There are a lot of applications that I really love — I can’t live without them and they make my life so much more enjoyable. One of these is Beyond Compare from Scooter Software. It was recommended to me by a colleague whom I deeply respect, and life hasn’t been the same since the day I started using it. Beyond Compare is a tool for comparing directories and files. It has a great many options and is a real joy to use. Tonight it got me out of a real bind when I was upgrading to a new hard drive on my laptop. I installed Windows on my new hard drive and I was copying the D drive partition from my old drive onto my new drive. I wasn’t doing anything fancy, just a plain old Copy ( + drag and drop) using Windows File Explorer. Then, things went bad — I got an error stating that one of the files could not be copied. It would have been a real pain to figure out where things went wrong, seeing as how I was copying about 20 GB of files. However, I launched Beyond Compare, did a difference on the source and destination locations, and within a few minutes had all the information that I needed. I don’t want to go into great depths explaining all the things that Beyond Compare does, just download the demo and find out for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.