NirSoft Launcher - More Great Portable Utilities

One of the quality producers of Windows software is Nir Sofer, who has produced more than one hundred different portable applications for the Windows operating system. Generally speaking, all Nirsoft applications are high quality programs that are highly popular and used by many Windows users.

I like several NirSoft utilities and appreciate their launcher package. You can add the Sysinternals package, too. Security Essentials will give some positives so just "allow" them. NirSoft and Sysinternals combined take about 45 MB.

Tip: ghacks.net

InfoSelect Replacement?

Since the death of XP in my world I have mourned the loss of InfoSelect. I loved the way it accepted random information and quickly retrieved searches. I even paid for the original program and again paid for several updates until I finally could not stand further abuse. Enter an old, in computer years, program Yadabyte Notes. It is portable and does all I want without the bloat. Now to start documenting my life again and all sorts of yada, yada.

It has some quirks. One is it crashed already under Win7. Another is the cryptic way it deletes notes, if indeed it does delete notes. It may be to quirky for me.

So it's back to SimpleNote. Cloud is more convenient anyway and hey, I'm not entering my own personal information, I'm entering yours.

SmartSniff to see activity on your NIC

SmartSniff: Packet Sniffer - Capture TCP/IP packets on your network adapter

SmartSniff is a network monitoring utility that allows you to capture TCP/IP packets that pass through your network adapter, and view the captured data as sequence of conversations between clients and servers. You can view the TCP/IP conversations in Ascii mode (for text-based protocols, like HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP.) or as hex dump. (for non-text base protocols, like DNS)
SmartSniff provides 3 methods for capturing TCP/IP packets :

Comments: When analyzing a slow PC I like to know if some trojan is stealing bandwidth. SmartSniff will do it on Win 7 easily.

Possible Replacement for Info Select

The Holy Grail of Ubiquitous Plain-Text Capture
Until Vista/Win7 I used InfoSelect for years. I threw every random fact, subject, number that I thought would be important. "Who was that guy who wanted me to plant Jerusalem artichoke?" OK maybe some ended up unimportant but the searches and entries were lightening fast. Info Select was expensive and became increasingly bloated with each revision(typical software path) plus another $100, would not sync. to anything and worst of all would not work under Vista/7.

I am hoping Simple note does the trick (and I can resurrect my old InfoS data base which I still miss monthly) "Who sold me that commercial washer so cheap 6 years ago?" I now have data skattered all over and can't find anything.

Evernote, although good, didn't push my button.

Control Sysinternals Suite & NirSoft Utilities with a Single Interface

Control Sysinternals Suite & NirSoft Utilities with a Single Interface - How-To Geek

Sysinternals and NirSoft both provide helpful utilities for your Windows system but may not be very convenient to access. Using the Windows System Control Center you can easily access everything through a single UI front end.

Links

Download Windows System Control Center (WSCC)

Download Windows Sysinternals Suite

Download individual NirSoft Utilities programs

Comments: I have not decided how useful this is but sounds like a good idea to throw it on your portable Swiss Army Knife. I don't remember the programs being updated all that often but the centralized list and access is handy if you are on a foreign computer with your thumb drive.
Via HowToGeek

EasyBCD Beta - Highly Recommended

EasyBCD 2.0 Beta Builds - The NeoSmart Forums

This is a locked topic with the latest beta builds for EasyBCD 2.0.
This thread will be updated whenever a new build is available for public testing. You may subscribe to this topic for notification of the availability of new builds.

Comments: Grab this free and excellent program for all you BCD needs. If you do not know what BCD is then you don't need it - yet. To get the Beta you need to register in the forum. The Beta adds a few new features. The non Beta can be had without registration. You can extract the installer and run stand alone.

The forum practically begged me to make my first post so it looks like a friendly place :)

UIF Files Are Troublesome

Did you end up with a .uif file? What do you do with it? If you have MagicISO no problem. Many people dislike MagicISO because it makes these proprietary .uif files. But you can extract this .uif to a standard .iso with a free program named uif2iso. You do not need MagicISO. Just search for this handy stand alone program. I don't know if it works with every .uif file but it has worked for me.

Mint - A Great Way To Track Your Credit Cards

I just started using Mint and find it very useful. Logging into credit card and mortgage accounts individually is frustrating. Mint centralizes and automates credit card and mortgage monitoring. Weekly emails let you know where you stand. Highly recommended.

Cool tricks about the Gimp interface - GIMP tutorial

YouTube - Cool tricks about the Gimp interface - GIMP tutorial

Comments: Excellent hints for Gimp.

Here is a good mask tutorial for removing background.

CutePDF Out / Bullzip In

FREE PDF Printer
The Bullzip PDF Printer works as a Microsoft Windows printer and allows you to write PDF documents from virtually any Microsoft Windows application.

