Forty-Three of The Best Free Windows Enhancements That You Should Know About
June 23, 2009 – 8:52 am | 81 Comments

There is an impressive range of excellent freeware Windows enhancements and tweaks. This posting will present forty three excellent additions to Windows that you will like.

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Articles by Samer Kurdi

Notable App: a collaboration tool that lets you clip, annotate, and share feedback on websites and images
February 8, 2010 – 9:15 am | One Comment
Notable App: a collaboration tool that lets you clip, annotate, and share feedback on websites and images

notableapp screenshot1At heart, this software is a web-clipping tool with online storage, similar to Evernote. Yet Notable App is designed for sharing clipped web pages with collaborators, making notes on them and receiving feedback in a kind of virtual conversation.

Notable App is a web app used in conjunction with a Firefox extension or IE bookmarklet (or even an iPhone app) in order to create and upload web clips or screenshots that can later be shared for feedback with friends, colleagues, or collaborators.This program seems to be geared towards creative teams of designers, webmaster, usability designers, developers and SEO practitioners interested in dissecting websites and sharing knowledge not just on the content of websites but on the way they were put together.

However, you can use Notable App any way you want, as a web clipping app or a platform to simply share sites that you find, like, and choose to clip. Up to three people can use Notable for free; adding more will require paid licenses. Read more on Notable App: a collaboration tool that lets you clip, annotate, and share feedback on websites and images…

Lammer Context Menu: more cool and useful functions for your right-click context menu
February 2, 2010 – 9:21 am | 9 Comments
Lammer Context Menu: more cool and useful functions for your right-click context menu

Lammer Context Menu - right click on a folderLammer files

Another day, another free utility that puts nifty function in the right click context menu. And although it may seem that we’ve seen a lot of the functions that Lammer Context menu offers before, a closer look will reveal some very interesting and noteworthy functions on here, such as mounting folders as virtual drives, search and replace file contents, batch file-and-folder renaming, select all similar files by type, and path operations (copy/move/list/delete) using regular expressions. Supports 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems both. Read more on Lammer Context Menu: more cool and useful functions for your right-click context menu…

PageZipper: consolidate articles or listings spanning multiple browser pages into one
January 28, 2010 – 1:00 pm | 6 Comments

PageZipper is a free Firefox extension and IE Bookmarklet that can merge articles or listings spanning multiple pages into a single browser page. It is useful in situations where you are interested in grabbing a web-clipping or exporting the entire article or listing to another application in one fell swoop, or simply if you would prefer not to have to keep pressing the “next” button to get through the article.

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JDcontextmenu: enhance Windows’ right-click menu with a host of useful functions
January 25, 2010 – 6:29 pm | 6 Comments
JDcontextmenu: enhance Windows’ right-click menu with a host of useful functions

jdcontextmenu screenshot1JDcontextmenu is a free app that installs a wide range of commands in Windows’ right click context menu. You’ve seen many of these before; here’s a list: "copy full path", ""copy name", CMD line here, MD5 checksum, FileDateTime Stamp, Create new folder(s), send fullname by email as a link, add file to startup folder, clear folders and a favorites folder function; conveniently, however JDcontextmenu allows you to pick and choose the configuration you want and the order in which they appear.

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MakeItOne FileBrowser32: launch a 32-bit file browser from your 64-bit context menu
January 22, 2010 – 9:30 am | 3 Comments
MakeItOne FileBrowser32: launch a 32-bit file browser from your 64-bit context menu

FileBrowser32 ScreenshotDo not mistake this program with the previously mentioned MP3 merging app from the same author. MakeItOne FileBrowser 32 is a free program that installs a right-click shell extension in your 64-bit Windows environment that launch a 32-bit browser set to the current path/folder, enabling the user to quickly access any installed Windows extensions that may be installed in the 32 bit environment and that would not appear in the 64 bit Windows explorer.

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MakeItOne MP3 Album Maker: merge MP3s into a single file while maintaining the ability to revert back to the original files
January 21, 2010 – 12:50 am | 3 Comments
MakeItOne MP3 Album Maker: merge MP3s into a single file while maintaining the ability to revert back to the original files

MakeItOne MP3 Album Maker ScreenshotMakeItOne MP3 Album Maker is a free app that can merge multiple MP3s while maintaining full reversibility (the ability to unpack/split the file into its original constituents at any later point). Merged files can be played on any player and MakeItOne and can preserve and edit the audio file tags and add album art as well. It can also unpack audio files packed by the Albumwrap shareware app which are commonly found on the net.

