I have been using Live Mesh on the home computer and work computer for a couple of weeks and the synching of data between the two computers has been very useful. The synch process works the same that foldershare does and copies files between the machines (and the web site) well. The only issue I have had so far is if I move the location of the data files by hand. The default location for a new Live Mesh folder is on the Desktop. As I don't want this location I used explorer to cut and paste the folder from the desktop and put it in a different location such as c:\andy\livemesh. However, going to My Computer/Live Mesh folders then shows the folder as not synched on this computer and in the original location. By double clicking on the folder a browse dialog box appears and the new folder location can be selected. If the new folder is the new location a merge data prompt will be given. Selecting yes will then set the folder up to be synchronised again.
Recently in Utilities Category
I often have to quickly move my laptop from the office and go to a meeting or client site where I do not have the luxury of plugging in an external monitor. Unfortunately the laptop doesn't know this and will continue to send applications to the previous screen it was in. As I typically have Lotus Notes running on the external monitor (as it has a higher resolution) this means I have to manually go in and disable the external display. This is annoying and a little time consuming so I went hunting for an application that would automatically do this. I had thought of using sendkeys to do it myself but I didn't really want the dialog boxes to appear on the screen.
Over at donation coder, a post in the forums came up with tv_out by nod5 Download this application, extract to a directory and then double click tv_out. This will then create a shortcut on your desk that you can use to toggle the external display on and off. By editing the ini file you can change the location for the shortcut. As I don't really want to display the desktop and then toggle the display I have actually changed my location to be in the quick links toolbar that is always displayed.
Another application I have downloaded from donation coder is the excellent screenshot captor. This does really nice screenshots and has some nice tools for creating borders, highlights and annotating the captured image. The only drawback is that I often find it crashes the first time I use it, but after I reopen it, it seems stable. (Note that I was running an old version (now corrected) so this may be fixed in the new version)
Update I forgot to mention that this application is directly compatible with Live Mesh as LM creates a virtual screen so my extended desktop becomes display 3 but tv_out only toggles display 2. There are some instructions to change this - that is a future project for me....
You can now access sysinternals tools direct from the command line (great for scripts) by accessing \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\toolname.exe for example \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\autoruns.exe This is great for running the command directly from a dos prompt or in a script or even just copying the file(s) directly to a server automatically without having to download each file from a web browser. Thanks to Ed Bott for the tip off and extra thanks to sysinternals for doing this
You can also download most of the tools in one go with tips on creating start menu icons for all the files in the zip file
Alternatively you can just "copy \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\*.exe ." to copy them to your drive.
I downloaded the new Windows Live Installer program yesterday which provides the ability to install Messenger, writer, mail and photo gallery from one "easy to use integrated installer". There are two downsides to this - one is that the installer is really a stub that doesn't contain the full product - this is normally fairly annoying as it means that you can't download the full install copy for offline (or multiple) installs - instead you have to be connected to the network each time the software is installed.
The other downside is that in my case, the installation of Photo Gallery (the only piece of software that I actually wanted from this bundle as I already have the rest) doesn't work. Instead I get the error message "Install failed with error code 0x80240022" - a google search yesterday only came up with details for Windows Defender which didn't help me much. Also, for those of you who are not aware, you need to hover the mouse over the error message in order for the full message to be displayed on screen in a tool tip. This means that there is no copy/paste functionality of the error message into google - instead you have to type it in manually. The link to "More about this error" only goes to a generic web page which tells you about the mouse tip.
The software also keeps checking the toolbar each time it is run - even though I don't want it to be installed but oddly enough doesn't check the Family Safety checkbox. It should be consistent to check both or leave both unchecked.
I could have done with this on Friday when trying to extract an inf file from an exe file for a printer driver - Universal Extractor extracts files from any archive - a great tool to have in the toolkit. This site also has links to peid, a utility which detects packers, cryptors and compilers (600 of them!) and ussf.exe which determines which switches can be used with a setup file. I really need to start keeping an eye on msfn more.
Ages ago, back in Sept 2003 I was looking for a scripting telnet program, something along the lines of expect. I was able to find some software from WorldsEnd, but at the time the one that kept coming up in google was by Albert Yale but his software wasn't actually available anywhere. However, yesterday I got a tipoff that you can download Albert's software from Gerald Bonne and this software was also mentioned in the latest In The Trenches - whilst listening I thought to myself - I've covered that before. I didn't realise how long ago it was.
