AccelMan

AccelMan from Flexigensoft is a Windows Explorer replacement that looks pretty good.

Personally, I've been a Salamander person ever since my good mate Paul showed it to me ages ago. However, AccelMan has a few features that could make it a useful complement to Salamander.

A couple of features I particularly like are the ability to have more than two panes, to filter the display to only show files with a set of extensions, bookmarks and the fact that you can even have multiple tabs per pane.

Thank Goodness I Have My Own Air

... because, while watching this, I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe!

Thanks to Dvorak Uncensored for pointing me to this video.

Directory Listing Printer

I've only ever wanted to do this a couple of times, but each time it was a pain.

Karen's Directory Printer is a free Windows utility that generates nice listings of the files in a folder.

You can specify how the files are sorted and what properties are included. Very nice.

Thanks to Uneasy Silence for the link.

Cairo

I'm surprised that I've not heard of Cairo before ... maybe I did, but mistook it for this Microsoft Windows version that never eventuated.

In any case, this Cairo looks very nice. We should see it sometime later this year, because a release milestone was recently provided to alpha testers.

Unfortunately, the "Features" section of their website links to pages that simply say it's in development, so I couldn't find many details. I just know that it replaces the "start" menu and has its own Explorer equivalent.

The screenshots look good, anyway, and I look forward to the time that I can have a play with it.

TUGzip

It's not often I want to create an archive and when I do, I just use WinZip.

Most of the time, I'm looking inside them and Salamander does a fantastic job of that. Come to think of it, I've never looked to see whether Salamander can create archives; I wouldn't be surprised.

In any case, TUGzip looks like it could be quite useful, for those who aren't happy to cough up money to achieve these goals, since it's free.

Whoa There!

Process Lasso is a Windows utility that provides control over the amount of CPU various programs and processes use.

What to control can be specified by rules, such as "When any process is consuming 35% or greater of the CPU for 1.5 seconds or more and the total system CPU usage is 95% or greater, lower that process's priority until it returns to 5% CPU utilization."

Thanks to Life Hacker for the heads up.

Window Manipulation Made Easy

On my high resolution 24" Dell display, the width of the window edges that you need to grab in order to resize is tiny, when measured in physical mouse movement.

So, a big thankyou to Life Hacker for pointing me to WinMover.

This Windows application allows you to move and resize windows easily, by pressing the Alt key and dragging with the right mouse button pressed, anywhere within it. Watch the video to see what I mean ...



Now, if someone can just provide me with an equivalent for the Mac ... the ridiculous idea that window resizing should only be possible from one corner is one of the very few things I think Apple got completely wrong.

Get Me Out Of Here!

On Linux, I'm used to shutting the system down using a command like "shutdown -h now".

However, on Windows, so far as I knew, the only way was to go through the Start menu (or use the shutdown menu in Task Manager).

Thanks to Life Hacker for pointing out that Windows has a command-line shutdown command, too.

You can bring your system to a halt quickly using "shutdown -f -t 0".

The "-t 0" says not to wait for applications to exit, but I haven't tried to track down what the "-f" does. If you want to know, Google is your friend :-).

A Night On The Tiles

I just discovered a nice little Windows utility, called WinSplit Revolution, that makes it easy to tile a number of windows onto your screen.

The tiling can be initiated via either hotkeys or a little pop-up window. You can make a given window consume anywhere between one quarter and three quarters of the screen size, in both directions.

Admittedly, this is probably only useful on large monitors, like my 24" Dell, but if such a layout is useful to you then this is a nice, simple way to achieve it.

Driver View

Thanks to Life Hacker for pointing me to Driver View.


It displays a list of all the drivers installed on your Windows system, providing a dizzying array of information about each.

If nothing else, you may find the sheer number of drivers that are installed quite amazing ... there are 149 on my system!

Hallelujah!

One of the few things I think Windows gets right is the richness of the file open and save dialogs.

However, I still find it frustrating that you can't set up shortcuts to frequently used locations.

For example, I have specific folders where I save the installers for downloaded freeware, purchased software and Mac-specific applications.

Similarly, I have a folder where I keep all my PDF reference material, like books I've purchased or mathematics papers I want to read later.

Well, via LifeHacker, I finally have the solution! FileBox eXtender is a plugin that allows you to easily jump to any pre-defined location from any Explorer window, including open and save dialogs.

The icing on the cake is that it's freeware!

It currently does not support Vista, but if you're using that then you have bigger things to worry about :-).

Switching To Linux

One thing that often stops people from even attempting to turn their back on the evil empire and switch to Linux is that there's some Windows application or other they just can't live without.

Download Squad has a nice article detailing three sites that provide help finding Linux apps that are equivalent to various Windows ones.

For The Truly Paranoid

If you're concerned that some program you download may execute without your permission ... and aren't smart enough to just use Firefox :-) ... then Trust No Exe may be just what you're looking for.

It gives you complete control over which exe files can be executed, allowing you to white list those that are kosher.

Did you hear that noise? It's the sound of system administrators around the world installing Trust No Exe.