2009 Windows Utility Guide

2009 Windows Utility Guide
Check out the biggest collection of time-saving utilities for Windows XP, vista, and even Win 7 ever assembled. The best part? Most of them are free.

AppeArAnce BumpTop www.Bumptop.com Make your Windows desk- top look like a regular three-dimensional desk, complete with piles (repre- senting fles) you can toss around or fip through and walls you can stick things to. Works with Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Free; Pro edition, $29 Minime www.saphua.com/blog/?page_id=18 Minime minimizes all windows to the System Tray with a single hotkey. Plus it hides them behind a single icon, which you can then click for a menu of what’s running. Free Nimi visuals www.mynimi.net This portable app (no installation required, just run the EXE fle) gives Windows visual effects similar to those found on Mac OS or Linux add-on Compiz, including better trans- parency, sparkles, blurred backgrounds, and more. Nimi Visuals is fun, albeit not useful, and best run on very fast systems. Free QTTabBar qttabbar.wikidot.com Did you fall in love with tabs in your Web browser? Add the feature to Windows Explorer and fall in love all over again. Free Taskbar Shuffe nerdcave.webs.com Portable and simple, Taskbar Shuffe does one thing: It lets you move around the but- tons for open applications usually found on the Windows taskbar. Free TrayIt! www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm This lightweight, portable app installs a Sys- tem Tray icon that lists the programs run- ning on your PC; that’s where you’ll access them when minimized, rather than on the taskbar, saving valuable real estate. Free ObjectDesktop www.stardock.com Give XP or Vista a whole new look. This col- lection includes WindowBlinds for new skins, DesktopX for building widgets, DeskScape animated wallpaper, and more; the Ultimate version adds ObjectBar for customizing your desktop and TweakVista, which does just what it says. $39.95; Ultimate, $69.95 UBitMenu www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages Do you love Microsoft Office 2007 but hate the ribbon interface that replaced the menus of yore? UBitMenu puts the drop- downs back in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, just as they appeared in Offce 2003. Switch back and forth from menus to ribbon when- ever you want. Free; $13.50 for businesses vista Start Menu www.vistastartmenu.com Vastly improve the look of the Start Menu in Windows and get faster access to just about all aspects of the OS with this replacement menu tool. It’s also accessible from the sys- tem tray. Free; Pro edition, $19.99 Winroll www.palma.com.au/winroll Right-click the title bar of any window and you can roll the window inside of it, and do the same to all open windows at the same time. Free BAckup/Sync BackUp Maker www. ascomp.de/index.php?php= prog&prog=backupmaker This simple interface might make all the difference for average users saving their data. It sends fles to another drive (including USB drives), a CD/DVD, or an FTP site. It also handles fle restoration if you lose something. Works with Windows 7. Free Carbonite Carbonite.com Carbonite monitors important files and backs them up online for future restoration, should you need it. It also provides remote fle access, so you can access your data from any computer. $54.95 per year for unlimited space Cucku Backup www.cucku.com Why back up to extra storage or online when you can stash fles with friends? This social-backup tool sends encrypted files to storage you share on your buddies’ PCs using Skype’s fle transfer abilities (without Skype, Cucku handles only local storage). You, of course, should share back. Free DriveImage XML www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm This utility will create a disk image even while the PC is in use (using Microsoft’s Vol- ume Shadow Services feature). Later you can restore a drive entirely, or browse that image to retrieve select fles. Free Dropbox www.getdropbox.com The darling of the world of online sync is Dropbox: Put all your fles in the My Drop- box folder and they’re immediately stored online; set up the software on other com- puters (even Macs and Linux PCs) and the fles synchronize whenever changed. Free for up to 2GB; Pro plan, $9.99 per month or $99 per year for 50GB Dimio's Tools hDhacker dimio.altervista.org/eng On start-up, your PC looks for the master boot record (MBR), typically the frst sec- tor in the frst partition of the disk. The MBR reads the partition table that tells your PC where the OS is—it’s essential to booting properly, in other