I'm sure many of you remember the "Power Toys" from the Windows XP days, and you probably have at least one of them installed if you're still running XP. My favorite was always the ability to quickly resize images with a simple right-click on the photo(s) from within Windows Explorer. It was fast, simple, and did exactly what you wanted it to.

There are some things I never understood with Microsoft. For example, why was it never possible until Windows 7 to have a keyboard shortcut for creating a new folder? Or for that matter why was there not even a toolbar icon you could add to perform that action? At least in Windows 7 they finally assigned Ctrl+Shift+N for creating a new folder, but that's not the only thing that's perplexed me.

I think that in the future we will be encrypting a lot of our data because, well, most of it probably won't be located on our own machines. When all our files are in the cloud encryption will be important to ensure the security of our data, but up to now most people have never worried about encrypting anything.

This is one of those apps you have to be careful with because the installer tries to throw some third-party software on your machine (details at the end of the post), but the end result is worth it. The Free MP3 WMA Converter from Koyote is capable of converting your entire audio library from one format to another.

A little while ago one of my co-workers convinced me to give the Miranda instant messenger a try, and at first I was reluctant because I had heard how much customization was typically needed to get it just the way you wanted it. Over the years I had downloaded it to play around, but it has a rather overwhelming number of options that you can mess with.

UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out certain antivirus applications are flagging this application as containing a trojan. My antivirus, NOD32, did not find any virus though. So it's up to you whether you want to proceed.

For the longest time I've been wanting Google to bring all of their services together into some sort of unified interface. A place where I could read my email, manage my calendar, catch up on news in my RSS feeds, search for a place on a map, and so on.

Last week Microsoft released a new version of Windows Live Movie Maker that I have to admit is rather impressive. I took some time to play around with it over the weekend, and the Ribbon interface makes creating movies so easy that I actually feel like new computer users could grasp how to do it in a matter of minutes.

I'll forewarn you that DeltaCopy is something you won't want to use for all of your backup needs because it's not the easiest thing in the world to set up. It is, however, useful if you're backing up large amounts of data every night that doesn't change very much.

Most computer power users probably open up the Windows task/process manager at least a few times each day. Maybe it's to close down an app that isn't responding, to see what's eating your system resources, or maybe even a bit more advanced like making sure you're aware of everything that's running on your PC.