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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A Portable office package

When it comes to making a document or a presentation, Microsoft's office package is the default choice for everyone. However, if we ask people how many of them have bought the software, not many a hands are raised. Little do people realise that it is wrong to use pirated software, worst, many of them are not even aware that alternatives exist.

So today I introduce you to OpenOffice.org by Sun Microsystems Inc. This is a really worthy competitor of MS office and has got all features an average user needs. Its interface is quite similar to MS office 2003, that means it has menus and not a ribbon. However, menus are standard in windows and shouldn't be a problem.

I'l quickly introduce you to the softwares in this suite. It has 6 softwares. OpenOffice Writer is a document editor (Which I am using right now), OpenOffice Calc is a spreadsheet program, OpenOffice Impress is a presentation making program, OpenOffice Draw is a drawing application, that means a desktop publishing (DTP) software, OpenOffice Base is a database application fit for use in small offices and finally, OpenOffice math is an equation editor.

OpenOffice.org is a free software and is opensource. It is also available as a portable application from portableapps.com.

Do visit why.openoffice.org.

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Organize your music collection

some of us are very fond of listening to music on our PCs. There are many tracks lying on such PCs which are not well organized. We just listen to whatever is visible at the moment. Thus one day when we start looking for that track which we heard last month and liked very much, we can not find it.

It pays to keep your music well organized so that you can find any track when you want it. So here are some steps to organize your music well.

First of all, to organize ones music, it is necessary to understand ID3 tags. Id3 tag is way of storing information about the song in the mp3 file itself. Information such as album, artist, track number etc. are stored in these tags. Music is organized with the help of these tags.

Before starting any media library management software, it is better to put some basic information on the tags. For this download and install audio shell tag editor. This puts a tag editor tab in the properties of mp3 flies. Your might have your music stored in folders according to album or artist. Select all tracks in a folder, right click and select properties or press alt+enter from the keyboard. Go to tag editor tab and fill the common information pertaining to all tracks. Fill in any other information which you know. This may take a bit of time.

When you are done filling the information manually, its time to do some serious organize. Download and install Mediamonkey. The free version has a few features missing compared to the paid version but you wont miss them much. The download is just around 10 MB. After installation is complete, import all your songs into the library.

On the toolbar select “show album art with details” and “show track browser”. This view gives you easy access to all your tracks. Now use the auto tag feature to organize your music further. Select a song, right click on it and click auto tag from the web. Howsoever, this feature doesn't work very well with Hindi tracks, but will help you a lot if you have English music in your library. It also downloads the album art if available. Assign ratings to your favorite tracks.

Now in the track browser, by default, artist, album and genre are visible. You can right click the heading and choose any other field which you may like, for example ratings, if you have assigned them according to your preference.

Mediamonkey lets you create play-lists and save them as .m3u files. You can also synchronize your portable music player with Mediamonkey and it also supports Ipods. You can also copy songs to any external device while encoding them on the fly.

After your music is organized, you can use the search box in the toolbar to search for any track, it should come up within a second. No doubt having your music well organized and sorted makes it more fun listening to them.

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Use your computer in hindi

India has adopted the internet and its associated technologies very fast. Many people use various types of services on the internet. But most people are content just using those services, very few individuals are willing to contribute. Although there are many organisations and companies who are developing content for the Indian market, they are also compelled to develop in English language lest there product may not have a pan India appeal. This has led to a lack of awareness about the availability of Hindi as an option in computing. So I’ve decided to list a few options which may help you use your computer in Hindi.

The most popular search engine of the world, Google, is available in Hindi. Just go to google.co.in and click on Hindi below the search box. The popular online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is also available in Hindi. For this you will need to visit hi.wikipedia.org. it has many articles in Hindi, you may also make your contributions.

There are a few dedicated search engines for Hindi language such as hinkhoj.com and raftaar.com. With these you can search online for content in Hindi. The difference between these and Hindi Google is that Google searches only for Unicode fonts whereas these can search for legacy fonts as well.

We often need to translate a few passages in Hindi from English, but we are stuck with a few words of which we don’t know the Hindi form. To help you out there is sabdkosh.com. it thrives on user contributions and has a large repository of words.

Finally we come to writing in Hindi. Although Hindi keyboards are available but in reality they are tough to get.  And even if we get it, it might not be worth it to learn a new layout for everyone as some may need to type just a couple of lines. So people invented the concept of typing phonetically, i.e., you type the word in English as it would sound in Hindi and it gets typed in Hindi. For example, to write भारत you need to type bhaarat or bhArat.

We have two options for using this technology, online options and offline options. One very good offline software is baraha. It has a notepad like editor as well as an application to enable you to type Hindi directly in any application called baraha direct. Download it from here.

Quillpad.in is an online option. Quillpad’s being online has one added advantage, it matches your word with its dictionary before writing it. Thus spelling mistskes are reduced and you also don’t need to follow any rigid code.

Both baraha and quillpad support few other Indian languages also.

Before you try out Hindi, make sure your computer is adequately equipped to display Hindi correctly. For this open control panel and then regional and language options.  Go to the languages tab and check install files for East Asian languages. Then click apply. You will be asked for the Windows XP CD at this point. Insert it and click OK.

You can also transform Windows XP’s interface into Hindi. For this visit bhashaindia.com and download windows XP Hindi LIP. Keep in mind though that for this you will need to have genuine windows license.

It seems strange that I’m writing this article in English. This is because i want to reach to those who are not at all using Hindi language on their PCs. Hindi version of this blog post is also available at http://gouravhi.blogspot.com/2009/07/blog-post.html#links