I’m not a huge fan of those visual tooltip applications no matter if they are integrated in the operating system or in other applications like Opera. The main reason for me personally was that I never had enough windows or tabs opened that I would need a visual tooltip to find the one I was looking for. Another reason was that those applications seemed to use a fair share of the system resources to display this graphical gimmick.

At least the second point of criticism has changed with the discovery of Visual Tooltip. That application is using less than 4 Megabytes of memory when its actively running which is pretty good for such a software.

Visual Tooltip does not need to be installed and can be run from the directory it was unpacked to. It adds an icon to the Windows system tray which offers access to the program’s options which are opened automatically during first start.

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Tamir contacted me today per email describing how he was looking for an easy way to backup and restore the wireless network profiles. He actually discovered some netsh commands but nothing that would really be considered an easy migration. He therefor decided to code a little application that would backup and restore the wireless network profiles in Windows Vista.

The commands to backup and restore wireless network profiles on the command prompt are netsh wlan export profile name=”name” folder=”folder” and netsh wlan add profile filename=”name” just in case you are asking. Regular users however will never discover this possibility and that’s where Wireless Migrator comes into play. Actually it’s of course also helpful for tech savvy users who want to speed up the process.

The software comes as an executable named BackupWireless.exe that automatically creates the backup RestoreWireless.wnb of all wireless network profiles upon execution. Executing RestoreWireless.wnb will restore the wireless network profile on the computer.

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Replacing an older hard drive with less space with a new one that offers hundreds of additional Gigabytes can be a confusing task. How do you get the data from the old drive to the new one without rising data loss in the process ? One possibility would be to copy the files manually after installing the operating system on the new drive, but what if you do not want to do that ? What if you want to copy everything including the operating system to the new drive without any additional hassles ?

HD Clone Free might be the solution in this case. The tool can copy contents from a smaller hard drive to a newer one without interfering with an existing operating system, file system or partition layout. It supports IDE, SATA and USB drives with capacities larger than 127 Gigabytes. It does have some limitations though which mainly affect the transfer rate. The maximum transfer rate is limited to 5 Megabytes per second and only USB 1.1. is supported.

Most retail versions of HD Clone support SCSI, Firewire and USB 2.0 but that’s probably not necessary for someone who is transferring files from one hard drive to another every two years or so.

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File recovery from old media disks like CD or DVD might become a huge market in the near future. People using them to store important data, like family pictures, documents or videos, will realize that CDs and DVDs won’t last forever and that read errors will happen more frequently. Ever tried to read from a CD that you burned in the last century ? I tried and the CD had lots of read errors although I barely used it in the last ten years or so.

CD Recovery Toolbox is a software that tries to recover data on CDs, DVDs and even HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs with no file size limitations which means that it can recover files of a size larger than 4 Gigabytes which is obviously not an issue if you want to recover data from CDs.

The application is compatible to all Microsoft operating systems since - and including - Windows 98 which includes Windows XP and Windows Vista. The easy to use wizard guides the user through the process which is simply a matter of selecting the drive where the CD or DVD has been inserted into, a target directory on the hard disk to store the recovered files and the selection of the files after CD Recovery Toolbox has analyzed the contents of the disk.

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You might remember that I was looking for a program to set global shortcuts to reserved keys like F1-F12. Winlauch is a program that can set global shortcuts and comes very close to fulfilling my wish. But let me start at the beginning. It’s relatively easy to set specific shortcuts in Windows that are recognized globally. It does however reach its limits when other applications, like Windows, are already using those shortcuts.

Shortcuts can be added by using an easy to understand wizard or by importing a list of previously created shortcuts into Winlauch. The user has to define the shortcut type in the first screen, a program, internet shortcut or custom command for example. The next window defines the selected type further. A program could be selected from a list of programs that are currently running on the system or by selecting an executable file on the hard drive.

The final screen configures the shortcut key and the state of the window or application that will be started by pressing it. A state could be hidden, minimized or normal. The real novelty is that single keys can be assigned. This means that a user could configure the F12 key to open Thunderbird and F11 to open Firefox.

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