Great Little Apps
Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 6:31PM Here are a few apps that I have collected from suggestions and tips from various sources as well as years of systems support and development. These include Security Now, Tekzilla and Overclockers.com. Personally, some of these apps are so useful and handy that I have them on a USB key for whenever I reinstall a PC at home (Read: My Gaming PC) or just to have so that I can share them with others (I always have my 16 GB USB key with me).
Notepad++ (plus plus) is a very powerful free alternative to the regular old notepad you find on Windows. At first it may seem silly to recommend so much power to such a simple task but as time has gone on, I find more and more that NP++ is a must have no matter the skill of the user.
7zip is a file compression/decompression utility. It is a very good alternative to WinZip and WinRAR. The best part is that 7zip is free. I have been using it for about 9 months and have no complaints at all. It reads every compression type out there so there are no real limitations for the average user.
This is a great little app for all those that love the windows snapping to the edges of other windows or the edge of your desktop area. This is the same kind of behaviour that is standard on most Linux desktops but is strangely missing from Windows.
This gem has been around for years. It is a wonderfully simple and effective music CD ripping and re-encoding application. Many people use Windows Media Player or iTunes but this app is perfect and simple. I don’t need it often but when I do, I am so glad it is around.
I bumped into this one a few years ago. It is a handy little app to help clean up Internet Explorer or Firefox bookmarks that do not lead anywhere anymore or that are now pointing at parked sites that are not what the bookmark you made was originally used for. Myself, I have a really bad habbit of bookmarking everything. I have over 3000 bookmarks and that is after some light cleaning not long ago. Which leads me to…
XMarks (Formerly FoxMarks)
XMarks was born first for Firefox as an extension but has recently taken on a new name and now offers support for IE and Safari. This awesome and FREE app allows you to keep all of your bookmarks stored on the internet in the “cloud” so if you change PCs or browsers, you can easily get all of your bookmarks copied to your new location or browser. Further, if you are like me and use a lot of different PCs all the time, it is a very handy way to keep all of your bookmarking action synched across all of the machines and their browsers.
We all make and collect a lot of files and when a pile of people are sharing a server, this problem gets out of hand. So a few months ago, I had to help clean up one of the general use file servers at the office and found this tool. It will scan the folders that you are looking to clean up and then let you sort through the list to select what you want to delete. The most important and attractive thing about this app is that it creates a CRC hash of each file which is based on the content of the file. If it finds another file with the exact same content, the CRC hash will be the same and regardless of the name of the file, it will be identified as a duplicate. This is the first app I have ever seen that does this. It also allows for the scanning of EXIF metadata in your pictures and the ID tags in MP3s so it really is a powerful tool for both home and play. And as you may have guessed, it is free as well.
Another utility that I found that was needed for the cleanup at the office is Free Disk Analyzer. It is a space usage reporting utility. I have used nearly a dozen of these kinds of apps and I can say with confidence that this is the best one yet. It allows for several different views of your space usage including listing the largest files and also listing what are the oldest files.
Stardock, the people that make WindowBlinds for Windows, has been working on an app called Fences. This nice app allows you to organize your desktop icons into groups in a way that is very handy. So much so, that even my wife asked me to install it on her laptop. For now, it is free but it is only free for personal use.
Well, that is what I have in my must have list so far. Have fun and enjoy!!!
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