words. Make sure your PC’s MBR is backed up so the PC is always bootable. HDHacker will back up and restore the MBR instantly when you’re in Windows. Free Mozyhome mozy.com/home Running completely in the background, MozyHome monitors folders you specify, and when all is idle on your PC, it backs up those fles into the cloud. Dead simple. Free for 2GB; $4.95 a month for unlimited space OffiSync - Enabling Collaboration If you’re a big user of Google Docs and Apps but can’t get away from Microsoft Offce (or vice versa), OffSync combines both worlds. Manage and open all your Google Docs fles from Office apps, and store all new Office documents online so you can access them anywhere with Google Docs. Free SyncToy 2.0 A Windows XP PowerToy that also works fne with Vista, SyncToy does a good job of making sure folders on your system are syn- chronized with their counterparts on exter- nal drives or network-attached storage. Free SyncBackSE www.2brightsparks.com A perennial fave, SyncBackSE is the mid- range uti l ity in 2BrightSparks’ l ine of backup tools, complete with fle versioning, smart two-way sync between folders, auto- start at log-in, and more. If you want even more features, like backup to single or mul- tiple CDs or DVDs, try the Pro version. $30; Pro version, $49.95 compreSSion 7-Zip 7-zip.org Compress fles in ZIP or 7z format (and get AES-256 encryption), and get support to compact or unpack formats from CAB to RAR. Free PortableApps.com AppCompactor If you like running apps from a USB flash drive but your drive doesn’t have lots of room, turn to the AppCompactor. This pro- gram will compress apps as much as pos- sible (how much varies depending on the app) to fit your drive and still function. Free SecureZIP Desktop www.pkware.com This PCMag.com Editors’ Choice is all about the ZIP format, because it’s from the cre- ators of the ZIP format. It does everything an archive manager should, such as inte- grating with MS Offce and Outlook. $39.95 DiSk utilitieS Defraggler www.defraggler.com Why defragment an entire drive? Defraggler is one of the few tools that allow drag-and- drop of individual fles or folders for defrag work. Free for home or business Easeus Partition Master home Edition www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm Resize, copy, or create new disk partitions from within Windows (2000 up to Vista, 32-bit only with Home Edition). It can con- vert existing partitions from FAT to NTFS on drives up to 1.5 terabytes in size. Free for home use FileAlyzer www.safer-networking.org/en/flealyzer Learn just about every property of fles on your system when FileAlyzer analyzes them. Seriously, it’s a lot of info. Free DiSplAyS Edgeless www.fxc.btinternet.co.uk/assistive.htm Why let the cursor stop at the edge of your display? Edgeless lets it wrap from one side to the other, even when using multiple mon- itors. Free Fences www.stardock.com/products/fences Easily unclutter your desktop shortcuts and icons with Fences. It groups the items on your desktop into transparent containers you can hide or unhide at will. Works with Windows 7, too. Free MaxTo www.maxto.net On a big monitor with a lot of screen real estate, it just doesn’t make sense to run every application full-screen. MaxTo seg- ments a display into regions so that you can easily tile windows as you see ft. It works with Windows 7. Free Maxivista www.maxivista.com Turn your laptop (or any second computer with a monitor) into a second monitor for your main system. What you’re really doing is controlling as many as four computers on your network using one keyboard and one mouse, to extend your primary computer’s desktop space. (Issues with Vista and Win- dows 7 are still being worked out.) Free 14- day trial, then $29.95 Powerresizer Dock windows to the edges of the screen, and when you resize them with Power- Resizer, they stay docked. If you put the windows side by side or atop each other, dragging one to resize will also resize the other so they never overlap. Free Switcher insentient.net Exposé on the Mac instantly shows you the desktop, or all your open windows in vari- ous views, when you invoke a keystroke. Switcher brings that same function to Win- dows, and it works with a multi-monitor setup. The utility runs only on Vista, how- ever. Free DisplayFusion www.binaryfortress.com Give each of your moni- tors its own Windows taskbar or wallpaper, span one long wallpaper across displays, move windows to new screens with a single click, and more. DisplayFusion is ready to work with Win- dows 7. Free UltraMon www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon UltraMon