What’s This About?

Edison is a program that allows you to change and save the standard windows power options in a simple interface for two different times “Work” and “Other”. It also has a simple scheduling option to switch between the two on a once per day basis.

Why Would You Want It?

You can easily change the standard Windows Power Options Properties by selecting Power Options in Control Panel as the last post  Windows Power Schemes - Set and Forget to Reduce Your Electricity Bill:

As you can see from the post under the Windows Power Options Properties - Power Schemes tab you can change all the options which are more than in Edison, you can also save as many different power schemes as you want. The advantage of Edison lies in the ability to automatically schedule two different power schemes to suit your pattern of use.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Quick and Simple Setting of 2 Power schemes
• Schedule Switching between the schemes once per day
• Helps save power for desktop PCs

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware
• See estimated savings

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Popularity: 25% [?]

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What’s This About?

Windows Control Panel provides a means to customize settings for when various power saving options are triggered following a set period of “inactivity” (no use of keyboard or mouse). For a Desktop PC (rather than a laptop) these include:

1. Turn Off Monitor
2. Turn Off Hard Disks
3. System Standby
4. System Hibernate

There is also an option to select what happens when the PC power button is pressed.

Optimizing these settings to suit you personal use can bring benefits in saving electricity, reducing wear on hard drives and cutting costs.

This article is part of a series on power saving.

Why Would You Want to Use It?

Whether you run your PC 24/7 or just switch it on for occasional use you can still make a difference to your bills by using these settings. Laptop users will probably be more familiar with power saving as this is a way to reduce the drain on the battery when not connected to the charger. Laptop manufacturers often provide more sophisticated power saving utilities that allow more options to conserve battery power. Windows Vista also has more options than XP.

This article is based on XP and is for Desktops only. Vista is very similar, but with  more comprehensive options in a slightly different interface. The Laptop version of Power Options Properties provides additional tabs and options for when the Laptop is running on batteries or on mains power.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Turns off monitor after a predefined period of inactivity
• Turns off hard disks after a predefined period of inactivity
• System goes to Standby after a predefined period of inactivity
• System Hibernates after a predefined period of inactivity
• Set Power Button action to:
  • Do Nothing
  • Ask
  • Standby
  • Hibernate
  • Shutdown
• Enable Hibernation
• Configure UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Part of standard Windows OS

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Popularity: 25% [?]

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What’s This All About?

Drive Manager is a small utility that provides quick access to information on all your disk drives, CD/DVD drives, Removable drives, Flash/USB Drives, Network Shares and Virtual Drives in one handy and easy to use interface. It provides an excellent way to get to essential information quickly as well as allowing you to run some essential drive maintenance utilities.

Why Would You Want It?

Simply because this is a small portable application that provides independent access to lots of drive information and functions in a single interface. You can access the majority of this information using Windows Explorer and various standard Windows Accessories and System utilities. However, with Drive Manger nearly all these functions are combined within a single, easy to use interface which quickly gives access to the information you need.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Displays a list of all drives
• Plenty of essential information is instantly available in the main interface
• Lots of other functions are available through the toolbars and menus
• Quick filtering of different drive types

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware
• Portable

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Popularity: 31% [?]

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What’s This About?

WakeupOnStandBy  is a small program that will automatically wake up your computer from Standby or Hibernation mode at a predetermined schedule of time and days of the week, then run programs, open web pages, etc. before closing down your computer again if you want. It also has the ability to run multiple schedules allowing you to effectively shutdown and start your computer when you want.

Why Would You Want It?

Many computers are run 24/7 as a matter of convenience rather than necessity. Just to be able to get on the computer instantly without waiting for what might be quite a long boot period and get to your emails or instantly access web pages is a convenience. This is trade doff against the cost of running the PC and the consequential use of “scarce” resources, carbon footprint, global warming and a general disregard for he environment and future availability of resources for our children and grandchildren.

I am as bad as anyone and worse than many. I run several computers and some of them run 24/7 because I need them to be doing scheduled actions while  am not actively using them. These include indexing, backups, fetching email, etc. so the information is ready and available when I need. The fact is that these computers could be shutdown for several hours a day when I am at work or asleep without any real inconvenience. In fact unless your running a server of some sort or downloading over P2P networks you really don’t need any computer running all the time.

The recent severe increases in oil and gas prices has been a bit of a wake up call and started to make me look at ways of reducing my energy consumption so I can get the bills down. I am ashamed to admit it is the impact on my pocket and not my impact on the environment that has spurred me into action

So I am across WakeupOnStandBy in a search for a freeware program that would allow me to schedule the time my computer was running to suit my daily./weekly programme. As you will see it is not a perfect solution and could do with a bit of work to make it easier to use but it will certainly do the job needed with a little bit of perseverance.

However, if you want to save yourself some money or feel you should do your bit to preserve our planet it is worth a bit of effort to set up the necessary schedules

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Wakes up your computer from Standby or Hibernation
• Puts the computer into Standby or Hibernation Mode
• Allows for scheduling based on time, days, and weeks
• Runs programs on Startup or Shutdown/Hibernate
• Saves power for desktop PCs
• Saves battery life for laptop PCs

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 38% [?]

