I seldom run into an application that is as hard to describe as Shell Enhancer. When you install the application you can configure some settings of it and I was really blown away by the amount of options the program was throwing at me. I cannot go back to that dialog but it seemed like 15 or so windows with configuration options.

Shell Enhancer adds some long needed functions to Windows and when I write Windows I mean Windows XP or newer versions. The main functions are window and task management each offering numerous options that make your live easier. I think I use some examples to explain some of the functions of Shell Enhancer.

With Shell Enhancer it is possible to resize windows without having to move the mouse to a border of it. Pressing the ALT key plus one of the mouse keys resizes the active window fluently to the desired size. The window can be moved, resized with two static sides and resized completely by using the hotkey and the mouse. It’s far easier to click anywhere in the window to resize it.

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Nero Disc Speed is a software created by the developers of Nero that can benchmark CD and DVD drives and check media quality. Benchmarking tools in general are not used that often but they can reveal some interesting information about a hardware component or the system in general. Nero Disc Speed is no exception from the rule although it provides disc media quality checks which are useful if you want to test the quality of a disc.

Benchmarking a CD or DVD drive makes only sense if you can compare the results. This can be useful if you can test several CD or DVD writers before making a decision which to build into the computer or if you want to know how your drive compares to similar drives. If the benchmarking process does not throw up an error or stops midway you can almost be sure that the drive is not damaged mechanically.

The disc quality test is more interesting. It tests the quality of a created disc displaying a quality score at the end. A score above 80 is acceptable and everything above 90 is very good. I usually analyse the disc using the Scandisc function if the quality score lies beneath 80. This is also a great way to test burned media from time to time to make sure it does not contain any bad or unreadable sectors.

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Some of you might have experienced certain spyware, virus or trojan behavior that they spawn another process as soon as the user kills it. This can be caused by several processes that are running on the system that are infected and that scan the system permanently to make sure that all the relevant malicious processes are running. It is not possible to kill more than one task with the Windows Task Manager which is a bit unfortunate.

Kill Process is a process manager developed by Orange Lamp Software Solutions. The main purpose of the application is to provide the user with means to kill several processes at once and it can also prevent that new blocked processes are spawned on the system. That second feature comes in handy in numerous other occasions, more about that later.

The main interface of Kill Process displays a list of all processes that are currently running on the system. The list contains information about each process that includes its name, description and memory usage. Detailed process information are available by selecting the process and hitting enter or right-clicking it and selecting Process Information from the menu.

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I was rather skeptical of Adobe Air when it was first announced thinking of just another desktop application that no one would ever need or want. Surprisingly though this is changing quite dramatically with the release of some very cool and useful applications for that plattform. The latest gem is called Mooflair, a desktop video player supporting several online video portals like Youtube, Daily Motion and Metacafe.

The first thing that I noticed about Mooflair was its excellent design and responsiveness. I had some troubles finding the video search option, it’s a bit hidden under the RSS menu. Mooflair does not offer a full video search yet which is rather unfortunate. It provides access to all video portal RSS feeds which means to several dozen videos in certain categories like Video Games, Music and HD.

Local videos can be played as well. The ability to download videos is a nice feature but more or less a default feature in every video player of that kind. Mooflair does offer enough videos so that it does not get boring to fast but it is kept back by the lack of a full site search.

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Fileseek is another application developed by the creator of Display Fusion, one of the best multi-monitor wallpaper applications in existence. The software is a file search that can be seen as a Windows Search Replacement. Why could it be a great replacement ? Because it does offer features that the default Windows search does not offer and it provides results much faster than the default search.

The two parameters that you always have to select are a path and a search term that you want to find, every other parameter is optional. Search results begin to appear immediately while other files are still processed. The time it takes to process all files depends on the size of the hard drive(s), the cpu, ram, files on disk and several other factors. It is still fast enough and responsive so that it is possible to work with the search results even if the search is still going on.

Search queries are not only compared to filenames but also with file contents. This is extremely useful if you are looking for documents that contain a specific phrase. The line containing the phrase is shown in the search results together with the filename and path of the file.

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