Cool Tech Reviews

Adam Pash at Lifehacker makes some interesting suggestions on how to Get Vista’s Best Features in XP. The sad part is that there is so little there beyond eye candy of dubious utility or applications for very specialized niches. In the latter category, I liked:

Take Quick and Easy Screenshots: PrtScrn has been around forever, but it’s never been the most user-friendly way to get a screenshot. In Vista, Microsoft threw in a screenshot utility called the Snipping Tool. Fact is, if better screenshots are important to you, there are gobs of excellent free screenshot apps available for XP like Screenshot Captor (original post), Clip2Net (original post), and Jing (original post), among many others.

Choose Clip2Net or Jing if you want to share your captures on the Web or Jing if you want to grab a screencast, but for my usual chore of taking screenshots and saving them on my PC, Screenshot Captor does the job and more. Screenshot Captor is for Windows only and is donationware.

Download Squad has a post on the The 5 most annoying programs on your PC and I cannot disagree with their selections:

1. Acrobat Reader
2. iTunes
3. Real Player
4. Internet Explorer
5. Microsoft Outlook

There’s no help for some of them, but they suggest Foxit Reader as a substitute for Adobe Acrobat Reader:

Acrobat reader does one thing poorly — read PDFs. To do this it needs to download updates at least twice a month. Acrobat’s other big feature is the ability to bring your system to a roaring halt while it boots up its massive amount of plugins and libraries. All this to display (wait for it) — a page.

FoxIt Reader is a much better solution. Download it, and you’ll no longer cringe each time your accidentally click on a PDF link while browsing the internet.

I gave it a try and it is fantastic as well as free unless you want some advanced features. Highly recommended.

Microsoft’s new Vista operating system may only be getting lukewarm reviews, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some useful new features. James Kendrick describes how Vista shadow copies saved his bacon when he accidentally deleted a bunch of notes he had taken with Microsoft’s OneNote application:

Reader Ryan Kabir left a comment and sent me an email with the two words that I’ll never forget– Vista’s shadow copies. OK, that’s three words but you’ll have to forgive me as I am as giddy as one can be without chemical influence. Ryan’s comment pointed out correctly that in Vista, shadow copies are activated by default (at least I didn’t specifically enable them) which means the OS saves snapshots of user files when they are modified. I’ve just spent 30 minutes, the most fun I’ve had in a good while, recovering EVERY SINGLE OneNote file that had been overwritten. Every. Single. File.

Vista and Ryan have come to my rescue and I am now grinning like the village idiot with all of my notes back where they were before catastrophe struck. Big shout out to the Vista team for putting shadow copies into the OS for just such an emergency.

Backup is easily the most important thing that most people never do for their computers and I am as guilty as everyone else. Vista shadow copies are a great idea for protecting yourself against user error, but you still need something external to protect you against hard drive crashes or the like. Some suggestions on that will be upcoming in a later post.

Chris Lanier provides a tutorial on setting up the Media Center editions of Windows XP and Vista for automatic commercial skipping using DVRMSToolbox:

Everyone should know about DVRMSToolbox that lets you do just about anything with your Recorded TV files. However, the more time that goes by the more I see that people are not taking advantage of what DVRMSToolbox has to offer. Today I wanted to give everyone a basic introduction to one of the coolest features, automatic commercial skipping!

Get it while it lasts before the movie and TV studios find a way to rain on the parade.

Who says Microsoft doesn’t have a sense of humor? Check out the BSOD screen saver they have online for free download:

One of the most feared colors in the NT world is blue. The infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will pop up on an NT system whenever something has gone terribly wrong. Bluescreen is a screen saver that not only authentically mimics a BSOD, but will simulate startup screens seen during a system boot.

• On NT 4.0 installations it simulates chkdsk of disk drives with errors!

• On Win2K and Windows 9x it presents the Win2K startup splash screen, complete with rotating progress band and progress control updates!

• On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 it present the XP/Server 2003 startup splash screen with progress bar!

Bluescreen cycles between different Blue Screens and simulated boots every 15 seconds or so. Virtually all the information shown on Bluescreen’s BSOD and system start screen is obtained from your system configuration - its accuracy will fool even advanced NT developers. For example, the NT build number, processor revision, loaded drivers and addresses, disk drive characteristics, and memory size are all taken from the system Bluescreen is running on.

Use Bluescreen to amaze your friends and scare your enemies!

Actually, it’s part of the package that Microsoft got when they acquired Winternals Software and their set of free “Sysinternals” system tools. The old Sysinternals website has been moved to Microsoft TechNet under the name Windows Sysinternals, but all the old utilities are there. Warning, only serious techies need apply - except for the BSOD screen saver.

Tsu Dho Nimh has a list over at Associated Content and it’s pretty good even if most of the items aren’t particularly surprising. However, the best part of such lists is finding something new and here’s one that I was unaware of:

AVS Disc Creator – CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc burner.

I have several computers, each with a different brand or model of CD/DVD drive, and I frequently move hardware from one to another. Instead of keeping track of which software goes with which hardware, and trying to remember how each one works, I use this CD burner for all of the computers.

URL: http://avsmedia.com/DiscCreator/index.aspx

A common problem for multiple computer owners and an inexpensive solution. Check out AVS Disc Creator and the whole list.