I Love Free Software

Secure Backup Software Free: Cobian Backup
Note Taking Desktop Tool for Windows: Note-It
Keep Track of Birthdays with Birthday Calendar Software: Birthdays
Create Music with ACID Xpress Music Production Software
How to Recover Deleted Google Calendar Events
Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows Live Writer
Free Instant Messenger to Improve Team Communication with Pingpong
Chrome Extension To Manage Multiple Links With Linkclump

Secure Backup Software Free: Cobian Backup

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 03:30 PM PDT

Cobian Backup is a free to use software which can backup all your important files to safety. It is absolutely free to download and use.

Worried about loss of important files like office documents, photos, music, videos etc.,? Cobian Backup is the solution to all your worries as it can securely make a copy of these files and can save them in desired locations of your choice.

Backup Destination

Network Drives
USB Drives
File Directory

Features of Cobian Backup

Encryption: When the location for backup is a network drive, then Cobian Backup automatically encrypts data before being sent to the network drive. You can prefer to use AES 256, AES 192 or AES 128 encryption so that you can be sure that your data is safe.
Password Protection: Using Cobian Backup you can secure your backed up files with a password. When being recovered these files require passwords to unlock them.
Compression: You can compress your backed up files so that you can save disk space. Cobian Backup offers zip and 7zip compression.
Splitting: You can split the backup files so that you stay within the upper limit of storage space. Using Cobian Backup you can split the backed up files to sizes of your choice.
Scheduling: You can choose to carry out the backup process in a predetermined time and date.
Filters: Using the filters option you can exclude certain type of files from being backed up.
Events: Before and after the backup you can choose to start or stop a program from running so that the files to be backed up are available.
History & Log: Cobian Backup maintains a complete set of all the backups in its History. It automatically logs each and every backup operation so that any problem encountered can be fixed quickly.

How to backup?

You can backup all your important files securely using Cobian Backup to a USB drive, any other directory in the same computer, or to a network drive.

You have to create a task to be executed. Give the name of your task.
Select the files or folders to be backed up and also its backup destination.
You can choose to compress, split, encrypt or password protect the files of this task or not.
Add filters and events if you need one.
If you wish to schedule the execution of this task to some other time you can schedule it.
Else add the task and execute the same to securely backup the files.

Cobian Backup is an awesome software to use and enjoy. Its cool user friendly interface makes the application more familiar. It houses a comprehensive help and also a tutor to acquaint new users with the various features of the software. Cobain Backup installs smoothly in any Windows 2000 or later system with a minimum of 128MB of RAM without any problem. It works in the background and doesn't interfere with other applications. Test results indicate excellent performance with very good rate of backup. Cobian Backup is an important handy tool to all computer users. Give it a try!

Secure Backup Software Free: Cobian Backup was originally published at I Love Free Software

Note Taking Desktop Tool for Windows: Note-It

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 02:00 PM PDT

Note-it is brilliant software, which is used to keep a written record of any important activity that you may want to write down. It's tiny and very smart, something which assists highly in noting and saving the written things. If you have anything important to note down, Note-it is the perfect platform for doing that.

The software occupies very little screen space and is very convenient to use. It is not like the other notepad software, as it has a much more flexible approach. A lot of features have been incorporated in Note-it, to make it a user's firm favorite.

Downloading and Installation of this note taking Software

Note-it can be downloaded from the website of the Veign software company. It gets saved, as a Zip file and is approximately 3 MB in size. It took a fair bit of time for the installation, as the setup process configured my XML. It's an easy click to launch application software.

Features of this note taking Software

A single file can be used to keep track of multiple notes.
Drag and Drop feature is present. If you want to append a link to your note, you just have to drag and place it in the note-it software window.
Hyperlinks and URL's are detected.
Images can be saved with the drag and drop feature.
Spell check and text formatting facilities are provided.
Information of the system such as computer memory and drive information is presented.
Note can be merged or aligned with the background.
Time, Alarms, RSS feed and Stocks; everything can be added to a note too!
A special feature of Multi-Note is present.

The simplicity and effectiveness of Note-It

Note-It has a very simple interface, which is packed with the best possible features. You can open a note and add plain text, images, URL's, hyperlinks or just anything that you may wish to! The interface acquires hardly any space on the screen and the best part is that, its movable.

