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.
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.
Love shortcuts on your Windows installation? Then you’ll surely love this trick. By making a few registry modifications, you can now have the Copy To and Move To options right from the context menu!
Here’s how you do it. All you need to do is download this registry file. Right click the download link and click Save Link As.
Once you’re done downloading it, double click it and add it to the registry. You will now be able to see the Move To and Copy To shortcuts when you right click any file.
[This post was originally written by me at TechnoBeta a long time back. Thought I'd share this here since I haven't written anything here in quite a while owing to work.]
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? =)
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?
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.
I’m sure you have come across instances of a task “Not Responding” right? There’s a quick way to kill all such processes without altering the registry.
Create a shortcut anywhere on your desktop [Right-click -> New -> Shortcut]. For the shortcut path, copy and paste the following line:
taskkill.exe /f /fi "status eq not responding"
You can add an icon to it if you would like to make it look pretty. =)
Going a step further, you can run the task using keyboard shortcuts. Something like your very own Ctrl + Alt+ Del. To do so, you can follow the steps I have mentioned in this previously dated article. I set it to Ctrl + Shift + End. Everytime I have a hung process that requires me to kill it, I just hit these keys.
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.
If you’re looking for a light weight calendar with an integrated to-do application that’s free, Rainlendar 2 is probably the best choice.
The application takes a little over 25MB of memory, fully loaded, and sits anywhere you want on the desktop with a very pretty transparent interface. Rainlendar can list all the events for the day in a neat list, and can also list all of your To-Do notes as well. Check out the screenshot below.
The days marked with a star indicate an event or activity on that day. There’s an option to keep an alarm for the event, which can go off a little while before the actual start of the event. Rainlendar can also contain more than one calendars, for example for your personal and business lives. You can assign categories to events, such as ‘Birthday’ or ‘Anniversary’ which means that the event will recur every year.
The pro version of the software has the ability to sync with Google Calendars. A very handy feature. For me, the best feature in the pro version is the ability to show Outlook calendar events, since I sync all my devices with Outlook. Makes me contemplate buying the pro version, but the EUR 9.95 tag is a little too much in my opinion.
Increasing productivity (or as some of us call it – becoming lazy) is always on the mind of anybody. We’ve already written about 
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