I am compiling a list of programs (in no particular order) that I actively use that I think are great additions to your stock XP install. I’m not going to mention things that I think are obvious, such as Firefox. More the little obscure programs that I’ve been really stoked to find.
- This guy has many handy little programs, but the one I needed at the time was unstoppable copy. If you have ever used tried to copy a bunch of files in windows, and it comes up with an error, totally screwing up the rest of your file copy. Especially if you chose move, and it had started removing other things or maybe it didn’t, but you just don’t know and it’s headache time. Use this.
- Truecrypt is a great tool for creating encrypted volumes. There are lots of different options for how much you want to encrypt it, putting it on USB keys, making it ludicriously hard to get into, whatever. They seem to take security very seriously indeed, so check it out if you need to encrypt something, whether to just hide something from casual inspection or to hide it from the government.
- This site has a whole lot of Microsoft “Powertoys” for XP. A few of the ones that caught my eye; Alt-Tab Replacement – In addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. I’m using this one right now, but I haven’t had a chance to test it out with some decent multitasking. RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer – Now you can organize and work with digital RAW files in Windows Explorer (much as you can with JPEG images). This tool provides thumbnails, previews, printing, and metadata display for RAW images. I have yet to try this one, but I’m sure it would make dealing with RAW files just that much more transparent to you. Open Command Window Here – Adds an “Open Command Window Here” context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder. Very cool, very handy if you need to quickly run something from a particular folder, but can’t be bothered cd-ing there every time.
- Baregrep is a windows GUI version of the unix grep command. Basically it is a very advanced very fast search program for windows. You can use it to search for text inside files. It supports regex and heaps of other options. Also, it’s fast. There is also Baretail, which is a free real-time log file monitoring tool, again, a windows GUI version of the unix tail command.
- Coretemp is a compact, no fuss, small footprint program to monitor CPU temperature. So simple, quick, and easy to use.
- SIW – System Information for Windows gives you more information about your system than you ever wanted to know, from licenses to loaded dll files, from drivers to open files and far more. If you are looking at delving deeply into your machine you can also check out two other great tools I use, Autoruns and Process Explorer. These two are both from microsoft. Autoruns is great for optimizing your machine and removing unwanted programs at startup. Why not use msconfig you may ask. Autoruns gives you so so so many more things to choose from. There is about 20 pages of things you can disable if you so desired. Process explorer gives you very detailed information on what is running on your machine. You can use it to track CPU time and memory usage for individual threads/processes. It is like task manager on crack.
- StrokeIt is an advanced mouse gesture recognition engine and command processor. I’ve been using this one for years. It hasn’t been updated since 2005, but I haven’t tried to look for any other program because I haven’t really had any problems with this. I’m guessing it won’t be compatible with Vista, so the dreaded day I have to move onto that I might have to find something else.
- Taskbar Shuffle is something really simple that I have been wanting for so so long. I can’t say I ever really looked that hard at finding one, but while reading this article, I came across it. It is called Taskbar Shuffle. It “is a simple, small, free utility that lets you drag and drop your Windows taskbar buttons to rearrange them”. Exactly what I’ve always wanted! I generally always like to have my browser over on the left had side, or at work I like to have a few apps that I pretty much always have to have open on the left in a particular order, yes, I’m very specific about things like that. It is always annoying when/if they crash or something and I have to open them up again, now it is in the wrong place, and it takes precious moments to find where it is again in the taskbar! The other cool feature I love about it is you can middle click on that application in the taskbar and it closes it, just like closing tabs in Firefox or what not. Very cool.
- Some useful links here and here.
