Free Small Web Icons

Found a site that offered free small web icons.  Might come in handy for internal uses.  It is offered by FamFamFam at http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/.  The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

EasyCapture

Yes, I know there’s a lot of screen capture software out there but is it Easy to use and is it Free?  Well, EasyCapture is just that, easy and free.  Which happens to be very good combination for most things in life.    The application have options to take a screen shot of a window, region, or all of the desktop.  It also presents the screen shots into multiple tabs when dealing with more than one screen shot at a time.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Website: http://www.xydownload.com/easycapture/

Update: I ran into a minor problem with this free tool.  If you try to print straight from EasyCapture, the image tend to be incredibly small on the Print Preview Page as seen below. 

I was able to get around this by zooming in on the picture at 400% for it to print correctly.

Belarc Advisor – Free Personal PC Audit

So I have been reading a couple of computer magazines and it seems like their editors like the program alot.  So I decided I should give it a try.  I have to say, the program definitely does a fine and good job of auditing your PC.  Frankly, I think it does too good of a job.  So well in fact that I’m kinda scared to keep the report file the program generated anywhere on my computer in case it falls into the wrong hands.  So why was I scared.  Well, the report it generated had every software that I have ever installed on my pC.  Not only that, it was also good enough to show you all the Keys and Serial numbers associated with the software.  It also shows all the hardware that I have on my PC including model numbers and types.  So, I would probably not use this program on a normal routine basis.  What I would use Belarc Advisor for is to generate a report before I format and reinstall my operating system.  I would print out the report and delete the HTML report file it generates so you will have a paper printout to keep handy when installing your OS back.  And once the OS is back up, then you have the Serial Keys and the list of programs that you had installed on the previous OS.  Now you can see all the programs you need to install to get the PC to where it was before.  Of course, this doesn’t mean you should install all the program again because some of those may have led you to the problems that you have and caused you to reinstall the OS in the first place.

Platform: Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT 4, Me, 98, and 95.
Price: Free
Website: http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

Windows Sysinternals Is Like Scalpel For Your PC

If you have never gone to Microsoft’s Sysinternals page and you own a PC then you need to at least stop by.  This site holds enough utility to keep a geek happy for a good couple of days.  Really, if you want to virtually disect your PC, then this will be a good place to browse for the tools.  Just under the File and Disk Utilities section, there are over 20 different utilities you can use.  For example, there’s a utility called Movefile that will allow you to schedule a file rename or delete command the next time you boot your system.  Then there’s a Pendmove program that shows you which files are scheduled to be renamed or deleted.  Some are so low level that it probably won’t do you any good unless you are Neo.  Diskmon gives me a lot of info, unfortunately I couldn’t decipher it.  Other topics on this site is Networking Utilities, Process Utilities, Security Utilities, , System Information, and Miscellaneous Utilities.  And of course, all this is free.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Website: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx

Export Windows Search with SysExporter

It’s a big freaking pain sometimes when I want to make a report of the result of my Windows XP Search.  You know when you go and right click on a Drive or Folder and choose “Search…”.  It takes a while for the search result to come back and you can’t even save it.  Once you close it, it’s gone.  Now that I have SysExporter, I don’t have to worry about that problem.  For example, I want to find all the PDF files I have on my PC, I can just do a search for “*.pdf” on my local drives and wait for it to finish.  Then I lauch SysExporter and choose the correct type in the list.  SysExporter shows you more than just your search result.  It shows you just about every window you have opened so you need to choose the “Search Results” with a type of “ListView”.  Once selected, it shows all the search result in the bottom pane of the application.  Highlight all of it and right click and choose “Copy Selected Items (Tab Delimited)”.  Now you are able to paste into Excel to save the search result.  Windows should have this built in.

Platform: Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP
Price: Free
Website: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sysexp.html

Avast AntiVirus – Another Decent Free Software

Just found this one recently but have not given it a try yet.  However, I heard some good things about it.  It is pretty much on the same level as AntiVir and AVG Anti-Virus.  Once I give it a try, I’ll give an update on my findings.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free (for the Home Edition)
Website: http://www.avast.com/

Hide Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is one of those programs that are meant to be turned on all the time, especially for the client rules to work.  I just wish they were smart enough like iTunes, WinAmp, or just about any instant messenging software available.  These programmers know that their program is running all the time and took the effort to create the ability for the software to run in the system tray.  Finally somebody create an addon that allows you to move Outlook to the system tray.  Once this program is installed, Outloook will no longer take up permanent space on the TaskBar.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Website: http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=hideoutlook

Zipper/Unzipper – Not For Your Pants But For Your Files

WinRAR is one of several software that I use on a constant basis that I would willingly pay for.  It opens just about every zip files I need like zip, rar, tar, ace, ect.  Not only that, it is also able to open ISO files.  You have the normal right-mouse click menu that enables you to compress your file.  While clicking on a compressed file,  you are given an option of extracting to current folder or creating a folder with the name of the file and extracting there.  Overall, it is very easy to use and is very worthy of the money you need to pay in order to get rid of the nagging splash page.

Platform: Windows
Price: $29
Website: http://www.rarlab.com/index.htm

Net Transport – Good Downloader

As you may have noticed, I have a lot of programs and utilities.  Of course, I have to get them to my PC somehow in order to install them.  Well, I have tried several downloaders and by far my favorite is Net Transport.  It’s definitely a foreign company that came up with this but you have to handle it to them, they did a good job.  After installing Net Transport, the user can just click on a link to a file and a new menu option will show up that says “Download by Net Transport”.  Net Transport would then startup and download the file.  If right clicking on the page, the new menu option will say “Download all by Net Transport”.  Net Transport would parse the page and list all the available files that can be downloaded.  The user can then just check the files and the download will be queued.  One feature that I like is the ability to create categories.  When downloading a file, the user is given a choice of what category the file is in.  The file will then be placed in the folder that is defined by you when you created the category.  This particular program is free but it has nagware. 

Platform: Windows
Price: Free – nagware ($24.95 to get rid of nagware)
Website: http://www.xi-soft.com/default.htm

Decent Free Anti-Adware

Since I blogged about two free anti-virus, I might as well show you two decent free anti-adware/anti-spyware. Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search&Destroy are pretty good anti-spyware considering they are free. Both of these run pretty well on my computer. I noticed that it is actually pretty good to have both of these installed because what one misses the other may catch.  When running this program, it will go through your computer and the registry looking for any suspicious program or entry very similar to that of a anti-virus program would do.  Once suspicious entries are found, the program lists them out for you to decide if you want to remove them or not.  The program also gives you the ability to backup the changes in case you want to roll back your removal.  Overall, these are very decent software to use to help guard against spyware and adware.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal
Platform: Windows
Price: Free (Ad-Aware SE Plus $26.95)
Website: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad-aware_se_personal.php

Spybot Search&Destroy
Platform: Windows
Price: Free (Donations)
Website: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html