On another ITT know - Microsoft have purchased Wininternals - the company that produces the excellent sysinternals "free" software and the no-so-free administrators pak.
IE HistoryView: Freeware Internet Explorer History Viewer (or iehv.exe) allows you to view the internet history usage. Great for checking out what sites someone has been to when they get a virus on the pc. I've used this before but can never remember the url for it, so I'm blogging it now. There are some other good utilities from this site too.
A utility to remove the bloatware on dell pc's might come in handy - normally i've done this manually but this tool might help - note that I've not tried this myself - yet.
There is a new version of Autorun out now but it looks like the licence agreement has changed which means that I can't use it on customer boxes anymore. You can use it on your own pc, your companies pc but you can't load it on another companies pc unless you are employed by them directly unless you purchase a commercial licence. The licence agreement is in the extended entry. This looks like a new change to the utility as the previous version(s) didn't seem to have this restriction. I doubt that many people will notice this change (or take any notice of it) but it looks like we'll have to use an old version or look for another utility - msconfig anyone *shudder*
I'm sure loads of people have blogged about Google pack which is a bundle of google software and third party software for free. One of the cool things is Norton Antivirus 2005 with 6 months subscription - great for people who don't have antivirus on their machine. It would be good if they included a free firewall package AND had the ability to download the lot as a cd image (or one big install file) so I could download it and make it available for friends on a cd when I go to fix their pc.
This weekend I have a project of getting together some software for a (shudder) 98 machine including antivirus and a firewall for a new broadband user. Not sure which firewall I'm going to use just yet......
In other software updates I'm still struggling with Internet Explorer - i've fixed the problem when new windows would only open in firefox by downloading Setbrowser which allows you to force the computer to use a particular browser. This solved the direct problem and now I can open new windows in ie but......The problem is that now the browser seems to download part of the webpage and then hangs. The browser title will change to the title text within the webpage so I know its downloading something but then it just completely hangs. After 2 or 3 minutes (if I've not loaded the page in firefox) I may be lucky enough to find the whole page has downloaded successfully.
I downloaded AvantBrowser, a tabbed version of ie to see if this would have the same problem and it does (as does ie7 to a lesser degree). Unfortunately it is not possible to repair an ie installation apart from reinstalling sp2 (which I've done twice) but it doesn't help matters.
On other software related issues I've also switched my mail server across to Surgemail, a free mail server which includes pop3,imap,smtp,webmail, spamfiltering and blogging software. It's pretty powerful but the user interface is done through a webbrowser and is incredibly complicated and confusing. I can never find a setting that I was using just a minute ago and it doesn't help that all the webpages are titled "Surgemail" so the back function in the web browser history is useless. It is not as good as vpop3 for downloading pop mail and sorting mail into the relevant mailboxes as it is really geared to be a proper mailserver with incoming smtp traffic for mail delivery - but it works. I'd recommend downloading a copy if you want a free local mail server and have some time to play with the settings.
windirstat is a great utility to work out how much disk space each folder/file is using. When you get down to the file level it will show you in a graphical format as the larger the file, the larger the colour block on display. Using this utility it was very easy to find out where the 12gb of disk space had suddenly gone on a server - it quickly showed me that a particular user had a large docs & settings and within that was the desktop and on the desktop were 2 6gb .tmp files!
Be careful if you buy a Belkin USB KVM switch as although they say they work with all usb keyboards, what they really mean is that they work with all usb keyboards that don't have usb hubs in them - so the keyboards that come with dell computers will not work - which is annoying as the whole reason that we got the kvm switch is because the dell keyboards were usb!
Essential Pim are going to be giving away the pro version of their software for everyone who visits their site on Halloween. Looks like Opera started a great trend :-)
The cool thing is that the portable version will be available too which means you can use it on your usb key. The data is encrypted and it doesn't need installing on the pc.
Although I've not tried this software it sounds really good. Now that we don't have outlook in the office (or even on the computer) and the Notes Pim functions just suck big time (at least on a naff 1024*768 screen) this will hopefully be really useful.
