Defragmentor would be top on my list right now... so many options, but no real way to tell if they give what they claim.

kevin

-kfitting (April 25, 2005, 06:24 PM)

Yes there is a lot of fud in this area and an awful lot of fanboys for each product.  I'm pretty certain this should make any review rather contentious, no doubt leading to a rather interesting discussion. :)

It might also be worth considering reviewing Spyware cleaning apps, especially as more than one is required to give any kind of real protection and these days you are much more likely to be a victim of spyware than of a virus.

Trojan cleaners/protectors may also be worth looking at, as is disk encryption.

Another excellent Saturday review.  I've been a user of UltraEdit for many years and find it indispensible for day to day text editing use, such as logs, ini files, reg exports, config files, generic text and program dumps.  From my viewpoint the main strengths in its favour is its small size, fast handling of files of all sizes, unicode support, ability to run self-contained from a USB memory stick and cheap(ish) price.  I almost forgot to mention, the support is fantastic and IDM are always willing to listen (and often implement) new suggestions.  It also has a lively support forum with expert users who are always willing to help with any aspect of the program.

For developing I find the compiler integration and flexibility of MultiEdit a much better choice.  Almost the entire product is based on compilable macros with the source included.  It is expensive though, so unless you are going to spend a lot of time using it or your company is paying, it can be rather tough to justify the price.  Unfortunately it *still* doesn't support unicode format files despite myself and others requesting it over many years.

We'll see how well IDM competes with the upcoming version of UltraEdit for Programmers, UltraStudio.

Another interesting point regarding UltraEdit is IDM also offer an unlimited upgrades version for around the same cost of a single upgrade to MultiEdit ($100 approx).  I don't think you'll ever regret paying that much for a lifetime of support and updates.

Thanks for letting me express my viewpoint on such a great site!  :)