RealPlayer Free Version Offline Installers for Version 14.0.1.609

Do you have a hard time to locate RealPlayer Free version installer for offline use? Let me share some standalone installers URLs that I discovered for specific regions and languages. How to discover the offline installer download URLs is presented at the end of this post.

English - United States
English - United Kingdom
Traditional Chinese - Taiwan
Simplified Chinese - Mainland China
Japanese - Japan
Deutsch - Germany
French - France

RealPlayer Version:	14.0.1.609
Installer File Version:	12.0.1.609

If you don't care the latest version of RealPlayer and don't mind using a version older, you can simply go RealPlayer old version page for download. This page offers older standalone installers for offline use including all supported languages.

URL Patterns

Looking at the URLs, I found that only the first two query strings are the keys for getting offline installers.

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61R03&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=en&oem=rp14_en_us

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61UKD&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=en&oem=rp14_en_uk

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61TWD&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=tw&oem=rp14_tw

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61CND&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=cn&oem=rp14_cn

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61JAD&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=ja&oem=rp14_ja

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61DED&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=de&oem=rp14_de

http://switchboard.real.com/player/installer.html?cd=backup_download&distcode=R61FRD&prod=RealPlayer&ver=14.0&li=fr&oem=rp14_fr

Every URL straightly follows the same pattern (except for English US. The main difference between them is the distcode, which consists of the version (i.e., R61) and the language or region code (i.e., UK, TW, CN, JA, DE, and FR) and plus a character D. Anyway, you should get what I mean and go figure out for other regions if you're interested.

How to Find out Where to Download Offline Installer

• Go to the Real Website in your region
• Download the Web version. Free version won't ask you for email address. If so, you're downloading the wrong version. Some regions may say a basic version instead of free.
• Ensure no Internet connection and then run the Web installer.
• Wait until its error out. It will take a while, possibly about 3 minutes.
• As soon as the Web installer gives up, it will offer you a re-download RealPlayer option. Click that button and then the Web installer will bring up the download URL at the browser.
• Grab the URL and go Internet for download

Adobe Reader Offline Installers

The easy way to download an Adobe Reader standalone installer for offline use is to get it from Adobe FTP site. And then choose your OS, your desired Adobe version, your language and then download.

Note that sometimes browsing/accessing to the Adobe ftp site is a bit slow.

As of today, the current version is still Adobe Reader 10 (as known as Adobe Reader X). The followings are some links for Adobe Reader v10.0.0 in some languages used on Windows.

• English - United States, also for United Kingdom
• Traditional Chinese - Taiwan, also known for Hong Kong, Malaysia
• Simplified Chinese - Mainland China, also known for Singapore
• Japanese - Japan
• German - Germany
• French - France
• Spanish - Spain (Traditional)
• Basque - Spain

Major Adobe Reader Supported Platforms

Windows offline Adobe Reader Installer
Apple Machintosh offline Adobe Reader Installer
Unix/Linux offline Adobe Reader Installer
Android mobile device offline Adobe Installer

For Adobe Reader news update, you can visit their blog.

Registry Mechanic vs AML Free Registry Cleaner

Despite all the good reviews about PC Tools Registry Mechanic, I am disappointed by it.

I don't use registry cleaner but lately I would like to try it out and possibly find one to add into my collection. Under google search, Registry Mechanic by PC Tools is highly recommended by most reviews I have read. Unfortunately, I would not recommend it.

I did a very simple test myself a week ago on one of my virtual machines. This machine is always abused to use for bit torrent, software tryout, far-sites movie watching and etc. Thus I know its registry could be a mess. Because it is a virtual machine, it will be easy for me to recover it if something goes wrong during this registry test. In the course of searching good registry cleaner, AML Free Registry Cleaner is another good one on my mind. Thus, this test is Registry Mechanic vs AML. If you seek for professional opinions on registry cleaners, you may have to go some place else. Here is simply my opinion.

Registry Mechanic vs AML Free Registry Cleaner:

Test Targets	Registry Mechanic	AML Free Registry Cleaner
Version	10.0.134    (currently also known as Registry Cleaner 2011)	4.21
Price	Free to try (First 6 sections repairing trial); $29.95 to buy	Free

Test machine: Windows XP SP3.

Test Results based on problem found and detected:
Registry Mechanic 2011:	150 problems found
AML Free Registry Cleaner:	327 problems found

I went ahead to fix all problems found by AML and run the test twice (before and after reboot). Both results are the same and shown below:

Registry Mechanic 2011:	17 problems found
AML Free Registry Cleaner:	0 problem found

I don't find any abnormality after the fix by AML. Everything is working fine.

