8 Expensive Irreplaceable Tools III

Powerful file managing with EF Commander

Another one off pay application is EF Commander. The application is not as popular as Total Commander but in terms of options packed it definitely blows your mind. It can do everything as its competitor and then some. The price is 6 bucks higher but it addresses advanced computer users and it is definitely worth the financial stretch.

What is loses in looks (default ones) gains in multitude of options and flexibility. EF Commander was actually the first file manager to offer direct link to PDAs and it offers support for a wide range of archive formats. The application is among the few file managers to provide the user with e-mail options, CD/DVD burning, HEX editing, FTP manager, system shutdown, built-in audio player, fast size check, add-on support, internal image viewer, all under one roof.

All in all EF Commander makes for the perfect companion if you aim for a highly customizable, jam-packed with features, portable file manager. It does not address the novice but it grows on you the more you use it. Plus for a $40 lifetime fee it is a real asset.



Compressing with WinRAR

WinRAR – yet another one off pay (about $40) software that comes with an unique set of features under one roof. It is not the archiving and the supported formats the make WinRAR eligible for our choice as the bunch of functions it comes with.

WinRAR is not all about archives and splitting them and protecting them with a password or locking them to prevent modification. If these are the only reasons for using an archiving tool than RARLab's tool is not exactly a necessity as there is plenty of freeware out there indulging these functions. On the other hand, if usage requires archive conversion, repairing, close to unlimited-sized compressions (it currently supports solid archives of up to 8,589,934,591 GB), profile support, authenticity verification, creating of self-extracting archives (and configuration settings) then WinRAR is the choice to make.

With the license you will benefit from lifetime free upgrades, not to mention the advantages of the RAR compression which is not the fastest and smallest of them all but it sure is stable as most of other ones are not and the repair options does come in handy should something happen. Also, RAR puts the text, audio and true color compression into your hands by letting you decide the prediction order, channels and dictionary size.

One downside is that it still supports only ZIP and RAR archive formats although it decompresses 12 other formats. Even so, WinRAR provides a helluva compression format, flexible and highly efficient in both stability and speed.



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Acronis True Image Home, Norton Ghost, Total Commander, The Bat!, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, PerfectDisk.