What’s This About?

MMM Free is a utility that runs in the background that automatically alters the Explorer context menu to a configuration that you can choose. MMM Free is a cut down version of a shareware product but it does a very good job of moving items that you use infrequently to a “Rarely Used” Submenu. It is a good alternative to using ShellExView which was reviewed earlier. Control Your Context Menu Items with ShellExView

Why Would You Want It?

When ShellExView was reviewed I said:

MS Windows provides many shell extensions as part of the OS. Also lots of programs add their own commands to the Explore context menu, Internet Explorer, etc. when they are installed to help with using the program. This makes the right click context menu in the system applications very useful for carrying out all sorts of operations and commands, however they can become cluttered with commands you never need or use. This can make it difficult to find what you want.

MMM Free allows you to still have all the context menu items available but in a sub menu to the single line “Rarely Used” in the context menu rather than switching them off permanently (or until you enable them again using the ShellExView program). So MMM Free gives you the option of always having all the context menu items but in a more user friendly and manageable arrangement.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Wakes up your computer from Standby or Hibernation
•  

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 39% [?]

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What’s This About?

ShellExView provides a detailed list of the shell extensions (in-process COM objects) that are used to display items in the Context Menu of Windows Explorer. These can then be individually disabled or enabled allowing you to have only those Context Menu Items that you really need.

Combined with a utility such as CMenuExtender which was reviewed here:

Create Your Own Explorer Context Menus with CMenuExtender

You can control your context menus to display only what you need and create commands to do what you want

Why Would You Want It?

MS Windows provides many shell extensions as part of the OS. Also lots of programs add their own commands to the Explore context menu, Internet Explorer, etc. when they are installed to help with using the program. This makes the right click context menu in the system applications very useful for carrying out all sorts of operations and commands, however they can become cluttered with commands you never need or use. This can make it difficult to find what you want. With ShellExView you an disable the menus you don’t need. ShellExView does not remove the shell extensions it just disables them so that you can always enable anything you need to get back. This also means that you can experiment using ShellExView to see whether you are making the right choice without any fear or permanently loosing any functions.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Lists all Shell Extension Objects on the PC
• Allows Enabling or Disabling of the Extensions
• Allows Details to be Copied to text or HTML files
• Opens Windows Registry at the Selected Object Entry
• Marks “Suspicious” Extensions
• Column Sorting of Display
• Highlight & Sort on Enabled/Disable Items

For more details about Shell Extensions and what they do go to ShellExView

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 28% [?]

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What Is It?

A utility that monitors the files accessed by any specified process or program. For the selected process it provides the filename and extension, last handle, last error, Opening module and address, the number of times that the file was opened and closed, number of read/write calls, total number of read/write bytes, the dll that made the last open-file call.

Why Would You Want It?

Ever wondered why a particular process is reading or writing to files so often or wondered what all the disk activity is about. Using Windows Task Manager and selecting the Read, Write and Other columns will show the overall activity but not which files or where they are located. This utility allows you to find out this information quickly and easily.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides details of files accessed by a selected process

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 26% [?]

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What Is It?

A POP3 and IMAP4 email viewer and manager. It will allow you to review emails on your email servers for multiple accounts in a tabbed interface. You can then choose to view the full text (but not HTML*) or delete the emails without full download.

*You can view the text portion of the HTML code.

Why Would You Want It?

To check, monitor and delete emails on your email account servers without having to download the complete email or using your email client. This can reduce the load on your Internet connection which can be useful if you are on a capped package or having to use a limited connection, particularly when travelling.

Why Do I Use It?

I use it mainly for quickly monitoring emails when I am away from home. The fact that I can carry it on a USB stick or removable drive or transfer it to another PC/Laptop makes it very useful to me. As removal of SPAM by ISP’s and the major web based mail providers is so good I don’t bother with defining rules, I simply delete manually anything that gets through.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides access to email on servers
• Allows email text to be viewed
• Allows emails to be deleted on the servers

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 29% [?]

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What Is It?

Zonesize is a simple utility whose sole purpose is to predefine window sizing templates on your monitor. These zones can be defined by pixel position or as a percentage of the screen size and they can overlap which is what makes the utility really useful. You simply drag the window over the zone and it automatically resizes to fit. It is one of the many “1 Hour Software” utilities from Skrommel at DonationCoder.

Why Would You Want It?

There are often times when you need to have 2 or more windows displayed on the same screen where you are using both programs at once. For instance you may be viewing a browser window while writing to another document. In these situations you may also want to drag and drop text or graphics from one window to the other. Zonesize allows you to have a predefined set of window sizes or zones to suit your working pattern

How Do You Use it?

Having defined the zones you wish to use you simply drag the window over the zone and allow it to resize automatically within a predefined time (user definable). You can drag the window from one zone to another to suit your required working arrangements.

Why Do I Want It?

I generally manage quite well with a 2 monitor “multi-monitor setup but there are times when I need access to more windows. Zonesize not only allows me to predefine some windows sizes for my working area across both monitors, it also allows for overlapping zones and zones within zones as you will see later. The benefits of overlapping zones, as is demonstrated in the example below, is the ability to quickly make windows active by clicking on the non-overlapped areas. Using a utility to keep windows “always on top” such as DeskPins - Help to Stop Other Windows Stealing Focus further enhances the use of Zonesize so that you can keep a smaller windows always on top within another larger window.

