Anyone who’s nuts about utilities and their importance in rescues of your computer or, more often your family’s and friends’ has to have this.
First of all, it’s portable and can be put on a zip drive or burned to disk, as well as put on the primary disk.
The Nirsoft Launcher is a package of more than 100 freeware NirSoft utilities in a logical and organized (and compact) format:
Needless to say, I grabbed it, and I strongly recommend you do so as well.
However, when reading Razvan Serea’s article about NirSoft’s launcher, I noted this:
“Please note, perhaps because a few of these tools can be used maliciously (the password revealers, say), some antivirus programs will flag them as threats. We've never had a problem with any NirSoft tool, though, and you can read more on this issue at the author's site.” - http://www.neowin.net/news/nirlauncher-11502
So I went and read about a phenomenon I’ve seen in occasional Forum posts: “My Antiviral Prevents Installation of…”.
Uniformly, these posts are answered with, “Nope. Not in SD’s software. Contact your security software company about that.” or we assume SD, Neil or ‘someone’ actually does that, somehow.
Then I read this: http://blog.nirsoft.net/2009/05/17/antivirus-companies-cause-a-big-headache-to-small-developers/ and came to realize just how pernicious malware really is to the software industry as well as to the economy and to progress in general.
For programmers and developers, the biggest factor in success (besides making a worthwhile or necessary product) is probably consumer trust in and the ensuing popularity of the software. Well, imagine your software is completely benevolent yet Kaspersky, Norton, BitDefender and/or Avast (etc.) perceive it as being malware?
This is precisely the situation (probably due to litigation related caution) that NirSoft and other developers find themselves in. It is very difficult to find the right person to contact (removing the customer feedback) and motivating that person to respond or change things (and make sure the change carries through to subsequent versions of their software for subsequent versions of the dev’s software).
There’s a real need for a trusted certifying agency or company to test the software and contact the right people. I can’t imagine the difficulties in establishing such an agency, but there’s a real business opportunity for anyone so minded.
To avoid malware, only download from the dev’s website (and make sure it’s really that website). Read reviews by trusted reviewers.
By the way, my BitDefender likes SD’s software and NirLaunch. I hope yours does as well.
Download link: http://launcher.nirsoft.net/
Please have a safe and good holiday. Please remember those who were willing to and those who did make the ultimate sacrifice for you. Please don’t be shy about thanking a veteran, reservist or active duty soldier today, or any day for that matter. Doesn’t cost a cent, but it will make you both feel better and smile.
Sources:
http://blog.nirsoft.net/2009/05/17/antivirus-companies-cause-a-big-headache-to-small-developers/
http://www.neowin.net/news/nirlauncher-11502
http://launcher.nirsoft.net/