UTILITIES – A FEW FAVORITES

by Lee Alexander

Introduction

Along with the necessities of a firewall, antivirus program, and anti-spyware programs my Taskbar contains a few often used shareware programs. The Utilities folder on my desktop contains 650 subfolders and 2229 files at the time of this writing, additional downloads probable. Like old comfortable clothing, I find it difficult to delete even those programs I have not used for a considerable amount of time. All of these utilities are either free or of a modest cost. The proliferation of shareware and my switch from dial-up to broadband has further fueled my addiction. You might label me a Utilities Junkie.

In this article I'll try to present a few (decidedly not all) of my favorites and their functions. As mentioned in a previous Novice SIG session, I have a folder named Downloads on a drive separate from where the actual utilities are kept.

Downloads are typically compressed (zip or exe) set-up files from which are extracted the utility's associated files. This can save a repeated download if something goes awry.

To access information and/or download the utilities, I suggest you Google the utility name to reach the latest sites.

The following paragraphs will list the utilities and their features in order of preference.

Irfanview

IrfanView is a popular freeware image viewer that can view, edit, and convert image files of dozens of image formats and play over a dozen video/audio formats. It is not a graphics creation tool nor a photo editor. It is designed to be a lightweight viewer/player. It can boast of over a million downloads.

The program is named for its creator, Irfan Skiljan of Bosnia and Herzegovina . IrfanView works under all modern versions of Microsoft Windows (i.e. Windows 95 and later). It supports many dozens of file formats including: image formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, non-image media files such as Flash, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG, MP3, and even text files. The program is incredibly small; the latest version 3.98 is about 900 Kb. However, if you have a broadband connection (or a fair amount of patience on a dial-up connection) include the Plug-In package at 5 MB. It should be noted that the plugin is necessary in order to view many file formats.

Still Irfanview is a very fast and powerful software.. Apart from converting file formats one can create screensavers using his or her own favorite images by IrfanView. These screensavers can even be exported to other computers and run even if Irfanview is not installed in that computer. It can also create icons by converting common graphic files into ".ico" format.

IrfanView's image editing capabilities, while lacking a freehand drawing mode, can still accomplish a wide variety of editing tasks . The program has built-in TWAIN support for retrieving images from scanners; it also has extended support for taking screenshots. It can crop, resize, and rotate images. Image colors can be adjusted by modifying the brightness, contrast, tint, and so forth. Its “red-eye reduction” feature works well and is very intuitive, as are most of the menu items.. Many of these changes can be applied to multiple images in one operation, using batch processing.

Suggested site for download: TUCOWS. If this is your first visit to TUCOWS, take time to look around, there is a wealth of info on the site.

CLIPOMATIC

This small utility (92 KB) by the prolific Mike Lin, adds a great extension to Windows' Clipboard. The clipboard is a volatile memory cache; when you end your Windows session, its contents disappear. Clipomatic contains two default clip sets and a large you to create many more. I suggest you resist the temptation to overbuild, managing the clip sets could become cumbersome. Clipomatic works only with text, not photos nor graphics.

On first use, the default.clipset will be created. The second default clipset is the permanent.clipset. Working with either one allows you to edit and Save As a newly named clipset. Executing Clipomatic puts an icon in the Systray. A right-click on the icon accesses the features of the program.

The keyboard shortcut for inserting a clip is <Ctrl> <Alt> V, just one more key then Windows standard (<Ctrl> V for paste) and easy to remember . It is also changeable, which I had to do when it interfered with another program.

<Ctrl> <Alt> V brings up a dialog box with the most recent clipboard item on the top, a separating line, the active clipset, another separating line, and the permanent clipset. The items in the active clipset all numbered and can be inserted by clicking with the mouse or typing the number. The number is restricted to a single digit, therefore only 10 items can be put in this type of clipset. The items in the permanent clipset are labeled with an alphabetic character giving us 26 items as a limit. All items are truncated to fit in the dialog box. The actual item can be many times the size indicated, limited only by memory size.

The permanent clipset is capable of fields, that is entries which are updated by your computer's clock, such as the date and time. The single character shortcuts users the % as a prefix; e.g., &w inserts the number of the week day, %a - the abbreviated day of the week, and %A - the full name of the week day.

The Help file is well written and should present no problems in working with the program.

Suggested site for download: www .mlin.net/Clipomatic.shtml

Rapid Resolution

This is a PC Magazine utility and therefore is not free as the previous two utilities. The magazine charges $7.97 for a single download or $19.97 per year for unlimited access to over 140 utilities.

The following is by the author, Charles Petzold.

Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours—but not always. You may, for example, want to run some particularly picky programs (games mostly) that require your system to be set to a particular resolution and color capability.

The standard way to change the video mode in Windows is rather clumsy. Before you can set the desired resolution and color depth, you have to open the Display Properties dialog box—the same dialog box you use to change your wallpaper and screen saver. To do so, you must either go through Control Panel or right-click on the Desktop and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Whichever you choose, the process is unnecessarily awkward.

RapidRes lets you make video-mode switches with much less fuss. The RapidRes icon sits in your taskbar tray. Simply moving the mouse pointer to the RapidRes icon shows you the current video settings. Just click on the icon with either the left or right mouse button, and you invoke a menu that lets you change the resolution, color depth, or refresh rate settings individually or switch to a complete setting combination in one shot. Double-clicking the RapidRes icon brings up the Display Properties dialog, allowing you to change the system-font size and other settings.

Suggested site for download : www.pcmag.com

Shutdown Pro

If you are adverse to paying for utilities, Shutdown Pro is a free alternative. Created by Kurt Zimmerman in Germany, the shareware has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. It is more versatile than Rapid Resolution but not quite as handy, generally requiring more than two mouse clicks. As its name implies, it is the quickest way I have found to close a session. Actually I have both Rapid Resolution and Shutdown Pro appear in the Systray upon startup. At a sparse 197 kB download, I recommend you give it a trial.

Suggested site for download :
http://home.tiscali.de/zdata/shutdownpro_e.htm

Gadwin's Print Screen

First up – realize you are capturing an image, not editable text.

The following is from the Gadwin web site:

Want to create a screenshot suitable for saving or printing? Then just hit a key on your keyboard. Oh yeah, you'll have to download this program first.

There are several hotkey combos to choose from (PrintScreen is the default). Once you've chosen your favorite combo, head to the Destination tab and have the screen print out instantly, copy the capture to the clipboard, save it to a specific folder, or even send it through e-mail. You can perform full screen captures, or only capture a specific window.

There are also six different image formats to choose from, and each one can be resized. With all the customization capabilities, what more could you ask for?

Why Gadwin PrintScreen?

On most Windows computers a full screen of data can be put on the clipboard by pressing the PrintScreen key. This sends whatever you see on screen to the clipboard, which you must then edit in a different graphics program to cut to the right size and image format. Here are some other reasons not to use the prefabricated PrintScreen function of Windows:

• Full screen of data can be put only on the clipboard.

• It is either difficult or impossible to capture some elements of a Windows screen, such as different shaped cursors.

• You spend too much time making image captures.

• Use Gadwin PrintScreen to save time and enhance your screen shots!

System Requirement.

Gadwin PrintScreen requires Microsoft ® Windows 98/Me/2000/2003/XP, or Windows NT 4.0SP6. If you are running any of these operating systems and have a Windows-compatible mouse or pointing device, your system has already met all the requirements necessary to run Gadwin PrintScreen. A full installation of Gadwin PrintScreen requires 1 megabyte of hard drive space.

Suggested site for download : www.gadwin.com