Note: In carrying out this review I have also come across:

Auto Window Manager from Eusing Software

Gridmove from JGPaiva at DonationCoder

which may be even better,I will check them out shortly.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Resizes Windows to predefined “Zone” sizes by dragging

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 30% [?]

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What Is It?

A simple and very versatile program to encrypt and decrypt text or files (less than 10mb in size).

Why Would You Want It?

To quickly and simply encrypt some text within a text file, word document etc. or to encrypt a small(ish) file.

Finding this utility started the other day, I needed to quickly encrypt a small amount of text. Full file encryption and attaching to an email seemed like a lot of work so I thought it would be useful just to encrypt the text. I then thought that quite often I send files to other people where we are developing the text but I don’t want some of them them to see all of it. So rather than cut out the text and send this to some of the group and then send a different file to others with all of the text, then have to get back different files and cut/paste the text into a master file, it would be better if I could just encrypt the sensitive information and send one file to everyone along with the password to reveal the hidden text to those who need to see it. This set me off on a mission to see if there was a suitable utility available. So I “Googled” using some of my essential keywords at the start of such a search which include “Freeware” and “Portable” - CliipSecure came up in the results so I downloaded it and tried it out. I was delighted with what I found .

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Encrypts/Decrypts Text
• Encrypts/Decrypts Files (smallish)

So that is a pretty short list but the way it does it and the options available are what makes it so impressive.

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Popularity: 47% [?]

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Or

A Cautionary Tale With a Happy Ending when You Don’t Backup Regularly

The real point of this post is that to not backup your essential and important personal data is often likely to end in disappointment and loss of perhaps your most precious memories in the form of photos and documents. This is one instance where the bullet was dodged.

So What Happened?

I spent this UK bank holiday weekend with my daughter, granddaughter and new grandson. As usual I was asked to do a few DIY jobs and to sort out a couple of things on her computer:)

It all started with trying to fix a simple wireless networking connection issue. The main problem she was having with her PC was connecting the wireless router and had resorted to trailing wires across the living room to connect the router by the network cable. At least this gave the necessary access to the router and to the Internet if needed. Sorting out the router was basically down to setting the router name and password using the web based settings utility rather than the provide GUI based utility on the broadband providers setup CD. Not that the CD utility didn’t work but it was just more difficult than using the web based setup screens. A triumph of creating complication when trying to simplify things for a less knowledgeable user. Reference was made to the web based utility at the end of the instruction book “For Mac Users” so the average windows user would never realise it was there.

So setting up the user access to the router and connecting to the PC all went relatively easily. We had been out earlier that day and my daughter decided to transfer the pictures she had taken to her PC. Apparently at some point this froze and she turned the PC off with the power button. If only she had said something to me first! We could have at least looked at the options of invoking the task manager with Ctl-Alt-Del before going for the doomsday solution. As to whether anything done in setting up the wireless router caused the crash I don’t know, my personal feeling is that so many things get changed by installation of programs, windows updates, etc. that any OS is often only one or two changes away from “meltdown”

Disaster

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Popularity: 47% [?]

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Just a quick post for my loyal readers.

My current installation of Windows XP is now grinding to a halt. (Not sure if that is the right expression as whenever a Windows OS reaches this stage, in my experience, it is in fact resulting in endless disk activity and very little else

Anyway the time has come to reinstall an earlier backup, update with the latest “Windows Security Updates” and then reinstall the essential software.

This gives me a great opportunity to share with you all the details of the software I currently have installed, the programs I consider essential and the ones I won’t be bothering with in future . Of course this will be my very subjective view but I hope it will be of some use to you all in your decision making. A you probably know by now one of the main aims of my Blog is to help you in making decisions about what software and particularly Freeware to install. So the next couple of pots starting next week will cover this aspect.

So I intend to produce a table of my currently installed software, whether I will or won’t reinstall it and the reasons why!

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Popularity: 44% [?]

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What Is It?

Recuva is a Portable Freeware Utility designed to very simply find and recover deleted files including photos on your hard drives or removable media including flash memory cards used in digital cameras, PDA’s and mobile phones, etc. It is deceptively simple to use but very effective and with a little experimenting surprisingly powerful. Hopefully this review will reveal a couple of things not obvious in a casual trial.

Having recently permanently deleted (i.e not sent the files to the Recycle Bin) a small test set up then decided I needed to re-run it with the same settings I used Recuva to get back the files. I have used several free and commercial utilities in the past for file recovery and was immediately impressed with the ease of use of Recuva, this prompted me to write this post.

Why Would You Want It?

If you have ever accidentally permanently deleted a file or suffered some hardware failure that has partially corrupted the media or file referencing/indexing system then the first thing you need is a file recovery utility. With a Windows OS a lot of file writing goes on behind the scenes so you should attempt to recover files immediately.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Recovers Deleted Files
• Works with fixed drives and removable Media

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Popularity: 48% [?]

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What Is It?

WatchDOG monitors active processes and performs a restart of that process if it is stopped or alternatively starts a different process.

Why Would You Want It?

Have you ever wished you could automatically restart an application if it crashes or is accidentally closed? Or have you ever needed to start a process when another finishes. WatchDOG is a small application that will do this for you in a simple, convenient and user friendly way.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Monitors all active programs/processes
• Starts a defined process when another stops OR
• Restarts the stopped process

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freewar