is all about multiple monitors: It adds icons to title bars to make moving win- dows from one screen to another faster (no dragging), creates shortcuts that open pro- grams on the monitor you prefer, and puts separate wallpaper images or screensavers on each display. And there are even more tools to handle all that real estate. $39.95 virtuaWin virtuawin.sourceforge.net Add up to nine virtual desktops to your sys- tem, on computers running Windows 98 all the way up to Vista. Access the other desk- tops via an icon in the system tray. Free WinSplit revolution winsplit-revolution.com Split your big screen into multiple smaller “monitors.” Drag program windows around with the mouse while holding Ctrl-Alt to bring up a shaded area—that’s the grid section that the window will snap to when released. If there are multiple targets, pick one with the mouse scroll wheel. Free encryption File & Folder Unlocker A locked file on Windows isn’t encrypted, but it can be a pain to work with. Unlocker will change files from locked to unlocked so you can manipulate them again without getting errors. Free See also Unlocker FreeOTFE www.freeotfe.org OTFE stands for “on-the-fly encryption,” and that’s just what FreeOTFE does, cre- ating a virtual disk where copied files are instantly encrypted and stored. It’s portable and works on thumb drives, and FreeOTFE has its own Explorer to access encrypted fles without installing software. Free TrueCrypt www.truecrypt.org A granddaddy in disk-encryption software TrueCrypt will encode an entire drive—even a thumb drive—for security in real-time Wizard software provides help with deci- sions like how big the virtual drive should be (just one fle or the whole hard disk). Free See also Maintain XP well until Windows 7 arrives My Lockbox www.fspro.net/my-lockbox This utility locks down or hides a special folder, not just from snoops on the same PC (even those with admin privileges) but also from any kind of remote access, all with a single password. Free erase and delete Autodelete Set time limits for folders on your drive and Autodelete will automatically delete files that are too old. It’s great for getting rid of older backup archives taking up space. Free Darik’s Boot And Nuke www.dban.org Download DBAN, write the software to a bootable CD, and then use the disc to com- pletely and utterly erase the contents of a hard drive. After that, those files will never come back. Free DeleteOnClick Rather than send an unwanted file to the recycle bin for “deletion”—where it can potentially be recovered—this utility securely deletes the space the fle took up, making it impossible for you to get it back. Free DoubleKiller www.bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller Remove duplicate files across your local and network drives, including pictures and music. DoubleKiller compares size, name, date, and content to see what fles may be a bit too similar. The Pro version supports multiple languages and can search on extra criteria. Free; Pro edition, $19.95 Download DoubleKiller Pro 2.1.0.104 Images IrfanView www.irfanview.com A compact classic dating back to 1996, Irfan- View can view any kind of image thrown at it (some video and audio too), plus convert and edit it. Free See Also Unable to open PSD files in Photoshop JPEGsnoop impulseadventure.com/photo/jpeg-snoop.html Wondering if that beautiful-looking JPG fle you’re viewing is an original right off the digital camera? JPEGsnoop looks at the metadata inside to see if the file has been modifed, and if so, how it’s changed. Free RIOT luci.criosweb.ro/riot Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT) reduces image size—not the dimensions, but the actual fle size. Smaller GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs on Web pages mean faster load times. RIOT will display old and new side by side for comparison. It’s also an IrfanView plug-in. Free Fotosizer www.fotosizer.com Three steps are all it takes: Pick a bunch of digital photos, select resize settings, and let it rip. All the images are reduced, replacing the original images or duplicating the source, as specifed. Free networking Comodo EasyvPN easy-vpn.comodo.com Secure the connection between you and other computers with this simple-to-install virtual private network. Free for personal use GoToMyPC www.gotomypc.com We all know this one: GoToMyPC makes connecting to a PC remotely almost as easy as using it live. Download the free trial to access one PC for 30 days. $19.95 per month to access one PC, $29.95 per month to access two PCs Leaf for Windows www.leafnetworks.net Get ready for peer-to-peer