I wanted to share with you a nice tool which tells the disk space usage by each folder in a drive. It’s a free utility called TreeSize. I have shared another utility called DiskSpace Fan before, which does the same job. But I found this easier and faster in terms of drilling down to the folder level and then file level. The tree style design of displaying the drive contents makes it easier to use. This utility can save lot of time when you don’t have any clue as why one of your computer drive become start growing unwantedly.

The best thing I liked in this utility is you can still explore the folders while it is scanning your computer drive. Also it scans and displays the data very fast when compared to the DiskSpace Fan.

The user interface is not at all complicated you can easily find what is occupying most of your disk space. They have a professional version as well it gives some premium features such as reporting and export possibilities. I feel the price of 52.95 USD is a bit expensive still you can try the professional version in trial period for 30 days!

It supports in all the windows editions currently being used by home users and enterprises.

Check it out the free TreeSize.

Hard Disk encryption is something different than all the above said security measures. It encrypts the whole hard disk data so if someone try to access the data by connecting the hard disk to another computer he will see some random data instead of the actual files. TrueCrypt uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 14 rounds and a 256 bit key. So decryption is hopeless for this! AES protection is used by US Federal departments and agencies to protect their sensitive data. The data encrypted with TrueCrypt will not drop any trace about TrueCrypt thus a hacker will never get information of the tool used for encryption.

TrueCrypt’s Features:

• A virtual encrypted disk can be created and mounted as a real disk within a file.
• Can used to encrypt the entire partition or an external storage device such as an external hard drive or a flash drive.
• Supports a pre-boot authentication and encrypts complete operating system files.
• On modern systems the encryption is hardware accelerated.
• Using encryption a volume can be made hidden (Operating system volume can be made hidden)
• It supports Windows desktop operating systems and server operating systems.
• Support for Mac OSX and Linux flavors.
• It’s absolutely free.

Try TrueCrypt from this link

This page is worth bookmarking as this article is featuring 10 websites which provides free utilities for Windows and Mac operating systems.

1) http://www.opensourcemac.org Mac

Open source Mac is a place with simple list of best free open source applications for Mac. You won’t find the complete list of Mac applications here but they have tried their best to showcase the most important and most useful applications in daily life.

2) http://softpedia.com Windows/Mac/Linux/Mobile/Handhelds

Softpedia has the huge collection of software packages for Windows, Mac, Linux, Mobile, Handhelds etc. You will find freeware and sharewares here.

3) http://ninite.com Windows/Linux

Ninite features all the freebies available on the internet. Categorized by Web Browsers, Messaging, Media, Imaging, Documents, Security, Runtimes, File Sharing, Utilities, Compression, Developer Tools. Best thing about ninite is it can be used for unattended installations. Read more

4) http://filehippo.com Windows

Filehippo is offering all the freeware apps in an easy to download interface. In filehippo store you will find only windows applications.

5) http://freshmeat.net Unix,Linux, handheld

freshmeat maintains the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software, themes and related “eye-candy”, and Palm OS software. Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat database, and links to new applications are added daily.

6) http://www.portablefreeware.com Windows

Portablefreeware is a database for all windows operating system versions. It’s a collection of portable applications which can be stored on a usb stick and run on any computer without installing it. The database is really huge and you will find almost all the portable application for every need.

7) http://oldversion.com Windows

Oldversion.com is a database of applications with all its previous versions released from the year 2001.A new version won’t be good every time especially when you miss certain features in a new version or even when you find incompatibility with your operating system.

8 ) http://alternativeto.net Windows/Mac/Mobile

Alternativeto provides and alternate application for those major applications. Even you will find an alternate software for a paid software which can perform the same process.

9) http://filepig.org Windows

You will find filepig similar to filehippo but you will more utilities here.

10) http://sourceforge.net

Souceforge is a huge database for open source softwares for windows. Sourceforge is a community of 2.7 million developers around the world. The sourceforge directory has more than 260,000 project hosted.

CloudFlare securely protects and speed up website as web traffic is routed through global network.  CloudFlare also block threats and limit abusive spam bots and zombie crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result is a that you experience  a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. And the best thing is that the whole service is free with Pro settings available for a small monthly fee.

CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain and it takes less 5 minutes to make your site secure and fast.  Adding your website calls for only a simple change in the domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code.

