Nifty Windows is a compilation of dozens of Autohotkey scripts in one application that are all aimed at providing the user with a better way of interacting with windows. The compilation offers 28 new ways to interact with the user interface of Windows by using either hotkeys or the mouse.

Let me give you some examples to make this clearer. After installing Nifty Windows you may minimize a folder or application by clicking the left and right mouse button. The right and middle button would close a window while the Windows key plus the mouse wheel would change the transparency level of a window.

The real beauty is that you only need to download the Nifty Windows application and start it to have access to all 28 features of it. Let me give you an overview of all features that are accessible. The developer of the application describes them as well on his website.

continue reading "Nifty Windows"

Traffic Shaper XP is a free software that is able to limit the upload and download speed of your applications and ports. This is done by creating rules similar to those known from software firewalls. You select a network adapter, choose if the rule limits upload, download or both, select a protocol and specify local and remote ports.

After that you name the rule and limit the speed to a predefined value between zero and unlimited bytes per seconds. Last but not last you may select a priority and a queue size for that rule. It takes effect immediately after you finished creating it. You might have noticed that you do not specify an executable but only ports in Traffic Shaper XP.

This means that you have to know the ports that the application is using to be able to limit the bandwidth. One possible reason to use this application would be to limit the download speed of an application because you need at least a little bit of bandwidth for your weekly online poker game.

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I have been writing about the sweet little tool Junctions before but it got somehow lost among more popular articles back then and I decided to give it another try. A Directory Symbolic Link is a link from another drive or directory to an existing directory. NTFS Junctions could be used for instance to access the folder d:\mp3 from a symbolic link in c:\mp3.

Junction was created by Mark Russinovich and is freely available on the Microsoft homepage. The software has a size of only 41K and can only be used from the command line. I’m using several NTFS junctions to be able to access my most important directories from several of my hard drives.

Let us take a look at the example from above and create a NTFS junction from c:\mp3 to d:\mp3. To create the junction you open the command line and write the following code: junction c:\mp3 d\:mp3. If the folder c:\mp3 is not existing it will be created by the command line tool.

continue reading "Create NTFS Junctions aka Directory symbolic links"

Stick is a nice little freeware application for Windows that is able to add several tabs to the top of the screen each with its own functionality. The tabs are fully customizable and can contain any of the following five functionalities: Notes, Calendar, RSS Feeds, Calculator and Navigator tabs.

The notes tab for example would give you a notepad like application that can be opened and closed by simply clicking on the tab or using a defined hotkey. The other tabs work the same way and it is furthermore possible to create your own tabs if you download the source code of Stick as well.

The real beauty is of course the ability to open and close the tabs when needed which means that they take up little space in closed form but are still accessible when needed. I decided to take a screenshot to illustrate how this could look like when applied to the windows desktop.

continue reading "Add Tabs to your Windows desktop"

The autopatcher team finally managed to update all of their update packages for Microsoft operating systems to July 2007 which means that you can download all patches that Microsoft has released for your operating system and apply them at once instead of using automatic updates or connecting to a Microsoft server at all.

As always core and update packages are available. The core package contains all patches from the beginning to that month while the update packages contain only the updates of a month. If you never used autopatcher before you should start with the core update which is currently to May 2007 and apply the June and July updates afterwards.

This way you can efficiently patch your system. You do get a choice during installation and may uncheck several patches that do not affect your system. To make things easier, here are the links for the XP updates: May 2007 core, June 2007 update, July 2007 update.

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