What’s This About?

ClipGuru is a semi Portable Application which monitors the clipboard and stores the information it finds there as text or images. This type of application is generally referred to as a “clipboard extender”. It stores this information in a database which provides a history of stored clips that can be reused. It has a variety of useful options for both storing and recalling the stored information

Why Would You Want It?

ClipGuru is a small, portable and light on resources. It allows you to store text clips or images (copied on there own without any text).So if you need to store text on it’s own, or images on their own, with the option to save different sets and paste multiple selections this could be very useful.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Monitors the Clipboard for text or Images
• Stores information in a simple database
• Multiple storage sets
• Clip text searching
• Combine clips
• Combined pasting
• Manage clips

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 90% [?]

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What’s This About?

DisplayFusion (Portable Freeware version*) provides the ability to move and resize windows between monitors in a multi-monitor setup. It also allows you to set wallpaper and backgrounds from photos on your computer or from Flickr. It is a great alternative to the shareware “Ultramon” program.

* There is a shareware upgrade to a Pro version however the Free version does everything that I need.

Why Would You Want It?

If you use a multi-monitor setup (and for a serious computer user the only reasons I think you shouldn’t is lack of money or space) then moving windows, particularly maximized windows between the monitors is something you wan to easily do. The ability of DisplayFusion to move a maximized window from one monitor to another by dragging and dropping makes it worth installing for just this one feature. The addition of hotkey window operations and wallpaper/background management are just an incredible bonus

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Drag Maximized Windows between monitors/screens
• Move, Size and Maximize Windows with Hotkeys
• Set Separate Images as Screen Background/Wallpaper
• Auto Snap Windows to Monitor edges

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 97% [?]

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What’s This About?

Flexible Renamer is a portable program that will rename files and folders, change file attributes including dates, change tags for different file groups (music, photos, docs, etc.) It has very powerful rules and methods combined with a wide range of options, defined presets and methods as well as both simple and advanced ways of working.

Why Would You Want It?

The need to rename batches of files in collections of photos, music tracks, documents, archives, websites, etc. can be met by many programs. However, Flexible Renamer offers this and more in a small portable program which includes comprehensive renaming rules, changing dates, changing attributes, changing tag information for most common tagged files and the ability to create batches of prenamed files. Sometimes you just want to add something to a file name, for instance you may want to add a place and date to the name of all the photos you took on holiday. You might want to add  something to a batch of documents that all relate to the same project. As you can use the file date for sorting in many file explorer programs you may want to change dates as a method of indicating that older dated files are part of a “most recent” set on a particular subject. This, combined with the ability to also change the folder names and tag information makes Flexible Renamer very powerful

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Renames Files and Folders
• Provides comprehensive rules and rename methods
• Changes Attributes including dates
• Changes File Tag information for common tagged file types
  such as photos, music, documents, etc.
• Adds Shell Extensions for Context Menus (Optional)

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 100% [?]

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What’s This About?

PicPick is a portable freeware screen capture program and a drawing program combined with some other useful drawing tools including a screen ruler, color picker on screen drawing and screen protractor. The capture and drawing utilities are very much like Faststone Capture which is no longer freeware.

I first saw this on winAddons.com a couple of days ago, since when it has “been doing the rounds” on many of the tech blogs. So read on if you are interested in some more detail and screenshots on the full potential of this great little portable program. The version reviewed here is PicPick 1.8

Why Would You Want It?

PicPick provides several tools in one small portable package, all integrated into a single main Manager window(GUI) and also accessible from the system tray menu.

The main functions can all be used independently of each other so you could still use it as a drawing and picture or photo annotation tool even if you don’t need screen capture. Of course you might just want it as a free, portable and very versatile screen capture tool. The fact that extra tools are included is a real bonus

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Captures Screen
  • Full Screen
  • Active Window
  • Window Control
  • Region
  • Fixed Region
  • Freehand
  • Repeat Last Capture
  • Autoscroll (for pages longer than the on screen window)
• Drawing Program/Image Editor with
  • Standard shapes, arrows, lines, etc.
  • Blur, opacity, hue, contrast, brightness, pixelate, etc.
  • Rotate, Flip, etc. (Whole or selected part of picture)
• On Screen Drawing Tools (Whiteboard)
• Color Picker
• Color Palette
• Screen Crosshair
• Screen Protractor

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware
• Portable

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Popularity: 63% [?]