Although i'm not using it (at the moment) there is a new version of Synergy out
I think that Microsoft Max stands for Maximum Hassle, Maximum uselessness and Maximum Waste of time. I downloaded the small stub installer yesterday and then when you install it, it insists on downloading a winfx graphics pack and some other files that it needed. This took about 40 minutes on my fast connection so I dread to think what it would be like on dialup. I find stub installers very annoying as it means you can't burn the application setup program to cd ready for reinstallation at a later date/another machine - instead you have to spend ages downloading. Then after it had installed it insisted I signed up for an account/linked my max account to my passport account. Thats all very well and good, but the email that is meant to get sent to my passport account never arrives. I then realised that this was probably due to the fact that I have to have my hotmail junk filter to exclusive due to the amount of spam I get even on the enhanced option. A solution to this is to add maxteam@microsoft.com to your contacts in hotmail before you attempt to activate/log into Max.
Once signed into an account it doesn't seem possible to sign out from that account and re-sign in with a different account as you only get prompted for your password address and not your email address. Actually after renaming store.xml and settings.xml in %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft Codename Max you can sign in as someone else, but this doesn't do you any good as Max is a peer to peer application so you both need to be running it at the same time.
Oh and did they forget to mention the fact "If your ISP does not support IPv6, you will not be able to access websites after you install Max. " (from the readme that doesn't get displayed when you install the software). They also have a blog of help posts but these do not appear on the main page unless you select one of the categories.
Auto Window Manager is a great utility that allows you to set any window to be on top, transparent or minimise to the system tray. I'm using it to keep a WMP window of news from WWL-TV about New Orleans in the top corner of my browser whilst I catch up on rss reads.
It's taken about a day of work but I've finally got a DVD that enables me to multiboot into Ultimate Bootcd, BartPE, XP, W2k3 or w2k installations by following the instructions at MSFN.org. The next step is to add a couple more boot cd's that I have to really make the ultimate dvd.
Synergy has been updated (the software kvm utility)
I've been playing around with :: SiteBar :: The Bookmark Server for Personal and Team Use which is a pretty useful app in consolidating all your bookmarks onto an online application hosted on my webspace. Using php and mysql it contains all my bookmarks imported from 3 pc's and 5 browsers with search, MRU and availability on any pc that I use - very handy. It can be installed to host different peoples bookmarks, although in my case it just hosts my own. It integrates with ie and firefox (among other browsers) via extensions or bho's to give right click functionality to add bookmarks to sitebar and uses the sidebars for main navigation. There are a couple of things that would be nice - synchronisation of the bookmarks back to the browser, 1-click addition of a bookmark to my local bookmarks and sidebar and bookmark validation - I just know loads of mine are dead links.
All in all I'm pretty impressed. If you want to try it yourself I think you can sign up for a free account at sitebar or download the free copy to install yourself.
There is now a dnsstuff toolbar for firefox for easily looking up stuff from dnsstuff the site which I frequently use to troubleshoot dns,networking and the registration of domain names.Thanks Mike
Last Freeware Version is a neat page of download links for software that was free but then became shareware. Some of these tools (like popcorn) worked great and did their purpose but then became bloated and charged for.
Popcorn is a great email reader for when you are on the road and just *need* to check your email.
Koozie talks about the release of ultraedit-11. He's on version 9 and i'm still using the free version 5 I got on a cover disk and it was excellent then and still is extremely useful now.
Thanks to Neils post, I've downloaded TaskSwitchXP which works really well and can be recommended over the powertoys version.
You would have thought that with all the rain there would be no problem with water in Congleton, but alas there is a burst water main. NorthWest Water or United Utilities as they are now known, can be contacted at 0845 746 2200 to find out if the problem is known.
A long time ago before blogs, I used to use a service called netmind that would monitor a webpage for change and send you an email when it changed. This was a handy way of checking pages such as a release log for a utility that didn't have its own mailing list etc. They then shut down and another service called spyonit did the same thing - again they shutdown (or you had to pay for it). This morning I discovered pagedetection which does the same thing. The blurb mentions that you can add a "subscribe now" type link in the page so users can sign up to be told when your page changes, but you can also add pages of your own choosing as a user too. Not much use on a blog (after all thats what RSS is for) but handy for pages that don't change often or don't have an rss feed.
I know you could use livebookmarks in firefox but in my short play with firefox I didn't discover a way of notifying me the page had changed.
An alternative to my previous post, is some software, MaxiVista, that I was given an evaluation copy for review purposes. This $50 software runs on the master pc and makes the master pc (server) think it has extra monitors. Client software is then installed on slave machines and the desktop is then mirrored or extended to these extra machines.......