network shar- ing, to stay connected to your network on the road (even through Facebook), share data with friends, or even set up Xbox and Xbox360 consoles for head-to-head games. Leaf’s client is free for Windows, and coming soon to Linux. Free LogMeIn hamachi secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp With LogMeIn Hamachi, you can put mul- tiple remote computers on a virtual private network (VPN) so that they all appear to be in the same building—perfect for remotely sharing fles. With the free version, one user can join 256 Hamachi networks, each of them able to handle 16 users; networks can handle 50 users if registered with the Pro version. Free; commercial license, $4.95 per month per PC orgAnizAtion Advanced renamer aren.hulubulu.net There are eight different ways to create batch-renaming jobs for your files with Advanced Renamer, including adding extra characters, changing the case of letters in the flenames, and changing the fles’ attri- butes and timestamps; it also supports ID3 functions to work with MP3 audio fles. Free everything you can imagine doing in Win- dows, using prearranged keystrokes and mouse clicks or just about any input button. Free Autohotkey www.autohotkey.com Set up macros to automate just about everything you can imagine doing in Win- dows, using prearranged keystrokes and mouse clicks or just about any input button. Free See also HotKicks ( Hotkey Utility ) CubicExplorer www.cubicreality.com/ce This file viewer and Windows Explorer replacement is portable and relatively uncomplicated, supporting tabs for multi- ple browsing sessions to take place at once. Free Free Commander www.Free commander.com Get dual panes of data (side by side or stacked) with this Windows Explorer replacement, plus features like FTP, tabs, fi le-renaming tools, and compressed archive support. Free Gladinet www.gladinet.com Get access to your online files—such as those in Google Docs or Windows Live Sky- drive—as if they’re stored locally. Gladinet mounts the services like network drives that are accessed from Windows Explorer. Free (for now) Portable Snowbird lmadhavan.com/software/snowbird Snowbird is built for speed as well as porta- bility (run it from a USB flash drive on any Windows system). The main window has the typical tree on the left, breadcrumbs at the top, and a list of recently visited files—but what it lacks in features it makes up for in performance. Free xplorer2 zabkat.com/x2lite.htm You want two panes of fle listings, a folder tree, tabs, and FTP access? That’s just the beginning with this longtime favorite Win- dows Explorer replacement. The free version also comes in a portable version. Pro adds individual folder settings, “hyperfilters,” scrap containers, duplicate cleanup, and more. Free; professional version, $29.95 recover AnD reStore AntiFreeze www.resplendence.com/antifreeze We all know the Ctrl-Alt-Delete salute to get out of a borked computer (or to get to the running processes list and kill an offending program). But AntiFreeze may offer a bet- ter way. It waits in the background for trou- ble, and when called, it displays all running processes, suspending most without killing them until necessary. Free GoneIn60s www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/index .html#GoneIn60s If you closed an application within the last minute, you can open it up again without los- ing anything by right-clicking the icon in the system tray—but only if your PC is already running GoneIn60s. Free (donationware) UndeletePlus www.undelete-plus.com No matter the volume type (FAT12 on up to NTFS5), UndeletePlus promises to restore fles you’ve junked but want back. Great fl- tering makes it easy to fnd one fle among the many you’ve deleted. Free trial, then $29.95 per year Download Portable_Undelete_Plus_2.96 recuva www.recuva.com Pronounced “recover” (what accent are they using?), Recuva has one goal: to bring back fles you accidentally trashed (or that were trashed by crashes and other errors) using a simple-to-grasp interface. Free (donation- ware) Screen cApture FastStone Capture www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm Capture and annotate whatever is on your screen with this little toolbar, then send it to a fle, printer, e-mail, Web site via FTP, or to another application (like Word or Power- Point). $19.95 SiteShoter www.nirsoft.net/utils/web_site_screenshot.html Good in any version of Windows from XP to 7, SiteShoter works with IE to take grabs of entire Web pages, even the areas you’d have to scroll because they aren’t visible on screen. Free SnagIt www.techsmith.com TechSmith (which is also behind Jing, next page) has upped the price of SnagIt by $10 this year, but this perennial PCMag favorite is worth the money. Version 9 is completely rewritten and includes new features like a live preview, a mini-toolbar (like the one for formatting selections in Word 2007), an software stamps you can slap into capture images. 