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Acer GridVista: snap your windows to pre-defined sections of your screen(s)
January 19, 2010 – 3:00 pm | 4 Comments
Acer GridVista: snap your windows to pre-defined sections of your screen(s)

Acer GridVista ScreenshotThis free app allows you to use your monitors more effectively by dividing your screen into custom sections. It mimics the Windows 7 snap feature but goes further by allowing you to place your windows into any of two, three, or four sections on the screen through drag and drop. It also works with all versions of Windows and even works well alongside the Windows 7 snap feature (you can have both working together simultaneously).

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Prism HUD: lightweight system monitoring software offers a unique visual interface
January 14, 2010 – 10:33 am | 15 Comments
Prism HUD: lightweight system monitoring software offers a unique visual interface

prism hud screenshot3 Prism HUD screenshot1

Prism HUD (heads up display) is a free, lightweight performance and resource monitoring software. It provides a wealth of information in real-time right on the desktop. Although there are many free system monitoring tools out there, what is unique about Prism HUD is the way it displays information: it does not display continuous chart; rather, colorful icons appear on the desktop in a designated area of the screen only when events are taking place, and disappear altogether when the event has passed.

The five performance areas include CPU (total usage and each core’s load); Memory (total usage and hard faults); Disk (used space, utilization and transfer rate for each drive); Network (each interface’s transfer rate); and Process (the CPU usage, memory usage, page faults and IO transfer rate for each process). If you only care for a subset of these metrics you can customize the program to show exactly the ones you want. Read more on Prism HUD: lightweight system monitoring software offers a unique visual interface…

Auto Mute: mutes your PC whenever it is turning on or waking up from sleep or suspend modes
January 13, 2010 – 11:31 pm | 22 Comments
Auto Mute: mutes your PC whenever it is turning on or waking up from sleep or suspend modes

Auto Mute ScreenshotAuto Mute is a free little program that simply mutes your PC whenever it is turning on or waking up from sleep or suspend modes. It is useful in cases where you might want to ensure that your computer will be completely silent unless you actively un-mute it, such as working late at night or around sleeping children, or in public places such as buses, cafes, or conferences, etc.

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FSL Launcher: a tabbed, mouse-activated launcher
January 11, 2010 – 3:21 pm | 13 Comments
FSL Launcher: a tabbed, mouse-activated launcher

FSL Launcher ScreenshotIf you need a good launcher for apps, files, folders or URLs and would like the option to organize your files and shortcuts into tabs then check this one out. FSL Launcher is a free, tabbed launcher activated by clicking on the top left corner of the screen with the mouse. It supports the dragging and dropping of icons into the interface and allows for a range of useability customizations.

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VUE: mind mapping software that combines data visualization, semantic analysis, and a full-fledged Powerpoint-style presentation engine in one
January 11, 2010 – 12:17 am | 23 Comments
VUE: mind mapping software that combines data visualization, semantic analysis, and a full-fledged Powerpoint-style presentation engine in one

VUE Screenshot2VUE Screenshot1

VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) is a free, open source mind mapping and data visualization software developed by the Academic Technology group at Tufts University in Boston. VUE is unique in that it offers a range of innovative functions such as tagging of nodes and of relationships, support for images, videos, and other objects within the mind map structure, and the ability to import and analyze datasets (from CSV files, XML files, and even RSS feeds) using semantic mapping. It also functions as an innovative Powerpoint-style presentation tool, allowing users to define “presentation pathways” on top of the mind map structure, and to create presentation-style content that is associated with the mapped concepts.

Freewaregenius 5-Star Pick VUE can also be used in conjunction with the Zotero Firefox extension to map out and visualize online documents and web clippings. Read more on VUE: mind mapping software that combines data visualization, semantic analysis, and a full-fledged Powerpoint-style presentation engine in one…

Ninite: One installer, multiple programs
January 8, 2010 – 2:12 pm | 11 Comments
Ninite: One installer, multiple programs

ninite screenshotOK so you’ve just reinstalled Windows for whatever reason (update, clean slate etc). Now you have to sit there for about an hour just downloading all your favourite programs again and installing them. Well not any more.

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