Synergy looks like a useful utility that allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard between different machines (and os's) - basically a software controlled kvm. I've not tried it but it certainly looks interesting and worthy of a download.
Alex has posted the new (beta) build of ISO recorder, the utility that allows you to burn iso images onto a cd. This version works on servicepack2 (and w2k3)- his older one didn't. Thanks to Thomas Lee for pointing this out.
Although its not a good idea to do this, we have a requirement to set the passwords for users on a telnet application so that they never expire. This is because the telnet interface is the only interface they have with the server and therefore they don't have any way of changing their passwords. Security is controlled by another layer of usernames and passwords within the app so its not that much of an issue.
Anyway, I have a script that creates all the users for me - saves me having to enter all the fields correctly and also ensures that all the fields are entered in a uniform manner.
Until this morning, I'd not been able to set the password never expires option. However using netuser.exe, available from JSI Tip 570 you can do this with netuser username /pwdnexp:y
We're doing some messy migration testing at the moment to get users from our existing windows2000 domain into a brand new 2003 domain. As I'm logging on as a different user I need to still run my daytoday admin apps when a phone call comes in. Unfortunately I was having problems trying to run my customised mmc console that has all my admin tools built in.
When running Runas /user:domain\username andys.msc Iwas getting the error message "RUNAS ERROR: Unable to run - andys.msc 193: Not a very useful error.
After some trial and error, running runas /user:domain\username "mmc c:\pathname\andys.msc" it worked. You must include the full path (.\andys.msc doesn't work)
On a side note, bloggar (which I'm using to post this file) can be run using runas /profile /user:domain\username wbloggar.exe" from the c:\program files\bloggar directory. You don't need the full path in this instance but you do need the /profile switch otherwise it will ask you to setup a blog account.
Friend of mine had a problem with a virus infection - or thats how this evenings call started. I had previously downloaded the Windows Ultimate Boot CD which looked really good. There is also a link on this site to QEMU for Windows - a iso emulator so you can test iso's before burning to cd. This tool is really good although i did find that using it with WUBCD I got an error loading one of the menu files, but at least it proved the iso was readable and bootable. Both these tools are well worth downloading if you frequently have to do diagnostics/repairs on friends pc's. One of the reasons I went for WUBCD is that you can update the av software and then burn another iso fairly easily - although i think i'm going to have to write some sort of batchfile to automate this process.
The annoying thing is that when I went round the friends house it turns out that the motherboard is probably fried as the monitor, mouse and keyboard show no signs of life when the machine is switched on.
There are some useful utilities at Nirsoft including ones that show hidden asterix's in all sorts of applications (including in w2k/xp), port status's and installation routines for applications included in zip files without an installation routine. Well worth a browse for the administrator techie. Some of them I've seen similar utilities, but these all come from one location.
The semi-annoying thing is that OutlookMT wraps the post in a paragraph and uses the font size=2 tag which is redundant due to the formatting that MT does. It also puts breaks as <BR> instead of <br /> Minor niggles but it breaks the xhtml standard if you use this tool.
Due to the company name change we needed to edit our pdf documents that have the old company name on. Now the reason the files are in pdf format is because its (nearly) impossible for a user to edit the manual.....as we have just found out. There seemed to be three pieces of software that could do the job, Adobe Acrobat (the full version) but for some reason this doesn't work at all - although I suspect its because the user actually has Adobe Reader and not Acrobat but they won't admit it. The other two solutions are Jaws PDF Editor but this only seems to give us the ability to copy/paste text from the pdf to another application such as Word - but then you can do this with acrobat reader anyway (unless its protected). The other application was PDF Editor from CadKas. This would do the job but its painfully slow. There is no global search and replace (which would make it easy to search for oldcompany and replace with newcompany and there seems to be a bug in firing up dialogs (which are quirky in themselves) in that if you click to load a graphic and select the folder, rather than opening the folder it will complain that the folder.jpg doesn't exist - and then refuse to open the dialog box up again. This software could be used if you only needed to edit a few pieces of text or a few graphics - certainly not 20 or 30 manuals each 10+ pages long.
Eventually the user went back and found the original word documents (although they swore blind they couldn't find them) and they are now editing the files in Word.
