Archive for February, 2009

Windows XP provides a basic search module (“Search For Files And Folders”) that can be useful in many cases.
However, this search module also has some restrictions and disadvantages:

  • When searching a phrase inside a file, Windows search may not scan all file types, depending on your current service pack, settings in the Registry, and so on. (See KB309173)
  • When searching by modified/created date of the file, it only allows you to search by whole days range. It means that you cannot, for example, find all files created yesterday between 11:27 and 11:35
  • When searching by file size, it only allows you to specify the size in full KB. It means that you cannot make search by file size in accuracy of bytes. For example: you cannot search files with file size between 252 and 527 bytes.
  • It doesn’t allow you to search by file attributes (For example: search only hidden and read only files)
  • Windows search has an annoying animated puppy that doesn’t do anything useful 🙂

If you feel frustrated from the above Windows search problems,
you are welcomed to try my new SearchMyFiles utility.

SearchMyFiles is an alternative to the standard “Search For Files And Folders” module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content (text or binary search), and by the file size. SearchMyFiles allows you to make a very accurate search that cannot be done with Windows search. For Example: You can search all files created in the last 10 minutes with size between 500 and 700 bytes.

You can find the download page of SearchMyFiles here.

Each USB device that you plug to your computer has 2 16-bit numbers that identifies the product: Vendor ID (vid) and Product ID (pid).
The Vendor ID represents the company that produce the USB device, while the combination of Vendor ID and Product ID represents a specific product.
Both of these values displayed by USBDeview from the earlier versions, but until now you couldn’t easily use these numbers to find out the company/product name of the USB device.

Stephen J. Gowdy maintains a very large pid/vid list of popular USB devices.
Starting from version 1.35 of USBDeview, you can download his USB devices/vendors file (usb.ids) and put it on the same folder that USBDeview.exe is located. When you do that, USBDeview automatically loads this USB ID’s file and find the vendor and product names according to this file. This information is displayed in 2 new columns added to USBDeview: Vendor Name and Product Name.

For more information and download link, click here

ChromeCacheView, VideoCacheView and MyLastSearch – Added support for Chrome 2.x

SkypeLogView – Added support for Skype 4

AlternateStreamView – Fixed a few bugs discovered by the users of the first release:

  • In Windows Vista, NTFS junction point to ‘Application Data’ folder created a recursive scan. In this version, AlternateStreamView automatically skip junction points.
  • AlternateStreamView failed to delete streams of read-only files.
  • AlternateStreamView allowed to close the main window during scan.

NTFS system has a feature that allows to add multiple streams in addition to the main file stream. When you open or view the file, only the main file stream is visible, while other additional streams are hidden from the user.

Here’s 3 examples of alternate streams usage in Windows operating system:

  1. Favorites of Internet Explorer: When You add a Web site link into your ‘Favorites’, a .url file containing the url and description is created. However, if the Web site also have an icon (favicon), the icon is saved as alternate stream for the same url file. The stream name of the icon is :favicon:$DATA
  2. Downloaded files of Internet Explorer: When you download and save a file with Internet Explorer, it automatically add a zone information for the saved file. This zone information is used for identifying the file as downloaded file from the Internet. The stream name in this case is :Zone.Identifier:$DATA
  3. Summary information of files: When you right-click on a file in Explorer and go to the ‘Summary’ tab, you can add summary information for the file, like title, subject, author, and so on. This summary information is also saved into alternate stream. The stream name in this case is SummaryInformation:$DATA.

In addition to the legitimate usage of alternate streams, this technique may also be used by Viruses/Trojans/Spywares for saving data and hiding it from the user.

AlternateStreamView is a new GUI tool that allows you to easily scan your NTFS drive, and find all hidden alternate streams stored in the file system. After scanning and finding the alternate streams, you can extract these streams into the specified folder, delete unwanted streams, or save the streams list into text/html/csv/xml file.

For more information and download link, click here


MozillaCacheView
and OperaCacheView:

  • Added support for cache filter. (Display only URLs which contain the specified filter strings)

RegScanner:

  • Export Selected Items – String values are now exported as strings and DWord values are now exported as DWords. (In previous versions they exported as binary)
  • Fixed bug: When using ‘Export Selected Items’ more than once, the first key was missed

FavoritesView:

  • Added support for command-line.
  • Added support for saving as .csv file.
  • The settings are not saved to .cfg file instead of the Registry.
  • MyLastSearch: Added filter by Web browser (in Advanced Options)
  • InsideClipboard: Added support for saving and loading as Windows .clp file. You can use it from the user interface or from command-line.
  • IECacheView: Added support for cache filter. (Display only URLs which contain the specified filter strings)
  • BluetoothView: New Option: Execute a command when a new Bluetooth device is detected. (In ‘Advanced Options’)
  • NirCmd:
    • New actions for clipboard command – loadclp and saveclp (load/save in Windows .clp format)
    • New command: setprocessaffinity