Reenigne blog

Whoever invented DLLs has a lot to answer for. I suppose they seemed like a good idea at the time - make everything into a library so that you only need one copy of it on your hard disk for all the programs that use it. Unfortunately, this has caused everyone's hard disk to swell with loads of stuff that is never used - you have to have the whole library even if the programs you have only use a tiny part of it. And there's no way to tell what a DLL does just by looking at it, so you can't delete the ones you don't use. I'm sure there's still loads of duplicated code as well, because it's often easier for people to write their own DLLs than to figure out how to use the existing ones. I guess that's closed-source software for you.

In order to keep download times down, software authors often leave out commonly used library files. These can sometimes be difficult to track down, so here I hope to put all those annoying files, as well as a few essential utilities, drivers and decoding/decompression programs. If there's one you think ought to be here and isn't, let me know and I'll upload it. Also if you have a more recent version of a file I have here please let me know.

New 4/4/2000: The files are now in alphabetical order for your convenience.

ARCE.COM (6K) - Decode ARC archives.
ARJ.EXE (75K) - Decode ARJ archives.
BWCC.DLL (43K) - Common controls for Borland software.
CMDIALOG.VBX (9K) - Visual Basic common dialog boxes.
COMCT232.OCX (76K) - Common control activeX control.
COMCTL32.OCX (229K) - Common control activeX control.
COMDLG16.OCX (38K) - Common dialogs activeX control.
COMDLG32.OCX (61K) - Common dialogs activeX control.
DEBOO.EXE (7K) - Decode BOO archives.
DOS4GW.EXE (141K) - DOS protected mode extender. v1.97.
GZIP.EXE (36K) - Decode files with have been encoded with the unix "gzip" utility. Such files are often tarballs, so you might need one of the TAR utilities (below) as well.
Icq V2 (1,397K) - Old version of the ICQ client, suitable for use with older PCs or NT machine you don't have the necessary permissions to install a newer version on.
JAR.EXE (195K) - Decode JAR archives. Not to be confused with the other sort of JAR archive (used with Java) which is actually a ZIP file with the wrong extension.
LHA.EXE (25K) - Decode LZH archives.
MAC.EXE (8K) - Turn Apple Mac text files into DOS text files.
MCI32.OCX (76K) - VB multimedia control v5.1.4319
MCI32.OCX (82K) - VB multimedia control v6.0.8418
MOUSE.COM (12K) - DOS mouse driver. Works with most standard mice.
MSVBVM60.DLL (680K) - Visual Basic 6 runtime.
MSVCR70.DLL (152K) - Visual C 7.0 reuntime.
MSVCP71.DLL (129K) - Visual C++ 7.1 runtime.
MSVCR71.DLL (177K) - Visual C 7.1 runtime.
MUNPACK.EXE (22K) - Decode MIME-encrypted files.
OC25.DLL (246K) - Not sure.
PICCLP16.OCX (23K) - Picture clipping activeX control.
PKUNZIP.EXE (34K) - Essential unzip utility for DOS.
PKZIPFIX.EXE (8K) - Fix (some) broken ZIP archives.
ROT13.EXE (8K) - Decode text files which have been encoded with the ROT13 protocol. Text that has been encoded with ROT13 looks like: jryy, irel zhpu yvxr guvf, npghnyyl.
TAR.EXE (50K) - Extract Unix "tar"balls.
TAR32.EXE (81K) - Extract Unix "tar"balls with long filenames. Requires 32 bit windows.
THREED16.OCX (73K) - 3D custom control activeX control.
UNACE32.EXE (42K) - Decode ACE archives.
UNP.EXE (20K) - Decompress compressed EXE files (compressed with PKLITE, etc.)
UNRAR.EXE (31K) - Decode RAR archives.
VB40016.DLL (460K) - Visual Basic 4 runtime (16 bit).
VB40032.DLL (378K) - Visual Basic 4 runtime (32 bit).
VBRUN300.DLL (224K) - Visual Basic 3 runtime.
WINSCK.OCX (62K) - Not sure, may be a trojan.
Wintalk (190K) - Windows version of Unix talk client.
WW.EXE (9K) - Word-wraps a plain text file so that no line is longer than 79 characters.
ZOO.EXE (25K)- Decode ZOO archives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2000 at 9:19 am and is filed under computer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.