Sometimes, when you double-click on a file in Windows, the file does not open as expected because it is not associated with any program. If you are confused about how to open a file type, then the Smart File Advisor may help you. Smart File Advisor will help you find appropriate programs to open your files using its online database. Smart File Advisor will be able to identify the type of the file you want to open even if it have a wrong file extension by analyzing file contents.
To start using the Smart File Advisor, you need to download and install it first. You can download the Smart File Advisor from http://www.filefacts.net/sfa_download.php. The download is in form of installer named sfa_inst.exe. Double-click on sfa_inst.exe file to install.
After the installation is finished, you can double-click on any unknown file type and you would see the Smart File Advisor window. If you choose to send the first 20 bytes of the selected file, then the Smart File Advisor will also check for an appropriate program based on the contents of the file and not only based on the file extension.
Just click on the OK button to send the information to the Filefacts.net. This would open a web page in your default web browser with one or more appropriate programs listed and information about the file type extension. After you know about the supported programs, you can download them from the Internet.
One of the other features of the Smart File Advisor is the Checksum tool which can be used to calculate the file hashes. Just right click on any file and choose Checksum from the right-click context menu. The Checksum tool can calculate CRC32, MD5 and SHA-1 hashes of any file. It can be used to verify the file hashes of the files downloaded from the Internet.
The Smart File Advisor is a useful and quick tool to find one or more appropriate programs for files types not associated with any program on your syste. Not only that, you can also check the integrity of a file by matching the file hashes of any downloaded file using the Checksum feature.