In surfing the Internet while sick at home, I came across a few good utilities for my Windows systems. I run Windows 98 (not Second Edition) at home on my laptop and Windows 2000 at work. I found a few of these utilities on the website Pricelessware.org, billed as offering “the best of the best in Freeware”. Here’s some of what I found:
Oscar’s File Renamer
This one’s a gem. Renaming a file in Windows is easy. Just point, right-click, and hit “m”. But to rename more than 10 files this way is just a pain. So this utility provides a way to rename files in a batch, and it does it in a clever way. When you choose a directory of files to rename, the names of the files are placed in a text window. You then can edit the text with the full search/replace and macro abilities of a text editor. (The lines are fixed in place, of course, because each line represents a different file.) Once you’ve finished editing, you can commit the changes to disk. This utility is particularly handy for managing a collection of mp3 files or image files.
DirKey
DirKey provides hotkeys for your favourite directories that you can use when presented with File Open/Save dialogs. This eliminates one particular annoyance of Windows for me, that of Open/Save always being open to the wrong directory. Plus, simply in Explorer, DirKey’s hotkeys will let you jump to your favourite directories. So far, I’ve bookmarked C:\darren\, C:\download\, and C:\media\.
AutoSizer
I use the web-based email site Oddpost.com and it always opens a new Internet Explorer window that isn’t properly aligned to my desktop. And I always have to maximize it after logging in. Now with AutoSizer, the window automatically gets maximized when it appears. One less thing for me to worry about.
Cacheman
Cacheman is a disk caching / paging management tool for Windows. It allows me to tweak some of the memory settings on my system. This is particularly important for my laptop, which is a Pentium 266 MHz with only 64 MB of RAM. Since it’s a laptop, there’s no hope for more memory. I hope to see some improvements in the speed of loading and switching between programs. I’m using the Freeware version of Cacheman for Windows 98, but there is also an XP version. The program comes with a Wizard which helps you decide what settings are important for you to change, and various profiles for different kinds of systems. I’m trying the “Low Memory System” profile.