Soluto offers to minimize your boot time, even with Windows 7 boot time is time wasted and a spark for frustration but this utility states it can cut a significant portion of your boot time.
http://www.soluto.com/
They even call it “Anti-Fustration software” 🙂
I have not tested it yet, but it does sound promising.
Hopefully you have your Windows machine set to receive updates automatically? But do you ever check that updates are actually downloaded, and installed and what about third party software?
Well, this tip is an oldie, but still quite good and worth a mention;
Secunia (a very skilled security company) offer several products for evaluating your Software readiness (ranging from corporate products to free online personal scanners).
Check it out at (at the very least do an online scan);
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/
CNet also offers a new product called TechTracker which more or less does the same thing;
http://www.cnet.com/techtracker/?tag=mncol;pm
I actually thought I had written this post long ago, but it would seem it somehow slipped my mind.
Anyhow, have you ever found yourself running out of diskspace – wandering what the h… is eating up all your diskspace… most have and it can be a complex matter to find that strange .zip or .log file (or whatnot file) that is floating around somewhere and taking up hundreds if not thousands of megabytes.
The solution is a cool freeware util Windirstat that will convert your drives filestructure to a graphical display, here you can just click on the large objects and see which file it is and thus quickly find those large files that is taking up space..
Sure there are other util’s like this, some may even be better I don’t know – but this one is simple, small, free and works..
http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/
a fairly good alternative is;
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/
this works much the same way just with a pie chart instead, and as I recall requires java installed.
Long ago I wrote about www.jingproject.com (a free and cool screen capture software), but recently I was made aware of a “competitive” product called PicPick which is equally free and cool.
Compared the two products offer some advantages over each other;
Jing: Upload directly to screencast, video capture possibility and also a layered approach (when adding text and arrows onto captures).
PicPick: Lots of different capture modes (eg. freehand) and a build-in graphics editor in which you will work with your capture (ala Paint from windows).
Both:Hotkey support (pipick even separate hotkeys for the different capture modes), option to add both text and arrows to the capture to underline your point.
Which is better is hard to say – I guess it depends on what kind of captures you do the most.. A merge of the two products would be ever so cool 🙂
I think PicPick offer some great options when talking capture modes and also the build in editor is nice, it is however annoying that the editing is not layered (if you add an arrow it is added into the graphics and cant thus be changed later as opposed to Jing). Maybe you will just have to have both 😉
Get PicPick free here; http://www.picpick.org/home
Get Jing free here; www.jingproject.com
Want to ‘cache’ google maps for offline viewing?
Check this out;
Gmap catcher
Read more here and here
Download it here; http://code.google.com/p/gmapcatcher/
(Screenshot is from an older version than the current 4.9)
Yet another free partitioning CD (why in the world pay for Partition Magic), this CD will let you boot from it and resize your partitions and much more (free).
As primary a Windows admin I get a bit discouraged by products like Nagios – although it’s definitely a cool product installing it seem complex and with little knowledge on Linux maintaining it even more so.
So are there any Windows (free) alternatives out there?
Yes, and propably more than one, however is there any open source/free versions among these?
I found two;
http://opennms.org/wiki/Installation:Windows
It claim to run on windows and have basic capabilities, I have not looked into details so I can’t say just how deep it goes (Nagius supports SNMP and very detailed monitoring, OpenNMS at a glance seem more like superficial monitoring). Anyway, it’s free and may just be enough for you, so take a look at it.
Demo available at;
http://demo.opennms.org/opennms/index.jsp
user and password is both “demo”
http://www.spiceworks.com
I actually tested this once (a previous version), it is quite fine for smaller sites (and seem more extensive than OpenNMS), but when it come to wan connected sites it seem a bit heavy (works without agents installed). Then again, it’s free and this one is quite easy to setup and manage.
Yet other alternatives (Non windows though) is;
http://www.zenoss.com/
http://www.zabbix.com/
And this one that seem commercial;
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/
Do you remember the song by U2 – “I still haven’t found what I am looking for”, are you forever lost when trying to keep order in your digital archive, can’t you ever find the document/picture/pdf/spreadsheet you are looking for – well then this may be of interest to you;
Benubird, benubird is a document management system that will analyze and organize your files/documents/spreadsheets etc. and add meta data to your files for better search results. It seem very clever indeed and it is of cause free (as the bird 😉 )..
Give it a spin if you are working with large amounts of data, it looks very promising.
Now this is somewhat clever, I have not yet tried it so I can’t say for sure how good it works but the concept is clever.
You agree with some of your friends that you will use each other as backup-hubs, install Buddy Backupand then define each other as trusted friends, then your data is backed up to your friends computers via P2P (of cause in encrypted format so your friends can’t look at your data)..
It is free and rather clever.
Read their getting started guide here
Download it here (sadly it is not available right now, a new version should be very close to release – even so close that they removed the old version – I have written to them requesting a release date but not received any yet).
I actually did not know Paragon had a free edition of their partition manager software, but it turns out they do.
Now I am sure it is crippled just enough to be useless but I may be wrong, so you may want to give it a spin (heck it’s free so it won’t cost you a dime) 🙂
Update;
I just tried it out, and beside the annoying thing that you had to register during installation (which is send to you via very slow email) then it is actually surprisingly full featured, you can resize, delete and whatnot – now this may just be enough for most. Try it before you spend money on something else or try out the equally free Gpart https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=910 which may offer a few additional features.