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Worthwhile Windows programs you can
download: LeechFTP, Where Is It, Microsoft Media Player and
CapsLockOff
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technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and
commentaries, continuously available online since
1983
4 great new freeware and shareware programs
July 5, 1998
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1998, The Syracuse
Newspapers
"You're like a kid in a candy
store," a friend told me the other day. As indeed I
am! Who could savor the wealth of software available for
downloading on the Internet without feeling giddy?
Especially when you can find software
such as the five Windows 95 and 98 programs I'm telling
you about this week:
- LeechFTP, an amazingly flexible ftp transfer program
that uses the multithreading capabilities in Windows and
can download many files simultaneously. Cost: Free. Web
site: http://lem.stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~debis/leechftp/.
LeechFTP was written by Jan Debis of
Germany. It handles multiple file transfers in threads --
separate operations that occur at the same time -- using
up to 16 threads. (You can run LeechFTP more than once,
thereby multiplying the number of simultaneous
downloads.)
Unlike Web browsers, LeechFTP can
download an entire folder full of files with one click of
the mouse. To do an upload, you can drag files or folders
into the window showing the remote computer's files,
and you can also transfer files by http (hypertext
transfer protocol), the method used by Web browsers when
they're not using ftp.
If you don't want LeechFTP to use
up all your connection speed while you're
downloading, you can turn on a "speed limit"
for one or more transfers. You can also set a
transfer-speed limit as the default for all connections
it makes. This feature can help a lot if you are grabbing
many files while running your browser and handling
mail.
- Where Is It?, by Robert Galle, is a disk cataloger
without serious competition. If you have a lot of
CD-ROMs, Zip disks or important floppy disks, this
program is for you. Cost: $37. Web site: http://members.tripod.com/~WhereIsIt/.
Where Is It? Creates searchable
catalogs of everything on disks of any kind. I use it to
catalog my commercial and homebrew CD-ROMs. It works
intuitively, and is able to list the contents of
archives, including Windows CAB files. I tried nearly a
dozen catalogers. This is the best.
- Microsoft Media Player, version 5, which now plays
RealAudio and RealVideo in addition to all other sound
and movie formats. Cost: Free. Web site:
http://microsoft.com/ntserver/netshow/download/nsie4_x86.asp.
The new media player takes advantage of
all the latest Windows audio-video techniques. It plays
NetShow sound and video as well as RealAudio and
RealVideo, along with the other file types (AVI, MPG, WAV
and so on). A surprise: It also plays MPEG Layer 3 audio
files.
- CapsLockOff, a simple program that disables the Caps
Lock key. (Hitting Caps Lock by mistake, which is easy to
do, causes you TO TYPE LIKE THIS.) Cost: Free. Web site:
http://www.rdrop.com/~daveb/.
CapsLockOff was written by David
Bleckmann. This program makes it easy to disable Caps
Lock and does not require any DOS files or statements in
your autoexec.bat.
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