30-day free trial, then $49.95 SeArch Copernic Desktop Search www.copernic.com An old hand at indexing and searching your fles, Copernic continues to look inside 150 different types of files so you can search their contents. Now you can search the Web via the same interface, and even make Copernic a default Web search engine. Free; Professional version, $49.99 Everything www.voidtools.com For NTFS drives only, this program promises to search, well, everything, and fast. Really fast. It’s for NTFS format only because it uses the drivers for the hard drive to create its index. It also comes in a portable version, and will work with Windows 7. Free Jing www.jingproject.com You can do more than take a picture of your screen and annotate it with Jing; it will also record video of actions you take on the computer. Using social networking to show people how to do stuff on the PC, it integrates quick ways to share your captures via IM, e-mail, or on a blog. Free Google Desktop desktop.google.com Integrate your Web searches with your hard- disk searches, throw in a gadget engine for the thousands of widgets available for iGoogle, and you’ve got a four-star product. Free ShutDown/Boot Edison www.verdiem.com/edison.aspx A truly green utility, Edison helps you adjust the power settings and schemes for XP SP2 and Vista, so your hard drive, monitors, and CPU all power down after a certain amount of inactivity. It will also calculate how much you’ll save, in money and energy. Free Marxio Timer www.marxio-tools.net/en/marxio-timer.htm Marxio Timer can perform any action (or actions) you preset for a select time, every- thing from shutting down to logging off to hibernating to displaying text to running a program. It can even simulate the press of a specifc key on the keyboard, or take a screen grab, or grabs, one after the other. Free WinPatrol 2009 winpatrol.com WinPatrol does a lot—it is a security monitor alerting you to changes you may not have made, and it even comes in a (slightly less powerful) portable version. Where it excels is in assisting your Windows system at start- up, delaying or deactivating processes as you see ft. Free; Plus edition, $29.95 SyStem cleAnerS CCleaner www.ccleaner.com It’s no secret that the first C in this program stands for “crap,” and that’s exactly what it goes after, in the browser, the Registry, and all the other spots in Windows where fotsam like temp fles and log fles accumulates. Its creator, Piriform, updates the app frequently and promises it is malware-free. Free Little registry Cleaner sourceforge.net/projects/littlecleaner Another portable tool for the USB fash drive arsenal, this app checks the Registry for unneeded items and cleans them—a must for tackling your family’s and friends’ com- puter issues. It also has options for speeding start-up and creating restore points. Free Norton removal Tool service1.symantec.com/support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/ 2005033108162039?Open&docid=2004030411260104 Symantec’s Norton products are super- popular but not always perfect. Getting rid of one to try a different security suite is so hard with the built-in Windows tools that even Symantec had to admit it and built this tool with only one job: Uninstall Nor- ton 2003 to 2009, and a few other titles like SystemWork and Norton 360. Free SyStem monitorS WinDirStat windirstat.info Need to know how much space on your disk is in use, and what’s using it? Win- dows Directory Statistics (WinDirStat) eliminates the guesswork, providing mul- tiple views—including some graphically beautiful color- coded views—that spell it out for you. Free Disk Usage Analyzer www.extensoft.com/?p=free_disk_analyzer This program does one thing: It creates a list of all the fles on your hard disks and tells you which are taking up the most room. Put it to use when running out of disk space, to quickly determine what should get tossed, or at least given permanent berth on a backup drive. Free FreeMeter www.tiler.com/freemeter When monitoring performance, your per- formance monitor should not impact per- formance. FreeMeter’s 888KB free version fills the bill, looking at drive space, CPU usage, memory usage, system up time and five more stats; the Pro version has 19 different monitors. Free; Pro version, $22.95 