A friends pc came back for diagnostics/repair after claims that the boot device was inaccessible. When I booted it up this afternoon it worked fine for about 10 minutes before crashing with a Kernel error. MS lookups showed this was an error in the SCSI plane or devices using the same interrupts. There were no SCSI devices in this box. The disk was making some nasty clunking noises though. Popped it in the other machine and ran a quick test on the disk and it failed with a Read Test Element and told me that the warrenty had run out on the 22nd Feb this year! I backed up the data using Ghost and then ran scandisk which gave no errors. Popped the disk back in the original machine and ran a quick test followed by a full test - no errors (and its nice and quiet again). I guess the first test relocated the duff sectors..
Hopefully the disk will last a bit longer now and at least it now has a backup of the machine, the latest antivirus updates (not a year old - tut tut tut!) and all the windows patches installed.
Shouldn't have spoken so soon...first boot into windows and the clunking starts up again and the machine hangs when I try to install the AV software :-(
Update Ok - it was the disk even though there are no errors reported by the software. I replaced the disk with an old 6gb drive and everything seems to be hunky dory. Now downloading the 42mb of patches for windows.
Downloaded the Regseeker program from Hoverdesk which has quick links to installed applications, startup programs, history etc within the registry. This is the same site that also has Hoversnap. This is another one of those screencapture programs that automatically saves the desktop when you press prtscrn. If you hold the alt key down you get the current window. This is the same behaviour as the normal prtscrn button but saves the end result to an autonamed file. However if you press the control key it gives you a crosshair cursor that you can drag to select the area of the window. This is pretty useful and therefore Hoversnap is now replacing GrabClipSave (which has the advantage of saving the files after the window title)
I'm trying out Aston which is an alternative skinned desktop which looks really good. It also seems to work unlike the LiteStep shell that I tried about a week ago. I'll keep you posted on the progress.
There's a new pdf creator program available at webattack, (which is shortly changing its name to snapfiles) that sounds fairly good. You just install it and you have a printer that "prints" pdf files. Go2PDF is free although it does put a "made with" sig at the bottom of the pdf. Personally I use Jaws PDF Creator which came free on a cover magazine and works great.
A new version of Messenger Plus is out. I'm not sure whether it still contains the alleged spyware/adware/whateveryouwannacallitware in the build as i've not read the history/readme information yet.
It never really fills you with confidence when a website that is meant to extol the values of how wonderful their ScriptLogic - system administration program - is returns an error message. Especially one that says "Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80020009' [DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied. /go/caffeine-free.asp, line 2"
A system admin company which talks to a server that doesn't exist?
A bit late (as it was updated in July) but I noticed that BGInfo, the utility that displays system information on your wallpaper was updated. It looks like it has more integration with Terminal Services as it can refresh everyones desktop whenever it is run.It also has logging to a sql server too.
I've seen Aida mentioned before but never got round to actually using it. I've fired it up this afternoon and it produces an excellent report of your computer setup. If you've used Sandra's Sisoft utilities then you'll be familiar with this. The major advantage is Aida is free.
Yesterday I started on an inhouse, inplace upgrade of a nt4sp6 machine to Windows 2000. Fortunately I took a backup with PowerQuest DriveImage of the machine before I started. Ghost is normally our imager of choice but the version of Ghost we have would not see the SCSI disks yet DI would.
Discovered by accident that Microsoft have a Web Admin tool. It looks like it is meant to be used for isps and asp's but also looks like it may be used inhouse for enterprise management. I've downloaded a copy to play with and also the documentation as I think it modifys the Active Directory which I'm a bit nervous about doing on our live AD setup.
Discovered SQLStripes today which sits and monitors your sql servers for services, agents and drops. Has useful right click to remote control the machine via vnc, pcanywhere or rdp. Also double click interface to browse database, tables and data. Pretty nifty.
Win2VNC is an excellent utility that brings in other monitors to your desktop. Normal vnc brings the desktop of your remote machine into a window on your local desktop. Win2VNC keeps the monitor on the remote machine and sends your mouse and keyboard to the other screen. So you get more screen real estate and still only need one mouse and keyboard. Thanks to Chris for mentioning the unix version of this
Just a quick note to point out that you can't pass URL's to filezilla without breaking them down into username, password, host and directory which is annoying and something useful I use in Leechftp
Quite a few people have mentioned FileZilla recently as a fast free ftp client. I downloaded and installed it this afternoon and am very impressed. It is very fast and works well from my limited use so far
Found a very useful way of providing users the ability to run administrative tasks without providing passwords to the users. By using the runas command you can launch programs with different credentials, however you need to enter a password. If you provide the user with the password then they could use it to do a lot of other things. Providing a user with a batch file helps, but it doesn't take much brainpower to read the batch file and obtain the password. However, thanks to techtarget they suggest the use of Microsoft Script Encoder. This takes an existing vbs batch file and encodes the output. Although not pgp strength encryption it would be strong enough to deter the casual browser of your hard disk/batch files. (the only downside is providing a new file when the password to the account changes.)