You can append your existing note to another file, Email the content of the note, Paste the content and even insert special symbols. You can change the font size of the words and even the paragraph alignment! In a way, it's just like miniature version of MS Word. With respect to the note, you can change the Font Family, Background Color and the Transparency of the software. You can even set alarms and reminders to help you keep track of your things better.

Final Verdict on the Software

Note-It is one of the best noting software available across the web. It assists you in noting down things without the tedious task of switching from your application. The only flip side would be that the reminder feature does need some sort of minor improvement. The reminder schedule must be able to plan tasks for upcoming days as well, rather than the current feature of setting reminders for the current day. Note-It is one of the excellent note taking software available to you, which are simple, dynamic and very efficient. I would definitely give the software, thumbs up from my side.

Note Taking Desktop Tool for Windows: Note-It was originally published at I Love Free Software

Keep Track of Birthdays with Birthday Calendar Software: Birthdays

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 12:30 PM PDT

Birthdays is a simple birthday calendar program you can use to keep track of birthdays and age of various people in your life. The program maintains a birthday calendar with birthdays you have added marked in their respective months. The status bar displays how many days are left to the nearest birthday with respect to the system date.

Once in a while you find yourself forgetting birthdays for some of your friends and loved ones. Although most social media sites notify you of the person whose birthdays are on a particular day, what happens when your are not able to logon to the site or if the person has not joined the site or may not have provided a birth date? With Birthdays you can easily keep track of literally limitless birthdays of your friends and family.

Features of Birthday calendar Freeware

Simple and easy to use
Age calculator
Birthday notes

How to use it

The program is very portable and can be run from any where as it requires no installation. The interface consists of a menu bar and icons at the top, a status bar at the bottom and the rest is occupied by the calendar. The birthday calendar lists all birthdays added by name, age and day.

Birthdays are added in four ways by clicking the Add Birthday icon, second, clicking Add Birthday on the Edit menu, using the hotkeys Ctrl+N or by right clicking on any month on the calendar. These open a dialog box that prompts you to enter the name of the person, month and date of birth, and the year of birth. Click OK to save changes and Cancel to discard. To edit a birthday, select the birthday on the calendar, right-click and select Edit Birthday from the context menu. You could also use the Ctrl+E hot key combination or select Edit birthday on the Edit menu or use the Edit birthday icon.

You can also check out Android Birthday calendar app reviewed by us.

You can delete birthdays by selecting a birthday on the calendar and selecting Delete birthday on the Edit menu or on the context menu. You can also use the Delete keyboard button. Birthday notes can be added by clicking the Show notes window icon. Notes are saved as the user continues typing. Click Check All-this month only on the Edit menu to check all birthdays in a month and Check all to check all birthdays on the whole calendar. You can activate the Show Age Column by clicking on it to view the age column on all birthdays or deactivate it to hide the column.

Pros

Simple and easy to use
Keeps track of multiple birthdays

Check out our article on scheduling Birthday messages on Facebook.

Cons

Poor date validation causes it to generate negative ages
No reminders

Verdict

Birthdays does a good job in tracking birthdays but falls a little short on functionality.

Keep Track of Birthdays with Birthday Calendar Software: Birthdays was originally published at I Love Free Software

Create Music with ACID Xpress Music Production Software

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 11:00 AM PDT

ACID Xpress is music production software which is designed for music recording, mixing and editing with the help of tracks, various effects and loops. This audio software allows the user to literally paint the music with the help of various effects, each track has its own effect which can be added to the song. Let’s leave the how’s for later and talk about installation first.

Download and installation of ACID Xpress music production software

Software is free, well at least the free version is, but in order to download it you’re gonna have to register. This program is sponsored by Sony, and after registering for download, you’re gonna have to register once again after you launch ACID Xpress for the first time:

This might be annoying to some, but what you get after you register is more than worth filling out the registration information. Next to software download, you also get a 128MB pack of audio loops, effects that you can use while creating your music, which makes the effort all the more worthwhile.

How to produce music with ACID Xpress

From the program screenshot above, you might think that creating music with ACID Xpress is complicated, but in reality it’s very simple. First thing that you need to get a grip on is the important parts of the user interface and where tools which you’ll be using are located, here’s an image that should help with that:

Music is created by adding tracks to the list of Tracks. A track is a sound container, which can hold various effects and loops. First track should always be the basic rhythm of the song, while others can have various noises which actually make up the song. Limitation of the free version of ACID Xpress is that it only allows you to put 10 tracks in a song, but there’s plenty of different songs that can be created with these 10 tracks.

