14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone loves pinching some pennies when it comes to using software. It is a fair response if you think that you already paid for the operating system and got carried away when picking the hardware components to run it on.
So freeware is a godsend after all that spending. What's not to like in a tool with no price tag and which does a good job at whatever it is supposed to do? Plus these days there is a freeware correspondent for almost every popular shareware or trial application that will do just fine for the basic operations and sometimes even more. Take for instance Filezilla – it is a helluva software when it comes to connecting to FTP locations and has a user-friendly interface.
The same ease of use is applied in Revo Uninstaller as well; it may not root out all leftovers of uninstall operation but it sure does more than the rest of uninstallers that do not use registry snapshots for eliminating all traces of an installed application. And the examples can go on and on as the plethora of freeware, in spite of the fact that it mostly offers limited software in terms of options, provides enough items that fulfill your needs just fine.
But if you are looking for that extra feature that really makes a difference, stop counting pennies and pull out the bills for professional paid applications as these are the ones to appeal to you. We gathered a set of eight pieces of software with prices ranging from $29 to $78. These are not by any means considered the best of the best, la crème de la crème, but simply are absolutely fantastic at what they do in terms of options, time and quality.
The mother of all backups: Acronis True Image Home
We'll start the list with Acronis' home version of True Image, which is priced at $49.99, and which gives you 15 days of full evaluation during which time the only nag will be the trial version reminder popping up every once in a while.
The main field of activity of Acronis is well known and of great interest if you want to avoid re-installing the operating system and the myriad of apps you need each time there's a serious performance drop or because of some malware doing its thing unhindered and corrupting system files. True Image can save you time and trouble if you create an initial image of the system drive, which you can later restore at any moment easily with a few mouse clicks.
True Image's skills extend to letting you back up absolutely any partition, drive or disk, application settings and data in a local network or FTP location. More than this, each successful backup can be mounted as a virtual drive and modified to your needs (delete files, edit documents, add new data) just as if it were a real location.
It can perform both online and offline (Windows is not loaded) backups and the best feature is Acronis Startup Recovery Manager, which lets you restore a backup image at boot time. For this you'll need to enable the creation of Acronis Secure Zone, a special partition hidden in Windows Explorer for security reasons, where you can place the backup file. It also doubles as a virtual environment once the Try&Decide feature is enabled, allowing you to make all the tests you want without affecting the real system and applying or discarding the changes, as you wish.
Additional features include data wiping (entire disk, partition, files and free space) using some of the best standard algorithms on the market and archive search through Windows Search or Google Desktop applets, depending on the Windows you are using.
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Norton Ghost, Total Commander, EF Commander, WinRAR, The Bat!, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, PerfectDisk.
