Not many useful applications come without charge

By Peter Vogel

Filehippo.com www.filehippo.com is a lovely little site with a simple mission: to provide the very latest updates for many of the add-on programs so pervasive in the typical home computer today.

To that end, filehippo is user-driven, rather than manufacturer- or publisher-driven. In fact, filehippo does not take publisher submissions. Older versions of products are maintained for users who might just not be happy with an update's features or interface and just prefer to roll back to the previous release. The site's authors comb product Web sites daily, posting updates after first thoroughly checking them for functionality and technical requirements.

A rather pleasant feature offered at filehippo.com is an automated update checker, a very small footprint executable file (just 116 kb) that when run provides a Web page summary of any programs for which updates are available through the filehippo service. Download the file to a folder on your machine and run it when you wish.

In my test on an older Windows 2000 box (Update Checker runs on Windows 98 through Vista), the update process took under 10 seconds to provide me with a Web-based list of 12 updates along with one update to a beta-flagged product.

From the update list it is easy to see current version numbers and compare them to those already installed. In my case most of the updates were minor in nature. For instance, my Flash Player is version 9.00.28 whereas filehippo had version .45. On the other hand, I am running WinZip 8.1.0.0 while 11.1.7466 is available. I'm content with 8.1 on that machine, thank you very much.

In each case Update Checker displays the update file size. The user can display the full program file path on the local disk drive. It is also possible to display all programs otherwise available through the filehippo.com site. In my test case this included applications such as Eudora for e-mail, Spybot, and GoogleTalk: these all reported as being the latest versions.

Updates are handled one at a time. Detailed descriptions of the updates and technical background information are available if wanted. The most popular updates from filehippo.com on a recent visit were CCleaner (see below), K-lite Codecs (audio and video decoding files), Flashplayer 9, AVG (antivirus software) Free Edition, and Windows Messenger.

Worried about the transmission of personal information? Update Checker submits only a list of programs and their versions, along with the operating system information, so that these can be matched to the database of available updates. No linkage is made to an IP address.

Filehippo is supported through donations and generally unobtrusive Google ads. Check it out at www.filehippo.com.

It was during my visit to the filehippo.com site that I was reminded of a free utility program mentioned years ago in this column under its original name, CrapCleaner (let's see if the editor allows the name through). Since re-branded as CCleaner, it remains a very nice tool to use regularly to rid your machine of (let's say) garbage, generally helping make a Windows-based computer run faster.

CCleaner, available at filehippo.com or from www.ccleaner.com, and compatible with Windows versions from 95 through Vista, and partially compatible with 64-bit XP, is essentially an optimization tool that removes unneeded files and cleans the system registry.

It deletes temporary files created by web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, among others) as well as recent file lists generated by applications as diverse as eMonkey, Kazaa, and Office XP. CCleaner is particularly helpful when it comes to removing fragments of programs that have not uninstalled completely.

As someone using a machine with close to four full columns of installed programs I can attest to the usefulness of this feature. CCleaner found half a dozen such programs on my test machine.

CCleaner is designed to make it difficult to delete anything that might otherwise harm a stable system. In addition to cleaning tools, the program offers a means to prune the list of applications run at startup time. Such lists tend to grow over the lifetime of a computer, often dramatically increasing bootup duration.

For those more technically inclined, CCleaner incorporates an advanced file deletion feature that completely overwrites, in multiple passes, sensitive files that might otherwise be recoverable from a hard drive after a normal deletion.

It's not often that you run across useful applications such as filehippo's Update Checker and CCleaner that are free, asking only for a donation, and that aren't otherwise contaminated with spyware, adware, or nagging popups reminding you of a feature only available in a pay-for-use release.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.