You know how it goes, you find a good utility that you find useful times and time again. You recommend it to all of your clients and IT buddies that you have. But you never actually get around to PAYING for the software. Well, today I finally got around to purchasing a couple of utilities that I have used for years. I've felt guilty about it for a long time but just never made the time to go to their websites and pay them (ya, I know, all of 5 minutes).
Today, I bought ExamDiff Pro and TreeSize Professional. These are two of the best utilities I have ever used and I use them on a regular basis.
ExamDiff is similar to a lot of other file comparison utilities like Winmerge. But it is, BY FAR, the best I have ever used. It is easy to make changes within the program itself and it is extremely customizable. You can highlight line differences, byte differences, change the algorithm that is uses to do the actual comaprison, ignore tabs/spaces/white space, etc. I highly recommend it. I use it daily when I am doing coding--whether it be vbs, VB.Net or who-knows-what. It makes it very easy for me to compare different versions of code and confirm that I am only making changes to the things that I want to actually change.
TreeSize also has a lot of programs that are similar to it. It's just a program that parses through a folder structure and shows you how much space each folder is using. But, once again, I just think it does it better than anything else. We used it just yesterday to find out why the C: drive on one of our servers was almost out of space. One of the guys on the team spent quite a bit of time going through folders he suspected were the culprit but wasn't able to track it down. Two minutes with Tree Size and we were able to determine that IIS logs had been building up on the server and were using around 10GB of disk space.
Anyway, I hope to do a better job of actually paying for the software that I use. I get spoiled because so many of the incredible tools that I use are free (like RegMon/FileMon) so I guess I get used to not paying for them.