Organise your Desktop more effectively

Multi-tasking is the order of the day. Everyone tries to do multiple works at the same time to increase his or her productivity. However while multi-tasking at your PC, it often becomes difficult to manage all the windows that we open. So here are some tools that will increase your efficiency while multi-tasking.
Taskbar Shuffle: we open several windows as and when required and under the windows operating system, the tabs of these programs are placed on the extreme right of the taskbar. However we want to keep similar windows together so that it is easier to cycle through them. Unfortunately this is not possible under windows XP & Vista although it is possible under Windows 7. However, this can be accomplished with a small tool i.e. Taskbar Shuffle. It not only makes it possible to rearrange the tabs on the taskbar, but also allows you to rearrange the icons on the system tray.
Virtua Win: now if you open too many windows at a time, a single taskbar may not be sufficient for you. Keeping tabs in two rows would not be a very good idea as screen space comes at a premium. To solve the issue you can use Virtua Win. This application allows you to have multiple desktops and switch between them according to your needs. When you open it, an icon appears in the tray, right clicking on it allows you to switch between tabs. While the program is running, you can middle click on the title bar of any program to take it to another window. With this program you can have as many as 9 desktops although it beats me why anyone would want to have that many.
TClock: while you are trying to increase your efficiency, it always pays to keep a watch on the time. TClock lets you do just that. It helps you to keep a closer look on the time. You can customize the way time is displayed on your taskbar. You can chose to display time only or the time and date. It also allows you to set alarms and timers. In fact, it has many more tricks up its sleeves, but I leave you to figure them out.
Hint: while TClock is running, right click on the time and go to TClock properties.

Want Google Wave Invites?

OK, a lot's been said and discussed about google wave, so i'm not going to discuss all those again over her. i'll just quote what I told my friend over IM when he asked me about it:

Its a new service from google,they call it an email replacement.

what happens here is you basically write a message which is called a wave,its the convergence of email and IM.

if one is online he will be able to see the message right away and reply to it.

in addition you can just drag n drop an image or post a video url and it will play inside the window itself.

Then you can use google maps to show a place to the other person etc.

Best of all, multiple people can join a single wave and have a conference, all the time using all these features

then there are gadgets which you can add inside like chess, sudoku and similar stuff just to pass your time

OK, so just a general conversation in not a very good English. So why I write this is, there are a lot of people out there who want an invite. I have 6 invites, just ask me for one if you want. Just leave a comment over here with your email ID.

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Get old versions of softwares

Softwares are generally updated. As developers find bugs and develop new features, a software is updated with bug-fixes and these new features. But not all updates are liked by people. Sometimes when software gets updated, people find it less usable than the older versions and prefer to remain with the older versions. however these older versions disappear over time and we have to change to a new a software or are forced to use the new version. for instance, Nero 6 was very light weight & had all features one would want. But with subsequent versions it suffered a feature overload & the size kept on growing. Now it takes over a GB on installing. flashget was adware free till 1.96, but version 2 displays ads. So, sometimes you might prefer to stay with the older version.

However, the older versions are not all lost. Some sites offer old versions of softwares for download. If you want the older versions of any software, you can visit the following sites:

http://www.oldversion.com/

http://www.oldapps.com/

http://old-versions.net/

One of my personal favourite mobile software is opera mini. there may be 100s of reasons you might want to stay with an older version. so here you can get all old versions: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=221224

Feel more secure with Prio

Most of us are familiar with the windows task manager. Mostly the only purpose it serves is ending those programs which are not responding. However it can be much more useful, only if you install Prio on your computer.

Prio adds a services tab & a TCP/IP tab to task manager. Just like you can right click on a task & go to its process, you will be able to eight click on a process & go to its service. This helps you find out any service which serves no purpose to you. On hovesring over any process details of the process are shown along with the path to its executable file. Both these features combined, help you to determine if any malicious software is running on your PC.

With the TCP/IP tab you can determine which process is using your internet connection. You can thus get to know if any malicious software uses you connection.

So give Prio a try and free your PC from unwanted processes.

Just a small tip, If you want to know more about any service, go to start>run, type services.msc and press enter.
Now locate the service and click on it, the left pane shows the details of the service. To know more about any process, go to processlibrary.com ant type the name of the process.

FreeCommander for browsing your Hard Disk

Any regular visitor to my blog would know by now that that I write only about free software, this may change in times to come as I run out of very interesting but less popular softwares. Right now however, I bring you another fantastic piece of software i.e. FreeCommander.
If you often deal with many files, that too of many types mixed together, then you would have often found yourself craving for more features in windows explorer. However, the fact remains that it does not have many helpful features to make file handling easy. So FreeCommander comes to your rescue.
FreeCommander’s interface is divided into two panes displaying separate folders. Needless to say you can drag & drop between the two panes making organizing files an infinitely simpler task. It also has tabs allowing you to open more than 2 folders in the same window. It can treat .rar, .zip & .cab files as folders allowing you to browse them & extract individual files if required.
 It has a multi-rename feature which comes in handy while renaming a lot of files in any particular order (this is however far less powerful than Lupas Renamer discussed in earlier posts). FreeCommander letsyou filter files based on their extensions. It also lets you store predefined filters. For example you can store a filter named documents with extensions .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf etc. Trust me; reducing the number of files being displayed on the screen makes things much easier.
All these features combined with small additions like one-click access to any drive or even control panel, splitting up of files, opening command prompt with current folder etc. make it a fun software to use. There are many more features you will find out while using the software. Sometimes you start wondering who the good person is who makes your life so easy, that too for free.
Give it a try, download here. You can also download a portable version here.
See a screenshot
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Nero is now free

  Nero, one of the most popular CD/DVD burning software, is now available for free. Although nero Burning ROM has always been free, the much easier to use and good looking StartSmart was a paid software. But now it is not. However, it does not contain the additional softwares like Nero Home, Nero media player, Nero Vision etc. that were a part of the pack. It also does not allow you to make mp3 and video CDs & DVDs. In some sense, this is actually good. It is now very light weight and does not contain anything which in any case, you would never have used. The advantage of Nero, according to me, is that it is extremely reliable and there is very low probability that discs burned with Nero will have any errors.

The interface of StartSmart is familiar to most of us and with slight changes from version 8, looks even better. The download is just 54 MB. Download it from here.

An alternative download & screenshots are available at filehippo

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Use Lupas Renamer to rename your files

once in a while there is a time when we have to deal with a large number of files and at some point of time we would need to rename them in bulk. For example we may have to remove all the blank spaces from the name of 20 files. Doing this with windows explorer would seem a daunting task. So to help you out there is Lupas Renamer.

Lupas renamer can handle any number of files or folders at a time. It can append names, crop names, insert or remove any character from any position in the file name. It can also handle extensions and auto numbering of files. It can also be used to rename files based on their ID3 tags.

Although active development of the software has ceased, still the last available version is quite useful and the simple interface makes it very easy to use. It does not need to be installed, that means it is a portable software. Download it from here.

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