Incidentally I've had to investigate this as one of our users can not admin our iis server settings despite being listed on the operators tab.
I was needing a utility for scripting telnet that would enable me to login into my router, run some commands and then exit. This utility does the job very well and I now have a batch routine that logs into the router every 30 minutes, gets some stats and then takes various actions depending on those stats. WorldsEnd has a lot more internet utilities too. Incidentally the Telnet Scripting Tool was written by Albert Yale but his homepage no longer exists as he was using a dynamic dns service that was shut down a few years ago.
A useful page to download Download Free Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools. Not sure on the legality of hosting these tools individually but it is a bit daft when you can download them all in one big lump (if you have a big fat internet pipe) which incidentally is similar to the stupid excuses Microsoft is giving as to why Magazines are unable to load patches on their coverdisks which is a good reason why there are so many pc's out there that are not patched and uptodate with critical updates.
Scott Hanselman has a useful list of utilities that he's collected over the years. Some of them I have used before, some of them I have better (imho) utilities, or I've written my own to do a similar thing. I guess I should really write my own list. It's certainly been something I've been meaning to do for yonks, with the first incarnation being "tools I use(d) to maintain and build this website.
Found an excellent site, Darkage - home of FastPush which enables you to roll out winvnc in its various flavours, realvnc, tridiavnc,tightvnc,ultravnc from your local nt4/xp/w2k machine to other machines on the network. This way you can be sure that each machine is set up in exactly the same way with the same password (assuming you want this of course!) AND you don't have to visit each machine.
I had the need to change a directory listing of all files on a server from a name such as f:\directory\fred.doc to DIRECTORY/FRED.DOC ie to remove the f:, swap \ to / and uppercase all the files. Using SED I was able to do all of those using repeated substitutions like the following, sed "s/f:\\i/i/;s/\\/\//g;s/a/A/g;s/b/B/g;s/c/C/g;s/d/D/g;s/e/E/g;...s/y/Y/g;s/z/Z/g" . Thats a really powerful utility and very complicated. I'm sure there is an easier way to UPCASE the characters but I didn't have the time to discover it. For those of you curious as to why I need to do this, its because I'm creating a cpio of some data on nt, and copying it to unix. If I uncpio'd the data on a unixbox, the backslashes acting as directorys would just be treated as a normal file character.
Thanks to Tara posting on my comments, I have discovered that the newsfeeds in Awasu are actually available offline as long as you don't click in the right hand window which contains the headlines of each feed. If you do that, the body page returns a 404 not found as it's trying to return the individual entry webpage. So you have to click on the feed in the control center window to view them. Apparently it also integrates with mozilla, but I'll need to investigate that when I'm back on a lan connection to the net and not on a mobile dialup!
Having played with this a bit more tI've found that it produces a sig at the bottom of the email to say that the email has been sent using desknow. I've not found anywhere in the documentation that is provided with the system which says exactly what is crippled/changed in the free version as opposed to the licenced version. The information on services that are crippled just says it will stop working "after a short while" - not very helpful.
One good thing is the messaging service that is built in - theres also the ability to send a message to everyone that is currently attached to the server although I am not sure if this would be disabled after the trial period is finished.
This lack of information is similar to a favourites synchronisation program I found on the web the other day - this allowed you to synchronise favourites between browsers and computers (although it didn't seem to be synchronising my firebird favourites properly). It took me a long time searching on their website to find that the software was timebombed to stop working after 30 days unless you paid $50ish, which is an extortionate amount to pay for synchronising bookmarks! This is rather misleading as the main page trumpeted the free software with no smallprint or asterix's to say "we wait until you are hooked on our app before making it really clear that you hafve to pay". Having said that the email they sent welcoming you to the service did mention the time bomb but not on the website, which is where you are first hooked in.
Now that i am using ZipGenius on the pc I was unable to open a .tgz file within this application - at least not on my xp desktop - the w2k machine opened it, but was unable to extract (weird). In the end I ended up downloading wingz11.zip which did the trick.