The Windows XP or Windows Vista Start Menus provide only limited options to customize their appearance and change the links and the way they are displayed. Open Menu+ is an Open Source skinnable Windows Start Menu replacement that provides better access to Start Menu entries.

One interesting aspect of the software is the option to run the new Start Menu next to the old one for some time to find out if it better suits the needs. The new Start Menu makes use of a search tab at the top and five tabs at the bottom that provides access to various files and services with enough options to customize most of the display and entries.

The Start Menu is separated by the tabs Favorites, Recent, Computer, Programs and Leave.

• Favorites contain links that are added by the user. Links can be added in various ways including from other tabs of the Start Menu or by editing the favorites.txt file that comes with the application.
• The Recent tab displays programs and files that have been opened recently by the user.
• The Computer tab contains links to profile folders like My Documents, Printers or the Run dialog.
• The tab Programs contains links to all programs that are installed on the computer.
• Leave provides links to options like shutting down, logging off or closing the Open Menu application.

continue reading "Start Menu Replacement Open Menu+"

There is no obvious way to merge several Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and while many users probably could not think of a reason why someone would want to merge PowerPoint presentations some might find that it can improve the manageability of a set of presentations. Say you received several presentations during a meeting and instead of storing them independently you might find it easier to maintain and access if they all were saved in one file.

PowerPoint Join (via Friedbeef) is a small HTML Application (HTA) that can merge several PowerPoint documents into one. The use is not overly complicated but it requires some work on part of the user. The Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that should be joined have to be in the same folder. The user needs to create a text document that lists the names of all PowerPoint files that should be merged which also has to be in the same directory.

That text document is then loaded in the HTML application. A click on the link here in step 2 of the process will merge the PowerPoint documents and display a blank PowerPoint window afterwards.

continue reading "Merge Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations"

If you want to move a window in a Windows operating system you need to left-click on the title bar and drag it to the desired location. A left-click anywhere else will not have the desired effect. Alt Drag which my good old buddy Samer recently reviewed at his excellent Freeware Genius blog makes moving windows a tad easier.

As the name suggests it makes use of the ALT key. Whenever that key is pressed windows can be moved by pressing the left mouse button anywhere in it. This will save some miles of mouse movement per month for many users.

Alt Drag comes with the additional feature to snap a selected window to the screen borders or visible windows on the desktop to make better use of the screen estate.

continue reading "Alt Drag Windows Moving Made Easier"

FragExt is not your usual defragmenting software that you point at a system partition and let it do its work. It can be used to defragment selected files much like Defraggler with the difference that it integrates more nicely into the Windows operating system. It does have one slight disadvantage that will be explained later on.

After installing the defragmenting software it can be accessed by right-clicking a file or directory and selecting the FragExt entry in the context menu. That’s a natural way of performing defragmentation on files. It is however problematic for users who want to defragment their files in one go regularly because that’s almost impossible to achieve with FragExt because of the way it handles directories. The disadvantage that we spoke earlier about is that it will not automatically include subdirectories in the defragmentation process.

Which leaves it to be an excellent effective way of defragmenting files in Windows Explorer. FragExt does add another interesting aspect to Windows Explorer. It extends the File Properties dialog and adds a Fragments tab to it.

continue reading "FragExt Defragmenting Software"

File Verifier++ is a portable software program for Windows that can check the file integrity of selected files. This is done by calculating the hash of every selected file in the first run of the application and comparing that initial hash value with the hash that was calculated at a later time. The file has been modified if the hash values do not match.

The software program does not act automatically. The user has to select files or folders that he wants to calculate hash values for. Once they are stored in the database it is possible to check the files at anytime to see if the file has been changed in the meantime.

A set of 21 different hash algorithms including popular algorithms like MD5, SHA-512 or CRC-32 is available and at the user’s disposal. Results can be saved or loaded so that they are available whenever they are needed.

continue reading "File Integrity Check"