Advantages of the CloudFlare system:

• Site Performance Improvement: CloudFlare has proxy servers located throughout the world. Proxy servers are located closer to your visitors, which means they will likely see page load speed improvements as the cached content is delivered from the closest caching box instead of directly off our server. There is a lot of research that shows that a faster a site, the longer a visitor stays.
• Bot and Threat Protection: CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site.
• Spam Comments Protection: CloudFlare leverages data from third party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site
• Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers: CloudFlare alerts human visitors that have an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine. The visitor can enter a CAPTCHA to gain access to your site.
• Offline Browsing Mode: In the event that our server is unavailable, visitors should still be able to access your site since CloudFlare serves the visitor a page from its cache.
• Lower CPU Usage: As fewer requests hit our server, this lowers the overall CPU usage of your account.
• New Site Stats: You have good tools to evaluate human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into search engine crawlers and threats. With CloudFlare, now you do.

Some limitations of the CloudFlare system:

• Currently, requests must be directed to www.$domain instead of $domain (which means you may need to make some configuration changes).
• CloudFlare may affect internal statistic programs that read directly from Apache logs. (CloudFlare will not affect web-based analytic programs that use JavaScript like Google Analytics.) While your logs will reflect fewer requests to your server and therefore lower load, the experience to your visitors should be unaffected.
• CloudFlare caches static content from your site. While this reduces the load on your server, it means that if you make a change to an existing static file, like an image, there may be a delay before the change appears. While you are updating your site, you can put CloudFlare in Development Mode so changes appear immediately.
• CloudFlare’s basic mode cannot handle SSL certificates. If you need to use an SSL certificate, that part of your site needs to be on a subdomain that is not protected.

CloudFlare is a service that makes any website faster, safer, smarter…better. Take a tour to find out more about how it works and what you get.

I am certain that a small number of people are aware that Microsoft is providing a Free yet powerful security application against Virus, Spywares and Malwares. It’s called Microsoft Security Essential. it is absolutely free to use if you have genuine Microsoft copy. No more registration and no more subscription expiring! Security Essential is very lite application you will not even believe that it is running in the background as it will use very less amount of CPU resources. Microsoft has developed this security software for the Home Computers or Small business workstations.

It supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 Operating systems (For both 32 and 64 bit) Installation of this application is very easy you can download your copy from Microsoft Website. After you complete the windows genuine check the installation will proceed. Once completed it will update the Application with latest virus database on your desktop. The tool supports real time protection for your PC and alerts you when there is a new threat detected. Essentials will run routine scans as per the scans scheduled.

Portable apps are very popular because it does n’t require an installation to run it. So keep in mind it will not save any of your settings such as browser cache or any application specific settings. But still it is everyone’s favorite as it comes handy. You can store all these portable apps on a flash drive and run on the fly!

VLC Media Player 1.1.2

Portable VLC Media Player is useful to play your Audio or Video files. The portable player never leaves any personal information behind when you play from it. Download it

Mozilla Firefox 3.6.8

The fast and easy to use full featured web browser will never leave any personal information on the PC you run it on. The portable version provides same as the regular versions features such as tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, privacy browsing etc. Download it

µTorrent Portable 2.0.3

I love this torrent client for its simplicity. It is very lite app it will use only 6MB of your system memory and never consume much of your PC resource. It supports bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT. Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification. Download it

Google Chrome 5.0

For various reasons I prefer Google Chrome as my seconds browser. Though it lacks couple of good advanced features of Firefox but it grabs the place when you need a faster browser. Best thing about this browser is it runs web apps very efficiently than any other web browser. Download it

KeePass Password Safe

KeePass Password is the safest portable password manager available now. It created to provide the most secure algorithm currently known as AES-256 and twofish to secure your passwords. The database can be unlocked with a master password or a key-disk. This app is an open source licensed package. Download it

Qualys SSL labs has announced a free online SSL test for websites.We can examine whether the website can be trusted and service is secure. SSL certificate chain to ensure it is trusted and serves as a good security foundation for communications over the Internet.

The test lets a user test a web site’s SSL certificate chain and performs comprehensive configuration analysis to detect configuration weaknesses and performance issues. Users simply enter the web site domain name, and the test will assess any server behind the domain. The test results include a numerical score, grading the SSL server across several categories, as well as a letter grade that rates the SSL configuration. To improve a score, guidelines and resources for improved SSL use are available at Qualys SSL Labs.

“SSL is a successful protocol that serves as the security backbone of the Internet, but most sites just don’t have it well configured,” said Ivan Ristic, director of engineering for Qualys and creator of SSL Labs. “Qualys SSL Labs is non-commercial research effort focused on understanding how SSL is used as an attempt to make it better and help users everywhere configure it and use it properly.”

SSL Test tool link : Qualys SSL Labs