If you are like me, then you download shareware and freeware and demo versions of
software like crazy. And somewhere on your hard drive or in offline storage, you have
directories full of ambiguous files named SETUP.EXE or INSTALL.EXE and cryptically labeled
ZIP files. You would think after all of these years that Microsoft would have come up with
a better file system so we could include customized comments or descriptions of each file,
wouldn't you? But nooooooooooooooo . . .
Back in the days of DOS, I used to use a simple little freeware program called DIRNOTES
which gave you the ability to maintain a brief description of every 8.3 DOS label file
name. You would think that developers would remember that Windows 9X/NT allows you to use
long descriptive file names now, but do they use them for their install or ZIP file names?
Nooooooooooo . . .
Well, leave it to a clever developer to solve the problem for us. This ought to be a
huge market for him! There are so many of us out there in need of a powerful and flexible
disk cataloging system. Advanced Disk Catalog (ADC) is another cool tool from www.ElcomSoft.com.
ADV presents you with an Explorer-like interface, so you will be able to use it and
navigate with it immediately. No learning curve here. Upon installation, it scans your
drive for the directory structure and file names. This is a tedious but necessary process,
but well worth the time. With a fast system and a large drive (mine is 450 Mhz and 20 GB
drive), this should take about five to ten minutes.
When completed, you can drill down through the Explorer-like interface and begin to
categorize and describe your files. Then you can search for files by category or file
description. You can also run reports.
Admittedly, you will not need to describe every file or see every directory. If you
want to delete these items from view, you can do so without actually deleting them from
your drive. This greatly simplifies the use of the tool. During our evaluation we deleted
everything except our C:\ZIP directory, and we were quite happy with its performance.
The developer appears to be very responsive to end user requests for enhancements. We
made a few suggestions for improvements, and he promises to consider them in the next
revision. Check it out at www.ElcomSoft.com.
Advanced Disk Catalog