When you add a track, unless it’s the basic rhythm it will remain silent while you click Play which is located at the bottom of the tracks area. It will be silent because you need to activate that sound on the right side, you see those lines on the image above?

All those objects that you see in the lines are places where the sound from that track has been activated and it can be heard in the song that you are creating. Tools with which you can activate effects and loops inside a given track are underlined in the image above. As you can see they are tools which can be found in a graphics program, pen, brush, eraser and so on. This is yet another way of how you can control the sound of the music, brush tool also has its own set of effects:

Conclusion

ACID Xpress is a great tool, even in its free version, the important thing is that you really understand how it works and you don’t give up without giving it proper effort. Program will offer you links to basic tutorials that you can follow to get a better understanding of how it works, follow them and enjoy creating music.

Create Music with ACID Xpress Music Production Software was originally published at I Love Free Software

How to Recover Deleted Google Calendar Events

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT

Spanning Undelete for Google Calendar is a free utility tool that lets you recover deleted Google Calendar events. Google Calendar unlike other Google products can only be able to undo the latest deletion. With Spanning Undelete, you can easily view and restore deleted events.

Features of Spanning Undelete for Google Calendar

Events list which displays all deleted events.
Simple and easy to use. All you need is to allow the application to access your Google Account to be able to use it.
Recover deleted events easily in a few clicks.

How to use Spanning Undelete for Google Calendar

Installation can be done in two modes, one for developers and another for ordinary users. To run the application, you will be required to authorize the app to manage your calendar and use your data. Once all authorization is complete, the application opens a new interface. The web interface is very simple and well arranged. The interface displays a list of all deleted items. The list contains vital event information like names, date modified and dates they were scheduled to take place.

You can click on any item listed to obtain more information regarding the task. To restore deleted tasks, select an event by checking the checkbox appearing before it. You can select all events on the list by checking the box at the top of the list. If the Undelete button is not active, make sure you have checked at least one event, if active Click Undelete. The program prompts you to choose whether you want the word "undeleted" to be appended on restored events or whether you want to resend cancelled invites to participating parties by checking the respective options. Click Undelete to restore an event and Cancel to discard any changes. Changes are updated in a few seconds.

Opinion

The idea behind the Spanning Undelete for Google Calendar is great. The program offers users a simple and easy way to restore deleted items which is not possible on Google Calendar itself. The numerous authorizations required were quite alarming leaving you wondering if it’s really safe to trust the application with your calendar and Google Accounts data.

Verdict

With Spanning Undelete for Google Calendar you don’t have to be stressed about lost calendar events when you can easily restore them in a few minutes.

How to Recover Deleted Google Calendar Events was originally published at I Love Free Software

Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows Live Writer

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Here, are some keyboard shortcuts for Windows Live Writer. I will be telling you some basic blog and post keyboard shortcuts, text formatting shortcuts, and general keyboard shortcuts.

If you are an avid user of Windows Live Writer, then keyboard shortcuts help you in speeding up your work. There are many shortcuts available for Windows Live Writer, and they are divided into different categories. I have listed down some of those shortcuts that I use regularly.

Blog And Post Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows Live Writer:

Create a new post – Ctrl+N
Open a post – Ctrl+O
Save a post – Ctrl+S
Post draft to blog – Ctrl+Shift+D
Publish a post – Ctrl+Shift+P
Insert Hyperlink – Ctrl+K
Add a picture from computer – Ctrl+J
Add a picture from web – Ctrl+Shift+J

Text Formatting Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows Live Writer:

Bold the text – Ctrl+B
Underline – Ctrl+U
Bullets – Ctrl+Shift+L
Center text – Ctrl+E
Align text left – Ctrl+L
Align text right – Ctrl+R
Heading 1 – Ctrl+Left Alt+1
Heading 2 – Ctrl+Left Alt+2
Heading 3 – Ctrl+Left Alt+3
Heading 4 – Ctrl+Left Alt+4
Heading 5 – Ctrl+Left Alt+5
Heading 6 – Ctrl+Left Alt+6

General Shortcuts:

Paste Special – Ctrl+Left Alt+V
Find – Ctrl+F
Undo – Ctrl+Z
Redo – Ctrl+Y
Print – Ctrl+P
Show or hide ribbon – Ctrl+F1
Help for writer – F1

To see exhaustive list of keyboard shortcuts for Windows Live Writer, check out this link.

So, just learn the keyboard shortcuts and make your work faster and easier while working on Windows Live Writer.

Also check out 10 Best Plugins for Windows Live Writer.

No related posts.

Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows Live Writer was originally published at I Love Free Software

Free Instant Messenger to Improve Team Communication with Pingpong

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 06:30 AM PDT

In our last encounter with Talk.to, we had a look at their Facebook and Google Talk free instant messenger application which is available for download and installation on all the major desktop operating systems, plus it can also be installed on the increasingly popular Andorid and iOS which are, as you may already know, smartphone OSs. Now we’re gonna have a look at Pingpong, a messaging network created and provided by Talk.to themselves, aimed at companies who would like to improve communications between their employees, but also for individuals who do not want to use previously mentioned services, GTalk and Facebook, for their communication.

The same image that was used for our previous Talk.to review is used here, because you use the same application to access your Pingpong account. The only difference now is that we will not be selecting Facebook or Google Talk when adding an account, but rather we’re gonna select the third option, Pingpong and enter the login details which we’ve created on the Talk.to main page.

Pingpong account registration and advantages of the Pro account

To register your free Pingpong account you’re gonna have to visit the Talk.to site and then click on the Pingpong tab at the top of the web page:

Here you are presented with a registration form where you can start the registration process for your Pingpong account. After you enter the necessary info for your own account, you’ll be asked to invite up to three members of your team to join your company chat sessions. Later on you can add more, there is no limit as to how many people you can invite, not even in the free Pingpong account.

The creator of the companies chat group on Pingpong is given the option to manage users, add or remove them. All this can be done via the Admin Panel, which you can access after the registration is completed.

Main features and differences between the free account and the paid account would be the following:

As you can see if you choose to purchase a paid membership at the Pingpong website, you’ll be allowed to have your chat history stored indefinitely, and it’s also possible to send larger files between chat members. Free users have their chat history deleted after a month and the file size limit is 20MB, while with the paid version chat history is not deleted and you can send files of up to 50MBs in size.

What makes Pingpong better than its rivals?

Like it was said in the previous review of Talk.to services, the main advantage of Talk.to would be the fact that you can use it on a number of different devices, desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones, and you don’t have to worry about device compatibility issues between your team members, who uses what. There are Talk.to apps available for download from both Apple store and Google Play store, which you can then use to send messages to your colleagues for free via your phone. If they are not online, they will be notified about the message when they login to their Pingpong account. This really is a great solution for large companies but also for small teams, which are in need of a quick and simple way to stay in touch.

No related posts.

Free Instant Messenger to Improve Team Communication with Pingpong was originally published at I Love Free Software

Chrome Extension To Manage Multiple Links With Linkclump

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Linkclump is a free chrome extension that lets users open multiple links simultaneously, found over a webpage. Basically, you just need to select all the links and the extension will open the selected links in a new tab, all in one go.

In addition, this extension to manage multiple links, also allows you to mark all the links, as your browser bookmarks and even you can copy the multiple links to clipboard.

Remember that the extension only manages multiple links when all the links are altogether on the webpage. You can even change the selection box color from the extension. Apart, from this, Linkclump allows you to even change the mouse hot key to start the selection when you are on the webpage. The extension made the selection of links easier and faster to access.

Check out ForgetBox to send large files through Gmail reviewed by us.

Key Features Of Linkclump To Manage Multiple Links:

Manage multiple links altogether in one go.
Open multiple links in multiple tabs on your Google Chrome browser, bookmark the links, copy the links to clipboard.
Simple and easy to use interface.
Change mouse hot key for selection of multiple links.
You can even select the optional key to customize your selection.
Change the selection box color.
You can make the extension ignore the words from the link.
Block repeat links in selection.

How To use Linkclump Chrome Extension:

Download and install Linkclump chrome extension in your Google Chrome browser.
Go to settings→tools→extension→Linkclump→options on your Chrome browser. Customize the settings according to your requirements.
Hold right or left mouse button and then drag the mouse point around the links to select them from the webpage.
Now release the mouse button and the required will immediately take place.

You can even take a look on Toggle Link chrome extension to copy text from link reviewed by us.

Install Linkclump Chrome Extension:

Click here to get the download link of Linkclump Chrome extension.
Tap on "add to chrome" button on the webpage.

Linkclump Chrome extension will be automatically installed on your Google Chrome browser. Now if you want to open all the links on a webpage together, you can do it using this extension.

Chrome Extension To Manage Multiple Links With Linkclump was originally published at I Love Free Software

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