Windows Utilities II

Continuation of my earlier post.:)

The earlier incarnations of Windows kept their application settings in easily configurable .INI files, but have now packed them into a registry file. Most users don’t ever peak into the registry since it’s a cryptic and huge file to mess around with. That said, there’re two programs that keep things manageable as the registry can get bloated over time. There’s CCleaner which checks for invalid and errorneous entries, and Quicksys RegDefrag to compact the registry when CCleaner’s done with its maintenance routine.

Communication tools: I’ve stuck with Outlook for email for 12 years now – I was previously a Eudora user in the mid 90s – and even despite my best attempts to frequently delete email that doesn’t need to be kept, the compressed email folder has grown over the years to a few gigabytes huge. I use also a small Startup program called PopTray that checks for POP3 mail from my domain-based account, with the Gmail notifier plug-in on Firefox for the Gmail accounts. Photos get uploaded to our Flickr album using Flickr Uploadr.

Both Matt and Ann both wondered a while ago how was it that my SMSes are so long-winded and quick too. Matt surmised that I must be a really quick thumb-typist LOL. Truthfully though; I use MyPhoneExplorer. This amazing free tool is for Sony-Ericcson phones, and supports Bluetooth, message archiving, file browsing and Outlook Calendar synchronization.

Browser wise, while Internet Explorer is always in the background, I’ve typically used anything but that. I stuck with Netscape for about a decade until I switched to Firefox in 2004 I think. Firefox is a godsend. Highly customizable with the gazillions of plug-ins available for it, though I just keep a small handful: Gmail Notifier + Adblock, Adblock Plus, and FxIF that lets me view EXIF data on web photos. Firefox loads a little too slow with many plug-ins. I tried out the other browsers too, including Chrome and Opera but still prefer Firefox.

Up till recently, the blogs here were written using the browser client off WordPress. While the interface is graphically driven (sort of), it still felt clunky. I recently discovered Windows Live Writer however, and blogging is so much easier now. Image manipulation is better featured (those nifty photo tilts and captioning in the Oratorio posts were done using a Writer plug-in), and the program supports multiple blog accounts. Best of all, it supports offline blogging that allows me to compose posts sans connection, then post them all up.

Image manipulation. Well, for full edits, noise removal, photo merging and HDR work I still stick with Adobe Photoshop and a few other tools but none of those are free. For quickie edits though, I’ve become very fond of FastStone Image Viewer. It’s very quick, supports customizable thumbnail previews, and most important reads the embedded JPGs in RAW files just fine. It can also do batch image manipulation, including resizing, conversion etc. It’s all free, and the batch functions work far better than clunky Photoshop. For more complex and RAW edits, there’s Picasa that wraps image editing functionality under a nifty UI.

And lastly to round off the lot: Automatic Wallpaper Changer that rotates the background wallpaper every now and then, and MP3 Tag Editor for me to manage all the several tens of thousand classical music MP3s I’ve bought from eMusic.

Wow – quite a long post even with just brief notes on each software. And I haven’t talked yet about the paid stuff and a whole bunch of other software utilities I also keep for FTP, PDF creation, messaging, ISO disk image manipulation, optical image burning, batch file renaming, file compression and encryption (handy for my test papers) . Maybe in another post some other time.:)