I cannot use Registry Mechanic to fix all problems it found because of its trial version restriction. However, I did something else interesting that may be an interest to you.

At pctools site, it features Registry Mechanic 2011 supports 17 languages but there is no further information about which languages it actually supports (or I could not find this information nor separate installers for other languages). When I installed it, it would not present me a language selection. I was curious how well its language detection was. Since that XP installed in this virtual machine is a multilingual version, I started fresh and switched to Traditional Chinese to test its language detection.

Why Traditional Chinese? Most software cannot handle well Traditional Chinese. They usually mistake the OS as Simplified Chinese if they try to be smart without letting the user to make a choice. Registry Mechanic suffers the same problem.

Similar to AML, the installation of Registry Mechanic is simple and straightforward. AML supports English only while Registry Mechanic claims to support multiple languages. Unfortunately it won't present you a language selection and it tries to be smart to use the language to match your OS. Sometimes it is not what you want. The worst is that it could present you a wrong UI language. Registry Mechanic mistakenly presented me everything in Simplified Chinese while my OS language is in Traditional Chinese. Because of this problem, some characters on screen are garbags.

As I mentioned before, I could not find the details of which 17 languages Registry Mechanic supports. Based on my test, it doesn't support Traditional Chinese but Simplified. To me, it is a serious problem for a software (which claims to support multiple languages but provides no language selection) to present the wrong UI language. Indeed, a lot of users would prefer to choose their languages.

There is one thing that annoys me most I found with AML Free Registry Cleaner. When it starts, it is always in a maximized mode. I personally don't like it. There is no way to configure AML to remember my preference. Other than this, I am fond of AML.

AML Free Registry Cleaner comes with free Disk Cleaner option. At first, I was surprised it found a lot of tmp files while CCleaner reported nothing about them. Later, I found that those tmp files are created everytime I reboot. Thus, I won't be able to get rid of them because they could be used or created by the system or the software (like anti-virus) you installed. They are needed whenever the system restarts. Thus, AWL Disk cleaner at this case is no use.

Conclusion

Between Registry Mechnanic and AML, I would highly recommend AML Free Registry Cleaner. The most importances are that AML detects more problems than Registry Mechanics and it is free!

Impressive PDFCreator File Size Optimization

I have been using both PDFCreator and PrimoPDF for 3+ years. I mainly use them as a PDF converter and a virtual printer. I personally like PDFCreator most. But PrimoPDF can handle/convert some Web pages that PDFCreator cannot. To me, they both compensate each other. However, I have never paid attention to the PDF file size generated by them until recently. PDFCreator definitely is the winner. If anyone looks for a good PDF compression tool, I would highly recommend PDFCreator.

The following table presents you the file sizes generated by PDFCreator, PrimoPDF and GIRAC freewares from Microsoft WORD 2003 which doesn't contain images.

MS WORD 2003 with no image	73KB
PDFCreator	35KB
PrimoPDF	124KB
GIRAC	123KB

As you can see, PDFCreator file size optimization is the champion.

Updated on Jan 27, 2011:

Today I need to convert a document from WORD to PDF. The document is embedded with a tiny image. I used both PDFCreator and PrimoPDF for comparison to see which one does a better job. As expected, the PDF by PDFCreator results in very small size. But this time, the PDF made by PrimoPDF is a bit huge.

MS WORD 2003 embedded with a tiny image	69.5 KB (71,168 bytes)
PDFCreator	47.2 KB (48,388 bytes)
PrimoPDF	1.18 MB (1,245,833 bytes)

Facebook Hidden Privacy Setting for Wall Posts by Friends

On April 7, 2010, I mentioned one of the confusing privacy settings Who can see posts made by friends? As of today, the setting was reworded a bit and honors your wish. Unfortunately, this setting is still the gatekeeper which controls who can post to your wall regardless of your specific setting.

If you go into your Privacy Settings | Customize Settings page, scroll down a bit, you will see the similar setting below.

What happens when I change the setting Can see Wall posts by friends to Only Me and leave Friend can post on my Wall unchanged, still enabled?

• Yes, my friends will only see my posts when they visit my wall.
• Unfortunately, their privilege to post to my wall is also taken away. The post box in my wall is no longer available to them.

It looks to me that Can see Wall posts by friends setting takes precedence. Previously, we could not use this to filter wall posts by friends. Now Facebook fixed it but it doesn't fix the wall post control. This setting still controls who can post to your wall.

If you play games at Facebook and rely on your friend Wall-to-Wall posts, be sure to set appropriate setting to this seting, Can see Wall posts by friends. Otherwise, no one can post to your wall but yourself.