Taskbar Shuffle is a small program that does what it’s named – it allows you to shuffle your taskbar and arrange windows the way you want them. Not just that, it even allows you to drag and re-order system tray icons.

Install the 630KB app and it’s as easy as dragging and dropping. As you can see from the screenshot, dragging items in the taskbar and reordering them is a snap. An added feature is the ability to re-order your system tray as well. The only problem that I found was that the icon you drag from the system tray automatically opens. If you were for example, dragging the icon of the ‘remove hardware’, you would activate the ‘remove hardware’ wizard. A little annoying, but something that can be ignored perhaps for the bigger feature of drag and re-order.

Download Taskbar Shuffle for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Operating Systems.

Loading up a website just to check the WHOIS details or DNS details of a particular website can be annoying if you do so very often. With eToolz, you can perform DNS lookups, WHOIS lookups, ping a website, perform trace, check the header details and much more right from the desktop.

eToolz is a freeware that can be a very useful tool for webmasters, domainers, and for the rest of us too. It’s a handy portable software that can be useful for looking up the PageRank of a webpage besides performing DNS and WHOIS lookups, performing trace, pinging a website for a reply, and a lot more. Take a look at the screenshot.

Just download the software, no installation required. You might have to change the language to English. Do so from Extras -> Language.

Picture this, you’ve positioned all your icons on the desktop in a nice little manner that you like, say some icons on the left of the screen, on top of the screen and to the right. If Windows Explorer experiences a crash, or if you change your screen resolution, all your icon placement are lost. Frustrating right?

IconRestorer can help you in such situations by restoring all the icons to their respective positions before the crash, saving you of a boring and tedious job of restoring them manually. You can even have more than one profile (with different layouts). You can even choose to save the layouts automatically, say for instance, hourly backups. You can then restore any of the backups at anytime you want. With the free version however, you can only save two backups and you cannot save layouts automatically. It can even remember what wallpaper you were using with the saved icon layout!

With IconRestorer, you can also have your icons displayed as a list. Helpful if you’re into keeping a lot of desktop icons. =P

You can download the freeware from here. Available for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and works with all versions of Windows including the new Win 7.

How would you like to easily group a bunch of JPEG images into a single PDF that can then be shared with others? You could make your very own scrapbook from the pictures of your last trip and share it with your friends. =)

With JPEG to PDF, you can convert JPG images into a PDF file with the least effort. The free software can convert a hundred plus images into a single PDF or multiple PDF files in a matter of seconds. When I converted a few logos into PDF, the conversion process took less than a second!

Download JPEG to PDF free.

Increasing productivity (or as some of us call it – becoming lazy) is always on the mind of anybody. We’ve already written about using keyboard shortcuts to launch programs, now with EscapeClose Pro you can use certain keys to do some trivial tasks like closing and minimizing windows.

EscapeClose Pro’s primary task is to close a window when the Escape key is closed. It can however, do a lot more than just that. Below is a list of shortcut keys that EscapeClose Pro has:

• Hitting the tilde (~) key will minimize the running app or all the apps. You choose.
• The ‘Escape’ key can be used to close a window.
• To select all files in Windows Explorer, the asterisk (*) key can be used.
• ‘+’ or ‘-’ can be used to select and deselect files respectively.
• Pressing ‘F11′ will make any application switch to Maximized view.

There are different “modes” for each task. For instance, selecting ‘Mode 1 (close Esc)’ will make the mouse pointer jump to the Close (X) button on the top right of a window when the Escape key is pressed. Under ‘Mode 2′, hitting the Escape key will directly close the application.

The best feature I liked about the software was that it made it easier for me to maximize and minimize applications by hitting the (~) and ‘F11′ keys respectively. Quite a time saver, given that my caption buttons are the size of an ant.

Other features include completely hiding a window (did not work with Firefox). Pressing the tilde and escape keys will completely hide a window or restore it to the system tray (based on what you choose). How’s that for hiding programs that don’t minimize to the system tray? =)

See the screenshot for more options and commands.

EscapeClose 1.5 (Free)

EscapeClose 2.1 (Trial)

(Thumbnail credits to Ukaaa’s The Great Escape)

Adobe Photoshop costs a bomb, and while some people find it easier to crack it rather than buying it, it still takes up a lot of system resources. How about using an alternative that’s just under 700KB and comes free to use?

Fotografix is a nice little free alternative to the mighty Photoshop. It has a lot of features, brushes, and built in scripts allowing you to start editing right away. Although it is no real alternative to a graphic designer, the rest of us who like to use Photoshop for some trivial tasks such as working with Layers or resizing/adjusting images, this software should just about be enough. It’s an excellent Microsoft Paint alternative as well, standing in at just about 700KB in size and consuming less than 4MB of memory. Pretty cool right?

Download Fotografix (300KB) (Did we mention it’s portable?)

DirHTML is a free portable program that creates a list of the content in a folder and saves it as an HTML page.

You can choose what type of files to include, which folders to exclude, the sorting of the output, the format of the output (XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, etc.),  file date, file size, and lots more. You can also choose to save all these settings as a batch file so you can run it later in one click.

The HTML file output is pretty old school, but we’re not complaining. It does what it’s supposed to do. Check out the screenshot below.

Download DirHTML v4.84 (can be run in Wine under Linux)

Protect your USB drive from unauthorised file changes, malware, or simply to prevent accidental changes by using a portable write-protection software.

USB WriteProtector is a small (444KB uncompressed) and portable (no installation needed) software that runs off your USB drive and prevents files being written to it or modified. It can help protect your drive from those annoying virus that affect portable drives, and it can also save you from accidentally making modifications to files or losing them altogether.

Just extract the file and copy it to your USB drive along with the ‘Languages’ folder containing the English language file (the original language is German). You can then run it and choose to enable or disable write-protection. Unplug your USB drive from the system and plug it back again for the write protection to be enabled. (Removal is not necessary for removing the write protection.)

For added security and ease, you can rename the executable to anything you want (I named it “usb.exe”) and hide it. It can then be run from the command line like so: X:\usb.exe /on /nogui

How would you like to create a .exe video file that executes in any Windows operating system without the need for an additional codec to be installed? Sounds good for distributing videos right?

Create. Click. Watch.

MakeInstantPlayer is a little software that converts any given video file into a .exe (executable) file with all the necessary codecs installed. Just choose the video, press the button, and you have a file that can be run without the need for any additional media players. It’s that simple.

Additional features include the ability to open a webpage at the end of the video, choose a splash image (this is seen while the player initializes), and set an icon for the executable file. Check out the screenshot for more features and options.

Why need another media player when there are already a thousand? Because Damn Small Media Player (DSMP) is the smallest, lightest, portable media player that’s also cross-platform and open source.

Author and good friend Saurabh Minni, heard all our suggestions and promptly created DSMP keeping in mind portability, small memory footprint, and simplicity. Though DSMP is written for Windows, it can easily be compiled under Linux and Mac operating systems. This is currently under development.

DSMP is currently in Beta and the current version stands at 0.3, but the 716KB media player has already become our favourite portable player beating out VLC Portable.

Being a heavy keyboard user, one of the main aspects of a media player that I look out for is the support for global hotkeys. I like to control my media player without having to open it. With DSMP, you can play the previous track (Ctrl+Alt+Z), Play/Pause(Ctrl+Alt+X), Stop(Ctrl+Alt+C) and Play Next (Ctrl+Alt+V). Quite convenient. In terms of memory, DSMP consumes only 4MB.

Download DSMP from here. Get the code here.