DescentBB

Got a utility that you think is just fantastical and you want to share the experience with others?
Well here's the thread to use.

1st: Guidelines.
Shareware, Freeware only. Price of getting registered version say under 30 usd.
must be available as free download. crippleware ok.
No links to the latest commercial version of Paint Shop Pro 25.2.1 that prices out at more than your hardware.
edit: although you can check the price when you get to a site, it would be nice if you put down approx. how much the registered version costs.

Give a brief note of operating system, what it does and why you think it's the bee's knees.

I start.

1. Phord's Shove it. works with most flavors of windows.
moves improperly placed windows from off your toolbar or from outside the screen area. configurable to move some or all and let's you set the distance. works from your system tray. Shove It Single user license = 15 usd. Download available to try before you buy.

2. I've seen a discussion of Screensavers so i'll edit this when i find it.
edit: Is the scrolling marque screensaver a waste?
I like Serene Screen. Versions for Windows and others.
It's a fish tank with the most realistic fish I've seen. I like to put it on so i don't have to look at a black screen or my boring desktop. Serene Screen Aquarium Single user license = 19 usd
Download available to try before you buy.

ToggleMINIMIZE is a handy little application that helps reduce the clutter on your task bar. With ToggleMINIMIZE installed, when you minimize an application its icon appears on the right side of the tray beside the clock instead of taking up room on the main task bar area. To restore a minimized application, just click on its icon.

I love it.

Verran wrote:ToggleMINIMIZE is a handy little application that helps reduce the clutter on your task bar. With ToggleMINIMIZE installed, when you minimize an application its icon appears on the right side of the tray beside the clock instead of taking up room on the main task bar area. To restore a minimized application, just click on its icon.

I love it.

Thanks Verran, that is an excellent utility. I am using it now.

Got two+ monitors? http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

PodPlayer, lets you listen to your music on your ipod thought your computer without iTunes AND can rip all the songs off of it too (in case your comp crashes)

http://www.ipodsoft.com/index.php?/software/podplayer

MajorGeeks.com

I keep all of my tools on cd in case I need them for use on another computer, so if I need to add something to the collection this website has all the utilities out there. Just do a search and BAM! [/Emeril Lagasse]

Wizmo. Made by the same guy that did ShieldsUp and Spinrite, its a really small program that does a whole lot of stuff. I use it when I know I'll be away from the computer for a while, and I have two seperate shortcuts for it (one activates the screen saver, one shuts off the monitors).

Krom wrote:Got two+ monitors? http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

x2. Since I dont have nView on my Radeon 9800 this is the next best thing for putting a taskbar on my second monitor.

StrokeIt

adds mouse gestures to windows. very handy.

IrfanView

IrfanView is an awesome FREE progam that can view seemingly any kind of image file including many video formats. Can also manipulate the images (but it does not replace your paint/art program).

Notetab Lite

NoteTab Lite is a terrific FREE text editor with lots of tools. It is also one of very few text editors I've found that can easily (and quickly) handle text files in excess of 90mb in size. (great for working with horendously large log files). NoteTab Pro allows you to add on plug-ins and additional tools, but only costs $4.95 US.

Battlebot wrote:PodPlayer, lets you listen to your music on your ipod thought your computer without iTunes AND can rip all the songs off of it too (in case your comp crashes)

Good stuff. I was looking for something that would allow me to extract songs from my iPod.

WinRAR. Awesome archive manager. Shareware ($29).

PowerArchiver is even better: http://www.powerarchiver.com

7-zip > winrar

I know this is off topic but currently my favorite utility is: http://www.fpl.com/

Just stumbled across this one today and I like it...

http://www.sysinternals.com/

fliptw wrote:7-zip > winrar

Aye, powerarchiver does 7-zip also.

I guess some basics had to be listed at some point.

Regseeker (free) for all you lazy bastiges who don't want to sort through your registries key by key just to keep it relatively unclogged. I know I don't.

Daemon Tools (free) is good at making virtual drives.

ImTOO audio encoder is a pretty easy way to change your audio files from this extention to that. $24 to register, but the only restriction in the free version is you can only do 5 files at a time.

There are only two extensions you should ever need for your audio files: mp3, flac.

CDBurnerXP Pro was mentioned in a thread recently. It's a nice freeware CD/DVD burning utility that's undergoing continuous development. From what I understand, Nero runs around $100, so this is definitely a better option in my own opinion.

Media Player Classic hasn't gotten a nod yet. It's a great compact video player with built-in subtitle and multiple-audio support, among many other features.

VirtualDub always deserves some props for free AVI editing.

DOSBox is a great DOS emulator that can be used to effectively run many old DOS games/programs in a modern OS; it doesn't run too well with D1, though.

GIMP is a powerful open-source image manipulation program developed for Linux. There are also Windows/OSX ports available.

Looked through my programs list and found some more that I dont use as much but are super handy to have.

CPU-Z: Handy tool for displaying information about your system, including clock/bus speed. Also on that website is Clockgen, which I use to overclock my dual Xeon system within Windows. Clockgen only works with certain motherboards; check the site for details.

Audacity: Free audio editor, can edit and export audio files as mp3s. I use it mainly to create custom ringtones.

DVD Shrink: Free DVD copy tool, can shrink a 9 gb movie into a single 4.7gb recordable disk. Can burn directly to disc if you have Nero installed, or can save to ISO files for use with other burning apps. Used in conjunction with a DVD decrypter like DVD43, can copy just about any movie you throw at it.

Microsoft Powertoys: Its surprising that such handy programs came from Microsoft. The main ones I use are TweakUI (for configuring hidden options in Windows related to the GUI), Power Calculator (since I dont have a graphing calculator yet), and Image Resizer (useful for saving large numbers of pictures from my camera at the same resolution but much smaller file sizes).

for making perfect varialbe Mp3's from CD or extracting songs from otherwise unusable scratched CD's

These work together

Exact Audio Copy piped into LAME Encoder

foobar2000 for all you media playing and transcoding needs, makes that ImTOO thing kinda pointless. no need to pay for using free encoders.

Top Gun wrote:From what I understand, Nero runs around $100, so this is definitely a better option in my own opinion.

$79.99 (v7.0) on the website, but last I saw it was ~$60 in stores (but this was Nero 6 Ultra). However, if you legally own Nero 6, you can get 7 for free.

I second sysinternals.com. Lots of awesome utils on there, especially Process Explorer (lets you view all running processes on your PC) and Rootkit Revealer (finds rootkits, pieces of code installed directly to disk and are not reported to Windows).

MP3 Tag Tools - http://massid3lib.sourceforge.net - best prog I've seen for MP3 tagging