Now, I don’t mind being asked to review products – indeed I positively ask for it. However, as it’s a free service, I would at least expect a little bit of effort from those making the request.

So, step forward Digiarty Software, who asked me to review their two latest products – a free iPod media converter and a free DVD to iPod ripper. Which would be good, if I actually owned an iPod. Besides, the email missed one essential detail – any kind of link to the product or their website. A quick “Google” found it though.

Having said that, lines in the email such as “Here May I request a review of  these software on your web?” doesn’t bode well. Was I really sent an email from “Sophia”?¹

Now, their website is very professional, which always makes me wonder why software is being given away free, especially when I can see they have an affiliate program. In this case, they also sell commercial software, which is their money maker. However, there’s something about them that doesn’t sit right.

There are spelling and grammatical errors throughout the site and their “Privacy Policy” page has obviously been ripped from the Intel website. Unless they meant to write…

This policy covers the Intel Corporate website and is applicable worldwide.

Their is no reference to where they are based, although the site contains many examples of “broken English”. Who would buy from a site with such a lack of identity? Indeed, when installing the software the copyright notice makes mention of being “protected by United Kingdom copyright laws”. This is then followed up by “The sole owner of this product is Digiarty Software, Inc.” I didn’t think that UK companies used the “Inc.” suffix?

So, next thing to do – look up the website in popular “checkers”. First up, the McAfee Site Advisor. This shows no problems with the downloads, and a contact country of the US. Next, Browser Defender shows much the same, but this time the US is identified as the location of the server. However, the contact is rather different.

HanZhicai
ZhiCai (softsupport@vip.sina.com)
+86.2885258636

I wish I knew where this contact information was sourced from, because a WHOIS lookup doesn’t provide anything of use (the contact information appears to be protected). However, the above name doesn’t appear on other sites, making reference to the aforementioned software.

Sorry, but I’m not going any further. If I’m going to download and install some “free” software, I need to be able to feel the source is trustworthy. In this case, I don’t.

1. curiously, it was a Sophia who contacted me to review EASEUS software a while ago. Hmmm [↩]

When you right-click a file and choose “Open With“, and click the “Choose Program…” option, the list of registered applications are displayed in the Open With dialogue. Programs that are not already listed in the Open With dialogue can be added manually using the “Browse…” option.

However, in some cases, I find that when you browse to locate an application, it does not get added to the Open With dialogue.

This happened to me earlier after updating an application – the files normally associated with it weren’t, and I couldn’t get them to. However, a quick search on Google found an excellent, portable application for forcing program to be registered. Named “OpenWithAdd“, it works quickly and simply – launch a .exe and in the resultant Window, select the program you wish to add to the Open With dialogue. And that’s it. And in my case it worked a dream.

Like the number 10 bus, one doesn’t come along at once. No, just days after a new release of +Extract, another version has been launched. This was to fix 2 niggly bugs in the previous release…

1. Byte remaining counter wasn’t counting down properly.
2. Small empty recordings were created (if selected to extract) if the extraction was cancelled. If ‘delete incomplete extracted files’ was checked in options then they would have been tidied up anyway. Files are no longer created now.

And two additional changes have been made…

1. A menu option to link to the authors blog.
2. Added an estimated time remaining for the extraction process. Use as a guide only.