Posted by Samer on January 14, 2010 in System, Utilities |
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. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 13, 2010 in Audio |
Auto 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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Posted by Samer on January 11, 2010 in Launchers, Utilities | Tagged Launchers |
If 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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Posted by Samer on January 11, 2010 in Freewaregenius Picks, Mind Mapping, Productivity & Applications |
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.
VUE can also be used in conjunction with the Zotero Firefox extension to map out and visualize online documents and web clippings. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 8, 2010 in Productivity & Applications, Software Updates, Uninstall, Web2.0 |
OK 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.
Ninite is a revolutionary new way of installing the software you want. Instead of having to download and install each program individually Ninite will do it all for you. Simply go to the Ninite website, choose the programs you want, download the installer and run it. That’s it. That simple. You can now go off and do something less boring whilst Ninite downloads and installs the programs for you.
[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Carbonize. Check out his tech blog here]. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 5, 2010 in Launchers, Utilities | Tagged Desktop Enhancements, Windows 7 |
7Stack is a free utility that can display the contents of any folder in a Mac-like vertical-style or grid-style stack, or otherwise in a cascading-menu style similar to the XP start menu. 7Stack shortcuts can be placed on the desktop, added to the Quick Launch tray (for XP, Vista), or pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar in the manner of a jumplist. Folder stacks can be used to browse folders and subfolders in-place without using Windows Explorer.
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Posted by Samer on January 4, 2010 in News |
First off I wanted to say to all my readers: may you all have a wondrous and prosperous new year. As you can see, I have taken a two week break from posting during this holiday season. I would like to assure reader Stanley who emailed me with some concern that I’ve disappeared for good that I am now back (back!) in the swing of things.
I am kind of depressed at my dearth of postings, actually. In an ideal world I would like to post an average of 2 times per day, but that does not look like it will happen anytime soon, not with my full time job and kids getting first dibs on my time.
But now that the new year is upon us, here are my 12 Freewaregenius resolutions for the new year (which I might add are not a whole lot different from my personal new year’s resolutions). I will also include a probability percentage of what I think the likelihood is for each one of these resolutions to actually come to be. Continue reading ..