Process Explorer technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 .aspx This extra from Microsoft is a major step up from the Windows built-in Task Manager, especially for power users. Rather than just show processes alone, it also displays han- dles or DLLs in use by that process. Use the search to fnd problem areas, or to skip out to Google and look up what a listed process does. Once you’ve downloaded it, it’s fully portable, or you can run it right from the Web. Free SpyMe Tools www.lcibrossolutions.com/spyme_tools.htm Sometimes things happen to the Windows Registry that shouldn’t—such as changes made by malware. SpyMe dumps a copy of the Registry from before and after a change, so you can restore the older version if you detect something amiss. It’ll also make Reg- stry backups. Free Xinorbis freshney.org/xinorbis You can analyze one folder, one drive, or multiples—even network drives—in a single eport. What you get is graphs galore, all of which can be saved for report comparison at a later date. Free tweAkerS Game Booster www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html Get more out of your game by making it the most important thing on your computer. Game Booster will do that by temporar- ily shutting down background processes, cleaning up leaky RAM, and giving the game processor priority. Works with Win 7. Free Ultimate Windows Tweaker www.winvistaclub.com/uwtf.html Ready to tweak Windows 7? So is Ultimate Windows Tweaker, building on the vast array of what it can do for Vista and the IE Web browser. Free XdN Tweaker xenomorph.net It doesn’t offer as many tweaks as the paid tweak tools, but XdN makes up for it with a price that can’t be beat. It requires Windows .NET to run on XP; .NET is a given with Vista and Windows 7, both of which XdN sup- ports. Free upDAterS Filehippo Update Checker www.flehippo.com/updatechecker Run this utility once in a while and it will compare installed apps against the vast collection at FileHippo.com, even against updates still in beta. The results come up in a Web page where you can download new versions to install. Free Update Notifier cleansofts.org/view/update-notifier.html Linux users know the joys of having not only their OS kept up to date, but also third-party software that never gets old. Windows users have to work at that. Update Notifer helps: When a new version of a third-party program you’re running becomes available, it makes it easy for you to download and install it. Free uninStAllerS PC Decrapifer www.pcdecrapifer.com If you got a new PC at retail, chances are it came preinstalled (read: bogged down) with extra unwanted and unneeded soft- ware. PC Decrapifier should be the first item you install, as it knows what to look for on those PCs and deletes them, en masse. Free remove Empty Directories www.jonasjohn.de/lab/red.htm Afraid you’ve got a bunch of empty folders on your Windows system? You won’t have them after this utility has its way. (Just don’t delete any temp directories needed by your other programs.) Free Revo Uninstaller Maybe the perfect replacement for Win- dows’ own uninstaller list, Revo chucks programs with the usual built-in uninstall routine, but follows up with a check of the hard drive and the Registry for anything left behind. It comes in a portable version for USB fash drives. Free Virtual PCs Portable Ubuntu portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar Want to try Ubuntu? Install a full-blown ver- sion of the popular Linux distro as an applica- tion within Windows. It can even be installed on a USB fash drive, so it can be your porta- ble OS—any changes you make to Portable Ubuntu stick with it. Windows will just treat it like any other application. Free Returnil Virtual System 2008 Personal www.returnilvirtualsystem.com/returnil-virtual-sys- tem-personal If you have a system with XP, Vista, or 2003 server, you can mirror it completely on the same system, entirely in system mem- ory. Why do that? So your software runs entirely on the virtualized side. If some- thing goes wrong, your primary installation is still okay. It’s a great way to experiment with software you might otherwise be ner- vous about. Free for personal use VirtualBox www.virtualbox.org Install open-source VirtualBox on just about any OS that runs on x86 chips (even Mac, Linux, and OpenSolaris) and you can run a “guest” OS inside it—including those above plus Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. It’ll even load a 64-bit OS inside a 32-bit host OS. Free for personal use Source: PC Magazine, July 2009

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