When was the last time you almost pulled your hair off over the frustration of windows copy failing over the last file from a set of hundreds? Or perhaps when you lost that software you installed just last week, but can't remember where in your start menu it may be hidden?
The answer to these questions can now be - never! I was facing exactly these situations and many more, and my searches ended up with quite a set of utilities to help you spruce up your daily computer use a little. That too spending 0 cash and only a teeny amount of your PCs resources! If you've never heard of the utilities in the list below, you might be surprised that they remained out of your sight for so long!
TeraCopy
The answer to these questions can now be - never! I was facing exactly these situations and many more, and my searches ended up with quite a set of utilities to help you spruce up your daily computer use a little. That too spending 0 cash and only a teeny amount of your PCs resources! If you've never heard of the utilities in the list below, you might be surprised that they remained out of your sight for so long!
TeraCopy
One of my favorite of the lot, TeraCopy is a handy little copy handler that beats the native copy handler of your PC hands-down! Coming in a super-small package of just a few MB, with RAM usage just a couple MB or so, this thing is able to copy, move - even show you options for overwriting/renaming/skipping files that may already exist in your targets!
If any file's not copied correctly, or if there was any error, it still shows you the list of successful and skipped/error files. Cleaning up the list leaves only the problematic ones so you can decide how to handle them. Not just that, it provides you the option of verifying the quality of the copied files by matching their CRC against the source file and this works when moving files as well! This can also be configured to be done automatically after every operation.
The configuration options, as should be for a lightweight application, are fairly light on your mind too - the defaults themselves are so impressive that providing configuration changes might have put off or confused the average user. Still, if you're a grease monkey, you can set TeraCopy to be the default copy handler, integrate into the right-click menu, tweak a couple of options related to the system cache usage etc. Everything that is either easy to understand, or for the non-technically inclined, easily ignored without losing out anything important!
Check it out - http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
SizerIf you frequently work with multiple monitors, or perhaps connect remotely to machines from your home PC or laptop, you know how some windows never resize correctly when switching resolutions. That's where Sizer comes to your rescue!
Its basically a Window Resizer but also maintains a list of many different window sizes you may use! Just install it, set it to start at windows startup, and voila - you're done. It comes with default sizes of 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x786 and adding more window sizes is a breeze. You can even have it move the resized windows automatically to any position on your screen - and you can define a user-defined position too! It not just resizes or moves stuff around - if you manually resize a window, it'll show you its size as you're resizing it!
The integration with Windows is amazing, simply right-clicking the maximize/restore button shows you the list of sizes you could resize to, and if that doesn't work for some softwares, for instance with Chrome, you can still right-click on the window's title bar to see a "Resize/Reposition window" menu. You can even do this from the window's taskbar button!
Check it out here - http://www.brianapps.net/sizer/
JetStartWith time everyone's PC gets cluttered, most notably I've seen start menu items run into 5 full-sized columns! In all that mess, it's very difficult to locate that new software, especially if its folders are named for the Company than the name of the product itself - Microsoft Studios instead of Age of Empires for instance!
Besides, using the mouse doesn't bode well for your wrists, so every second you save from the mouse usage is like a new life for your hands!
Windows Vista onwards, the start menu got its own small search bar where you could simply start typing the program's name to find and launch it, but what if you're still kicking it old school with XP?
Well, then JetStart's just the thing for you. It installs and runs unobstrusively in your taskbar, but with a simple keyboard shortcut or a move of your mouse, it brings up all your shortcuts literally at the tips of your fingers!
Simply begin typing what you remember of the name of the software and it starts listing out possible shortcuts that match the letters you typed. If you just gave it half the letters and got multiple results, just press the cursor keys (or mouse scroll) to navigate the list. And - the best thing - just hit enter when the right entry's selected and you've launched your software! I have never used the mouse to find/click my shortcuts since I installed this!
The search-as-you type is fast & excellent, the overall RAM/Processor consumption is negligible and the options are extremely straightforward - all that you could ask to keep things simple!
What are you waiting for - http://www.codesector.com/jetstart.php
So go ahead, give yourself a little productivity boost and you'll wonder how you haven't always used these nifty gadgets!
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