only available (this is not a “lite” implementation of a more featured application) and it offers a nice interface and great defragmentation speed, compared to the defrag tool that is provided with Windows XP.

It worths a try

http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag