Last week I downloaded and installed a free utility called AM-Deadlink. I had heard of it through PC World magazine, so I figured it was software that could be trusted not to do nasty things to my PC.

When activated, it checks all the favorites in your Internet browser. It will work with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

Of course you must be connected to the Internet at the time. It checks to see whether each URL can still be reached, and if not, it flags the favorite accordingly.

After running the check, the user is then able to sort all the unreachable links to the top of the listing and ask  AM-Deadlink to remove all (or any subset) of them.

When I first ran this, I had over 600 favorites and after removing all the dead ones, I found I was left with 530. Some I was sorry to see go, but if they're dead, they're no use and there is always Google to fall back on.

Because a web site may be temporarily out of action, the program advises users to check a site's availability for yourself  before deleting a favorite, but as a backup, it says that it writes a log of all deletions, so that if you find you may have deleted something that you later want to check, you can still retrieve the URL from the log file. I found it had written  my log file to:

C:\Documents and Settings\Brock\Application Data\aignes\AM-Deadlink\deadlink.log.

However, be warned, it seems to have saved only those URLs that I have deleted individually, rather than the large slab of  
them that I deleted when I first used the program.

AM-Deadlink also provides a backup facility for your Favorites, but I have not tried it, as I already backup my Favorites a different way.

A simple utility to use, and it comes at the right price. I use Windows XP Home edition with IE7.

Brock 12 Feb 2007