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Eating a little crow..
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My Favourite Utilities

Speedfan is a great hardware monitor which can automatically control fan speeds, warn when temperatures are rising in the case, and do a SMART scan of your hard drives. A 'must have'.. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php 

Piriform Speccy tells you what is inside the box and with great accuracy.. http://www.piriform.com/speccy

Networx shows download/upload bandwidth used.. http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/

Piriform Recuva is probably the best file recovery utility around and is free too.. http://www.piriform.com/recuva 

Treesize shows you what you have got, where it is, and how much space it is all using.. http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Windows 8 alternative start menus.. Classic Shell.. http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

Stardock Start8.. http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/

EaseUS Partition Manager is the best free utility of its type..   http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm

YoWindow, a weather utility which appears to work with the Windows 8 desktop.. http://yowindow.com/

My Favourite Gadgets - Windows 7 and Vista only..

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I don’t usually have much faith in driver finders, in fact none at all. However, I was answering a post in Microsoft Answers, and I happened on ‘DriverMax’ as being a solution for backing up hardware drivers. So I downloaded and installed it (it is free, btw) and I tried one or two functions including the ‘find new and install drivers’.

I have always considered myself to be fairly good at tracking down hardware drivers, and the drivers for my nVidia SATA and nForce network card had eluded me completely. In fact, I had disabled the integrated network card and installed a 3rd party variant because the only driver I could find that worked with Win 7 64 would only allow half of the download speed available. 

After a driver scan with DriverMax, it found newer SATA and NIC drivers than I had , so I agreed to the install. Everything went ok and after a reboot, my integrated NIC was allowing full throughput. The only hardware where it totally failed was an Intel 536EP, but I knew that there were no 64-bit drivers for that anyway.

Apparently, it does not find external peripheral hardware drivers, but it does a good job with motherboard stuff.

If you want to try it, take a look here.. http://www.innovative-sol.com/index.htm


Posted Mon, May 10 2010 23:13 by Mike Hall

Comments

Dave Sanders wrote re: Eating a little crow..
on Tue, May 11 2010 13:18

I tried it as well and found it useful. I opted to put a little cash($29) in to it and and got the Pro version which can be loaded on more than one machine.

It does a fine job at tracking down drivers and has found a few that have eluded pretty much every other effort I have tried.

Works for me.

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