Everyday tools
By Andrius Miasnikovas
In this post I want to share with you a few tools which in my opinion are really useful. A while ago I found this page called FileHippo that contains a lot of free software and they even maintain older versions which is great for when you’re searching for a particular version of some tool and can’t find anywhere else. But the really nice thing is that now they have this program called Update Cheker which you can download and install on you machine and it will analyze the software that you have installed and present you with a list of possible updates including the beta versions as a separate section. I really enjoy using it, in fact some time ago I even though of writing something like that of my own, but now I don’t have to, because someone already did all the work.
Another tool that I recently found is [In this post I want to share with you a few tools which in my opinion are really useful. A while ago I found this page called FileHippo that contains a lot of free software and they even maintain older versions which is great for when you’re searching for a particular version of some tool and can’t find anywhere else. But the really nice thing is that now they have this program called Update Cheker which you can download and install on you machine and it will analyze the software that you have installed and present you with a list of possible updates including the beta versions as a separate section. I really enjoy using it, in fact some time ago I even though of writing something like that of my own, but now I don’t have to, because someone already did all the work.
Another tool that I recently found is VirtuaWin which is basically a simple implementation of virtual desktops like the ones that unix-based window managers have. The things that I like about it that it’s lightweight, has a portable version that you unzip and don’t need to install anything and seems to be quite fast. Do note that I’m using it on Windows XP machines and have not tested it on Vista or Windows 7, but I would like to assume that it works.
A couple of other useful tools to keep your machine clean and running smooth are CCleaner and Defraggler accordingly. The first one cleans the cache, cookies and other temporary files left on disk by various browsers. Also it can scan the registry for the integrity issues and will create a backup of the keys that it modifies before fixing those. Defraggler is yet another disk defragmenting tool (there are quite a lot of them out there). The good things about it is that it is faster than the default Windows defragmenter and can defragment only the selected files if you want. Another defragmenting tool that I would definitely recommend is MyDefrag which doesn’t have a fancy user interface but seems to be taking the disk maintenance issue very seriously and is providing everything you need to do this. You can read some tips & tricks that they suggest which are kind of common sense, but not everyone might know this. MyDefrag features a screen saver that can start defragmenting your disk whenever you machine is idle, has script support for scheduling defragmentation and any customization needs that you might have. All-in-all I like MyDefrag better and this is the tool that I’m running every evening to keep my machine ready for any disk intensive tasks each morning.