This program is FREEWARE with limitations, which means that it is FREE for personal and commercial use up to 10 users. It does not contain any advertising or popups. For commercial applications with more that 10 users there is a commercial version of the product available at www.biopdf.com.

Comments: Cute is out and Bullzip is in. Does the same thing and much more flexible.

Screen Capture Flip-Flop

I seem to keep flip-flopping around on my screen capture programs. I would like to simply draw a box on the screen, grab it, then annotate, re-size if necessary, upload to a free server and grab the link. Is this asking too much?

I'm back to TPUCapture from TechPowerUp. No I can not annotate or re-size but I can do everything else. It leaves a little watermark in the lower right corner but they deserve it for making a great little free program/service. I quit it a few versions back because it didn't work well with Win7 (or maybe it was just time to flip-flop) but it works well again.

If you need to annotate use Snipping Tool first then use TPU to grab the annotated clip. I loved FastStone for this but the free version became squirrely in Win7.

TPUCapture downloads with an installer but dropping the installer on Universal Extractor gives you the folder and TPU runs fine as an executable. Wow! LegRoom is being tagged as malicious by Firefox? What's up with that. I wouldn't worry about it.

So until my next flip-flop ... I'm trying to warm up to FireShot but it is clunky and limited to browser shots.

To make this even more long winded. I tried the old free FastStone Capture again (part of my Liberkey Suite) and it worked fine. It is a far better annotator than the Snipping Tool. FS can even re-size. So I have gone full circle.

In Chrome Awesome Screenshot Capture works well for browser captures.

Touchfreeze automatically locks touchpad

touchfreeze - Project Hosting on Google Code
Annoyed when you are typing a document and accidentally the palm of your hand brushes the touchpad, changing the position of the cursor in your document or accidentally clicking on an option. TouchFreeze is simple utility for Windows NT/2000/XP that solves this problem. It automatically disables touchpad while you are typing text. Like syndaemon on x-windows.
Comments: Have not used but marking for future.

Remove Old Java Installs

JavaRa Updates and Removes Old and Redundant Java Versions - Windows - Lifehacker
Windows only: Tiny utility JavaRa cleans up older or redundant versions of the Java Runtime Environment
Comments: Look in Add/Remove Programs, do you have 4 versions of Java? Dump them with this little gem. Updates Java too and removes the startup entry. This is a good way to update Java and have control over the process.

Port Forwarding Program

Download Simple Port Forwarding | Simple Port Forwarding™
Comments: This interesting little program will handle port forwarding. As yet I can't see why it is any improvement over directly tweaking the router's setup page but the program is kinda cool. Maybe it could be useful, someday ... for something.

Optimize Services (lazy man's version)

Smart PC Utilities - Download Center

Comments: Today's huge memory and fast processors eliminate some of the importance of optimizing services. If you are a big time gamer the "Gaming Mode" on this program might be handy. If you have an old PC, this program might give it more life. View video here. I have not tried it.
via: Gizmo

PDF to Word Converter

PDF to Word Converter — 100% Free!
Using our PDF-to-Word conversion technology, you can quickly and easily create editable DOC/RTF files, making it a cinch to re-use PDF content in applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect.
Best of all, it's entirely free!

Comments: Try cut/paste text from a pdf to anything. Fun right? This online service will convert the pdf to doc or rtf and email a copy to you. If you can not find your little conversion program or don't have one, this works. If you want a stand alone program try pdf2word.

If you want to split, join or collate try or PDFTK Builder or PDF Binder

Windows SteadyState

Get SteadyState now

Are you ready to download Windows SteadyState for your genuine Windows XP or Windows Vista computer? There's no charge. Download it now, or look around and learn more.

Windows SteadyState

Comments: Keeping multiple computers running is tough. Steady State (free) drops any changes to the system upon reboot. Motel lobbies would be a good application.

Sorry Mr. Windows 7, Microsoft says no plans to support. Too bad, it works well.

Hard Drive Recovery

When trouble strikes your hard drive, searching for programs to fix it can be disconcerting. Here is a nice review and description of several free programs to try.

Tweaking Windows 7

Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a stand alone tweaker worth trying even if you only want to remove "shortcut to" dialog.

I don't do much tweaking with Window's 7 on a fast dual core. I even leave indexing on. But there are a few things. Maybe I will add them here some day.

DNS Servers - Choose The Fastest

Here is a little program (DNS Benchmark) for testing DNS servers to find the fastest from your area. Run it and record the fastest into your router. I'm not sure how much difference it makes but my browser seemed to perk up a bit. 4.2.2.5 ended up changing places with 4.2.2.2 but I could have chased them around for little benefit.


Or just use OpenDNS 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220
Here is a good article on why you may want OpenDNS.