Windows only If you are anything like me you likely hate when something makes itself start with Windows without first notifying you.

The new (default) Windows 8 interface is something that Microsoft has spent a lot of time rethinking, and will drastically shift the way we use computers. The good news is that the classic Windows 7-style interface is still buried underneath for those that want it, but you won't be able to move completely away from the Metro-style UI.

I remember when Microsoft first came out with Windows Vista and they introduced the Aero theme. One of the computers I had at that time didn't have the graphics chip needed to support the Aero interface in all its splendor. Going back and using the Windows Basic theme was rather depressing because not only did it look clunky, but you couldn't even customize the color.

When things start to go wrong on your computer what is one of the first things you do (after punching your monitor, of course)? Often times I resort to Safe Mode, which prevents a lot of third-party and non-critical processes from starting up. If you try to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8 using the typical F8 key you'll be a little shocked when you're not actually prompted to enter Safe Mode.

Like many of the geeks out there I downloaded the Windows 8 Developer Preview last week so that I could play around with it.

Windows only Programs like Notepad++ are great because they provide powerful text file editing, but the searching can leave something to be desired. Text Filter is an app dedicated to searching through text files and it does a great job of it. It instantly highlights results as you type, and can optionally hide lines that don't contain any matches.

Notepad (in Windows) has a unique feature that a lot of people don't know about. If you open a file in Notepad where the first line contains ".LOG" you will automatically see the current time and date appended to the end of the file. Here is how it works:

Windows; Mac; Linux The other day I needed to scan a range of IP addresses to find out which ones were actually in use, and I began looking for a tool that might make that task a little easier. I found some things that could be run through the command line/terminal, but I figured there had to be something that had a GUI. That's when I stumbled across Angry IP Scanner.

Windows only Before posting or sharing photos you might like the piece of mind knowing that there isn't any identifiable information stored in the metadata of your images. For example, if you've taken a photo using your cellphone there is a good chance that the image was also tagged with the GPS location where it was shot.

Windows only Windows includes several different command line tools that are useful for viewing network-related details on your computer such as ipconfig, route, and netstat. The ipconfig command provides TCP/IP configuration information, route lets you modify your system's IP routing table, and netstat displays active connections and ports.

Windows only I have seen all kinds of utilities that tap into the context menu that appears when you right-click on an application's titlebar. Often times they can adjust the transparency, pin the window so that it stays on top, and adjust the process priority of the app.

Windows only Are you looking for a light-weight screenshot utility that does only what you need it to? LightShot is about as resource-friendly as you'll find considering it uses a mere 2MB of memory while running. With it you'll be able to select an area of the screen you want to snap for your screenshot, and then choose from a variety of actions:

Windows only Wouldn't it be nice if you could see a larger preview of an image without having to actually open the photo? That's exactly what FastPreview does, and it does a pretty awesome job of it. All you have to do is right-click on the image file and a larger preview will be shown right there in the context menu.

Windows only A couple months ago I wrote about an app that could be used to download songs from Grooveshark, but it was limited to songs you searched for one-by-one or songs that are on Grooveshark's "Most Popular" list. The free SciLor's Grooveshark Downloader can do all of that as well, but it also has a some other awesome features.

Windows; Mac; Linux When I've had to compare two files in the past I've always used the free WinMerge. There is no arguing that this is an awesome free app, but there is one feature it has always lacked that the developers say they won't add. That feature is a way to view only the lines that are different between two text files. Here is what the WinMerge FAQs say:

Windows;  Linux Areca Backup is one of the few backup utilities that I've seen that runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Like most backup utilities you can choose what files you want to backup and where you want to send them to, which includes backing up the files to an FTP/SFTP server. You can also have the the backup zipped to help save some space.

Windows only Students these days have a lot of resources available at their disposal thanks to the Internet. In fact there is so much out there that most students will never even use a lot of the tools available, and a good example of that is Microsoft Mathematics.

Windows only There are some times where it would be nice to reset important registry values and services back to their default state. With RefreshPC you can do exactly that. They don't list out exactly what changes are made, but there are over 300 registry settings and services that will revert back to their original state.

Windows only I use PDF printers quite a bit since I've grown accustomed to having the feature built-in on my Mac. In order to do this on a Windows machine you'll need a third-party application, and there are quite a few that you can choose from. Most of them all do the same thing, but we came across one recently that we liked.

Windows only There are a lot of apps out there that will calculate hashes for popular formats such as MD5, SHA1, and CR32. Some of them try to conveniently integrate into Windows Explorer so that you can just right-click on a file and view the hash, but very few apps have an option where they can recursively crawl through an entire folder and record the hash for each file it comes across.