The tiny software Vista Drive Icon changes the drive icons in My Computer when running a previous version of Windows - like Windows XP, Windows 2000 and even Windows 95 - to drive icons that resemble those of Windows Vista. They are not the same but look nice and add a new function displaying the free and used space of the drive in a horizontal bar beneath the icon.

Just select a language and destination folder for the program files during installation and start the software afterwards. The drive icons will automatically be changed to Vista like drive icons. You can only see those however if you Thumbnails from the View menu.

What I like is that icons do change to red if the drive is almost full which gives you a great quick overview of drive capacities. I’m normally not running out of space but this could come in handy for some users who have at least one hard drive that is close to its storage limit from time to time.

continue reading "Windows Vista Drive Icons"

Ink is expensive, I think we can all agree on this fact, yet programs with ink saving technologies are not available widely. Free programs that save ink are even rarer and it is nice to see that a program named Greenprint is now available in a free version which does have reduced functionality and ads.

But what’s so special about Greenprint which I discovered at the Download Squad ? Greenprint gives you options before you start the print job. It displays all pages and determines those that are most likely not needed, this can be for instance pages with just a footer which would be a waste of ink. Besides that users can remove certain elements from pages that do get printed by right-clicking those pages and selecting one of the three available options to remove certain elements on the page.

Elements that can be removed are images, text and the whole page much like a basic version of the Firefox extension Aardvark. The advantage of Greenprint is that it is available in all types of applications because it installs itself as a virtual printer, the disadvantage is that you can’t select single elements on a page and remove only those. It’s all or nothing. Documents can also be saved instead of printed using Greenprint.

continue reading "Save Ink (and a tree) with Greenprint"

Have you ever come across files with the extension cbr or cbz? These are the standard file formats for digital comic books. Whether you have a subscription to a comic book archive or had the files given to you by a friend, the bottom line is what are you supposed to do with them.

If you’re using Windows, then you might want to try CDisplay. This software is a free comic book reader (also called sequential image viewer) and is also the most popular one as far as I can tell. The program can read the images inside the comic book file in a sequential format with relative ease.

continue reading "View Comic Books with CDisplay"

The Windows clipboard can store a single text phrase in its memory, once a new phrase is copied to the clipboard the old one is lost. If you want to copy two different text phrases for instance you need to copy the first, paste it somewhere, copy the second and paste it as well. A tool that would save more than one record at a time would optimize the process considerably.

Clipdiary, which was mentioned at Tech Yard, is such a program. It stores all plain text and rich text phrases in the clipboard as well as images in the clipboard until you delete the entry in the clipboard or a set limit of stored entries is reached. That limit is set to 3000 but you can change it from 0 (unlimited) to a number of your choosing. I personally think that 3000 is way to high because it would take ages to find the correct phrase that you are looking for, some users might find it useful nevertheless.

CTRL + C and CTRL + V work the same way as before, if you press CTRL + V the last saved phrase or image gets pasted into the current text field. The new keyboard shortcut CTRL + D opens the program interface where older entries can be picked and pasted.

continue reading "Extend the Windows Clipboard"

Quick Tool for the evening. The unfortunates who have to use Internet Explorer might find the following utility handy, it is called Faves Analyser and analyzes the favorites of the Internet Explorer. All favorites are scanned and tested to see if the links are still working.

The software tests each link of the favorites displaying the favorite folder structure and all links. Links that are still pointing to a valid url get a green icon while dead links are shown as red icons. The problem that I had with the application was that it is not possible to edit or delete entries from within the program.

I had to open Internet Explorer or the folder containing the favorites to delete the dead links. The program requires the .net framework 2 from Microsoft.

continue reading "Check Internet Explorer Favorites"