Most people carry a USB drive around for storing files on-the-go, but that's not all they are good for. A free (for non-commercial use) program called Predator will actually let you use a USB drive as a key for your computer. Basically, when you remove the drive the computer will lock itself, and it will be unlocked the next time you insert the drive.
If you use the Windows Task Manager on a regular basis there's a pretty good chance that you've tinkered with an application's priority. This is typically accessed from the "Processes" tab when you right-click on one of the entries, and from there you can assign the particular process a priority that the OS will use to determine which applications/processes should be given special treatment.
Sometimes it can be a pain to constantly rename new files and/or photos as you move them onto your computer. We've covered quite a few batch file renamers in the past, but one area that makes Personal Renamer unique is in its automatic processing capabilities.
I love coming across useful network-related tools, and SoftPerfect Network Scanner is pretty cool for both system administrators and geeky home users. With it you can scan an entire range of IP addresses and retrieve things like their host name, MAC address, response times, and much more.
There are a lot of integration points in Windows that developers can take advantage of, and many of them do. For example, if you have a program like 7-Zip or WinZip installed you may see related entries when you right-click on a file or folder.
Similarity is a pretty awesome app for anyone who doesn't keep their music library organized. I don't have a very large music library (just a few hundred songs), but I know people who have tens of thousands of songs. Once it starts getting that big I could see some duplicate songs sneaking in there...
If you're reading this site there is a pretty good chance that you already know how to use the ping and traceroute commands from the command prompt. If you only have to do these once in awhile I'm sure you don't mind opening up the command prompt, but if you're anything more than a casual pinger you may find the free PingMaster app to be useful.
Keyboard shortcuts are something I've always try to make the most of, and doing so has served me well over the years. One thing that Windows has seemingly lacked was a way to let me make my own keyboard shortcuts, but with Clavier+ I am one step closer to eternal keyboard bliss.
Freeing up some space on your hard drive may not be a concern right now, but down the road you may find that the space left on your drive is a little lower than you'd like. When that happens you'll turn to a disk space tool such as FilePro.
If there's one thing I do a lot on a day-to-day basis it would be taking screenshots. We've covered a lot of different apps that are able to take screenshots some of which are more complex than others, but DuckCapture may very well be the cleanest and fastest way to get the job done.
I've never been much of an artist, but that doesn't mean it's not fun to dabble with some of the art-focused software. I'd link to think that a lot of the software would be better served if I had a drawing tablet to tinker with, but I'd say that my mouse skills are probably on par with any hand-drawn creation that I could come up with. Yeah, it's that bad.
Have you ever erased something from your computer, but were then concerned with whether the information would still be accessible? One situation I can think of is when giving away or selling a computer/hard drive, and the fear that the new owner may try to recover the information that you left behind on the drive.
Over the last few years I've written about several video converters, but I always felt that none of them offered the simplicity that they I know they should.
Like many things in life the art of taking photos can be a lot of fun, but the aftermath of organizing the images isn't always that exciting. It's especially daunting if you have thousands of photos scattered around in obscure locations on your computer that you always meant to sort, but never quite got around to.
Have you ever tried to open a file just to find out that you don't have something installed that is able to handle it? That's where the Universal File Viewer comes in. This free portable app is able to open most filetypes, and prevents you from having to hunt down the right app for the job. It supports most text, images, videos, documents, and many more.
I've found a lot of great apps thanks to commenters on our site, and credit for this one goes to an anonymous visitor on our article about automatically restarting crashed apps. The program I'm talking about is called Kiwi, and it has some unique monitoring capabilities that aren't found in many other applications.
Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
Copying and pasting is something that we've come to do on a regular basis without thinking twice. What I find interesting is that over all of these years the basic concept has not changed. On most operating systems you copy one item, it gets stored on a clipboard, and is immediately overwritten when a newer item is copied.
About two months ago we wrote about how you could grab O&O Defrag Professional 10 for free, but now you can get one step closer to the latest version without dropping a dime.
Keeping tabs on my machine is something I've done for as long as I can remember. I like watching the performance of my applications, monitoring network connections, and all of that stuff most people would never think twice about.