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What’s This About?

CrossHairs is a very small program/utility that will display a vertical and horizontal line on the monitor at the mouse cursor position. It can be set to be static at the original position or to follow the mouse position.

Why Would You Want It?

CrossHair has 5 obvious functions:

1. As an aid to lining up graphics and text for page layouts
2. As an aid to estimating values on graphs and charts
3. To pinpoint the mouse cursor position on "busy" screens or difficult backgrounds
4. As an aid to people with impaired vision
5. To help young children spot the mouse position

I have found it very useful for all of the first 3 items over the past couple of years, particular 1 & 2. I am also sure it will be a great help to people with impaired vision or for children.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Shows vertical and horizontal lines activated by Hotkeys
• Lines can be static
• Lines can follow the mouse position

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 37% [?]

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What Is It?

A wonderful calculator with basic math functions plus extended financial, unit conversion, algebra and scientific functions. Combined with the ability to add your own requirements this is a truly versatile utility.

Why Would You Want It?

Ms Windows calculator provides basic functionality, Farsight Free fills many of the missing gaps you need. While some of the functions of Farsight may be beyond the your  needs in the extensive options there is something here for everybody and it deserves to be part of your essential toolbox. Don’t let the fact  that some of the functions and options are beyond your usual needs put you off that this utility is worthy of your attention.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Maths Functions
• Algebra and Trig Functions
• Financial Calculations
• Statistical Functions
• Logical Expressions
• Reverse Polish Notation

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware
• Simple to Use as a basic calculator

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Popularity: 37% [?]

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What’s This About?

Mouse Speed Switcher is a little program that sits in your system tray (systray) which allows you to control the speed of your mouse between two user definable “speed of movement” settings. This can be done either by a mouse lick or a system wide Hotkey combination.

Why Would You Want It?

The speed of your mouse movement will often be a compromise between precision and time. If the mouse moves to quickly it is hard to precisely locate a particular point for precision work such as graphics. If the mouse moves to slowly it can be frustrating where you have to locate points across a screen or screens with a multi-monitor setup. Another problem can be where you use a touchpad or similar pointing device on a laptop but sometimes also use an external mouse (on its own or with a docking station for instance). Here it can be very useful to change the speed between the touchpad and the mouse for maximum productivity.

While windows provides a control panel function to change the mouse settings it is a long winded process. Mouse Speed Switcher provides a quick and easy interface to change the speed settings, apply one of them at startup and then quickly switch between the two with the mouse or keyboard.

Mouse Speed Switcher will also be very useful where you have children, in-experienced users or users who may benefit advanced accessibility options for mouse movement using the same computer/account as another user.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides two interchangeable mouse speed settings
• Allows for quick change between speeds.

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 41% [?]

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What’s This About?

PDF-XChange Viewer is a fully portable application with a tabbed interface and extensive options for adding notes, text, highlights, drawing, etc. on a PDF file.

Why Would You Want It?

There are plenty of PDF file viewers available and most of them are free. Acrobat is bloated and slow, Foxit is good but not portable (Yes you can make Foxit portable using a wrapper , downloading the original installer and then using an extractor to get the executable - but who’s got that long to live!) PDF-XChange Viewer provides a fully portable (English Language) version with a tabbed interface and lots of useful options for direct download. The download has been kept small by stripping all unnecessary files including the language files so you miss out on these and a help file. Not only that but it is fast, relatively light.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Opens PDF files
• Provides tools for drawing and annotation
• Supports PDF file formats from 1.0 to 1.7 (equivalent to Acrobat

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 43% [?]

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What’s This All About?

If you keep up to date with Tech news you will know there has been a lot written about the impending release of the “Google Browser” Google Chrome over the last couple of days. Well now the Beta version (another Google everlasting beta? ) has been released to the world and ProReviewer has grabbed a copy to see what it does.

Why Would You Want It?

Google have done some clever pre-release marketing and in particular a comic strip talking about what \Google Chrome offers. It clearly takes on may of the great aspects of other browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as making sure it has MS Internet Explorer * well in its sights. The particular aspects that appeal to me are the “sandboxing” of individual tabs (well it seems to be websites) so that if they crash or a script won’t complete it doesn’t crash or freeze the browser. A Task Manager for the browser to display information about the individual tabs and allow their termination. Other aspects related to search and history within the address bar or “Omnibar” reflect what the “opposition” is currently providing.

I have very gone through being slightly disappointed to indifferent to quite excited about Google Chrome over the last hour as I have experimented with its capabilities.I still realize that I am, at present, a “Dyed in the Wool” fan of Firefox 3 Portable and it will take a lot of development and add-ons (will there be any? ) to make me consider Google Chrome as my browser of choice. However, if their is a portable version with the current functionality I would certainly add it to my Portable Apps toolbox.

Screenshot Tour

Rather than follow the normal ProReviewer review template this post will take the form of a (similar) series of screenshots with notes.

Click on any screenshot to enlarge if necessary

Installation

Standard installer progress window

Installer Welcome and Customization:

About

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Popularity: 41% [?]

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