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What’s This About?

Winsock XP Fix is a tiny utility whose only purpose is to simply repair Winsock and TCP/IP errors from errors or corruption of the registry, etc. It also makes use of the Freeware ERDNT Registry Backup Program so that you can make a backup copy of the registry before changes are made.

Why Would You Want It?

Sometimes things just get messed up for no obvious reason, there are many reasons corruption of files and settings can occur. It may be a power failure or spike, a hardware malfunction or the action of some malware,virus or spyware. Maybe TCP/IP and Winsock settings are changed by mistake on the users part or installation/removal of software causes a problem. Firewall software may change settings or some sort of utility that needs proxy settings to work. The removal of Adware is a very common cause of these sort of problems. Whatever the cause it can be very difficult and time consuming to try and manually sort out the registry settings.

Winsock XP Fix provides a very simple and easy to use solution to the problem. It provides the means to backup the registry although, personally, I would prefer to create a Restore Point in Windows before applying.

So if you have Internet or Local Area Network Connection problems WinSock XP Fix is well worth a try

but create a Restore Point or backup your registry first

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Repairs Winsock and TCP/IP Registry Settings
• Provides Registry Backup Facilities
• Gives Access to System Information Dialogs

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 46% [?]

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Warning: This is a subjective and slightly philosophical post - My Personal Viewpoint - Feel Free to Disagree or Just Ignore

What resources does a program use, how do you measure them, does it mean anything?

Research, software testing, subjective viewpoints of the user all present challenges to giving expert opinion.

I received an interesting and valuable comment on my AVG 8 Free post (NEW - AVG Anti Virus 8 FREE - Quick Review) from mulligrub:

Good review but a few questions.

The 2 biggest pluses for AVG free in the past are:

1. Free &;

2. Very low overhead - doesn’t use much system resources in day to day operation

The negatives include:

Not the fastest when scanning

Only daily upadtes

Outdated User Interface (looks like that has been addressed)

No Spyware, rootkit, spam protection (Spyware included in AVG8)

So if we are getting more (spyware scanning) in a flashier package
still for free the only achillies heel I can see will be the resource
usage

have you compared what level of resources it is using now?

Does the user experience ‘feel’ slower?

I am keen to know before recommending to family and friends and will test for myself too

Cheers

Well firstly thanks to mulligrub for the comment, and secondly thanks for sparking my interest to write this post!

I felt a more detailed answer and explanation is required, far more than just a comment reply on the original post. This is because it gets into some of the basic philosophy and policy I have tried to put in place for this blog.

A bit of background information is relevant to explain where I am coming from:

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Popularity: 25% [?]

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Update Posting

A while back I posted on Daphne 1.32. A new version, 1.33 has now been released with some significant new features and improvements, these are:

• Fully Portable configuration using an “ini” file
• The ability to view a full list of installed software
• Display a snapshot of all current processes in a “Process Tree”
• Parent process name an PID at process’ properties
• Support for DRK’s database of process information

The original post review provides all the main details and can be viewed here Daphne - Modify, Control & Kill Processes with Your Mouse

There is also a follow up post with comments from Leo, the developer of Daphne here Daphne Update - Comments from Leo (Daphne Developer)

The original post noted:

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Popularity: 19% [?]

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Leo, the developer, sent me the following email answering some of the points I raised in the review. He has kindly given me permission to reproduce his comments (Thanks Leo!)

The bullet points in the email are my comments in the review and Leo’s replies are in blue.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

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What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Daphne is a small utility that allows you to view and control the processes running on your system. The beauty of this utility is that it provides the ability to do this by dragging and dropping a target with your mouse. It also provides functions to modify, control and kill processes by name and to save these as rules. I had been looking for a “process manager” with the mouse capabilities for sometime so I am really pleased to have found this.

Summary:

• Lists all currently running processes
• Kill processes by name, from main window or by dragging a target onto the application window
• Control and modify processes in the same way as above
• Controls include hide application, always on top, hide , transparency, enable and disable
• Processes can be highlighted by colour in main window
• Shows full process path in main window
• Process priority can be changed in the main window
• Details of processes can be shown
• Access to database of process details (via web)
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Popularity: 25% [?]

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