Tag Archives: freeware

VLC Media Player officially hits 1.0 after 13 years of work!

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Wow! After 13 years of long development, VLC Media Player has finally reached version 1.0. VLC is well known as a free media player that can decode many formats of video. It even plays a lot of HD content, and best of all – it’s totally open source.

The project was first started back in 1996, and ever since it has proven very popular to the general public.

I remember when I first started using VLC many years ago – it’s always been great at decoding weird and wonderful video formats. There isn’t any other freeware around that has the capabilities of VLC.

The VideoLAN website claims that the new version fixes a number of bugs, adds a range of new features, and adds even more codecs that can be used with VLC.

I don’t think I’ve ever known a piece of software that took so long to reach version 1.0 – but what a great piece of software to have the honour of taking 13 years to reach a 1.0 version.

I’m very glad that the developers of VLC are going to continue work with VLC – it’s a wonderful piece of software that is continuously expanding.

If you’d like a copy of the new 1.0 version, you can grab it for free (of course) from the VideoLAN website. If you’ve never tried it before, you’ll be amazed at what it can do.

Why is Vista’s disk defragmentation system so bad?

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Ever since Microsoft released Windows Vista in 2007, I’ve absolutely hated the Disk Defragmenter in the operating system. It was fine in 98, 2000, and XP, but in Vista it is absolutely stupid.

For some reason, it automatically decides that you want to defragment all of your disk drives by default – and most of the time this is not the case for me. It spends absolutely ages “analysing” drives – to the point when I just give up and cancel it before it’s even started defragmenting.

It’s just such a failure – what happened Microsoft?

A lot of people say defragmentation is a total waste of time, but I think it does work now and then and it can improve hard disk performance (even if it’s just a little).

If you agree with me that defragmentation is a good idea, I’ve found a solution to the Vista defragmentation issues. It’s a little freeware program called Auslogics Disk Defrag. It works in all versions of Windows from 2000 up, so if you like it you can run it on some of your older systems too.

It’s much better than Vista’s defragmentation system because:

  • It let’s you choose which drives you want to defrag.
  • It doesn’t waste your time by trying to defragment files that don’t need to be defragmented.
  • You can set it to clear temporary files before defragmenting so you don’t waste time defragmenting files that are about to be deleted.
  • It shows you a graph of what’s being defragmented (this was in earlier versions of Windows and it was really helpful so why did Microsoft scrap it?)
  • It’s relatively quick.

So yes, if you do think defragging is good but you hate Vista’s system, this is the answer.