The popular game, Portal, has been made available via a free download for a limited time (May 24). Since I have never personally played it, I am getting the description of the game from Wikipedia’s page: The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and simple objects using the Aperture...

If you are unsure of what a mosaic is, it is simply a big picture made up of a bunch of smaller pictures which are tiled on a large grid. The effect is typically pretty neat. If you would like to make your own mosaics, then check out AndreaMosaic. I have used this title and it is ridiculously easy to use. Just select your master photo (the picture to turn into a...

Windows 2000/XP had a built in utility, the Clipboard Viewer, which did exactly what you would expect. For some reason, however, this tool was removed in Vista and still is not available in Windows 7. So if you need to be able to view your clipboard in one of the new OS’s, here are a few tools which can help. Generally, you would probably not need to view...

Something that old-school Windows users remember is the “Recorder” program in Windows 3.1, as in the macro recorder:(image credit) This was a very short-lived but very useful program as it had the ability to record keystrokes and mouse clicks into a script and then be run later at any time. After Windows 3.1 this program disappeared, and people...

If you use multiple monitors and are tired of seeing your background wallpaper repeated on both screens, a utility you might be interested in is DisplayFusion. With DisplayFusion you can add a taskbar to every monitor that works and looks just like the Windows Taskbar. Or take advantage of advanced multi-monitor wallpaper support, Flickr integration for image...

This is the tag line for the aptly named free utility: SIW – System Information for Windows. As you can probably guess, the functionality is in line with the name: SIW is an advanced System Information for Windows tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner. SIW can...

Many folks these days download videos from sharing sites such as YouTube (usually with this handy Firefox add-on). The downloaded video is usually MP4 or FLV, both of which can be played with the VLC player. If you want to burn this video to DVD however, chances are the software you use to do that doesn’t recognize either format, so you’ll need to...

For those of you who like to brainstorm on the computer, you can’t beat the flexibility offered by mind mapping software. For this task, the software package XMind looks pretty impressive. XMind is an award winning open source program which, in addition to the expected package of features, offers quite a bit of sharing and collaboration ability (some...

Windows 7 introduced the incredibly useful Aero Snap function, but for those of you using Windows Vista and XP you can add this functionality with the freeware utility, AeroSnap. AeroSnap is a simple but powerful application that allows you to resize, arrange or maximize your desktop windows with just drag’n'drop. Simple drag a window to a side of your...

Wonder whatever happened to the Netscape Communicator suite, and wish you could use it again with a modern engine? You can. It’s called SeaMonkey. Suite? SeaMonkey is more than just a browser. It also has a full email client, an IRC client (ChatZilla) and web page editor (Composer). It’s also compatible with some Firefox add-ons, so it is...

Foobar2000 is something that’s actually been around a very long time (since 2002!), but for whatever reason I never heard about it until very recently. The foobar2000 program is an audio player for Windows. Just audio, meaning no video. And that’s just fine because there are some of us out there that appreciate dedicated audio player programs, yours...

For those of you who remember and enjoyed the simple (but addictive) game Lemmings, a game you should give a look to is Pingus. If you haven’t played Lemmings, the concept is simple: The player takes command in the game of a bunch of small animals and has to guide them around in levels. Since the animals walk on their own, the player can only influence...

A common tool that network and system admins make use of is the “ping” command which is a very simple and effective way to verify a machine is available on the network (firewall rules depending of course). So if you find yourself having to ping multiple machines at once, a very useful tool is Nirsoft’s PingInfoView. PingInfoView is a small...

Windows Live Writer is without question the best blogging tool there is. It’s so good that even Mac users like it. If there were ever a killer app for blogging, Windows Live Writer is it. WLW is free and part of the Windows Live suite of applications; it can be downloaded from http://download.live.com. It will run on versions of Windows from XP to the...

Developers and power users usually find themselves with a “hodge podge” collection of tools and utilities. If this sounds like you, then a suite you might be interested in is Gizmo Central which brings together lots of utilities into a single package, including:Advanced Themes Full VHD mounting (Dynamic, fixed, & differencing) ISO, BIN, CUE,...

For those of us who use a laptop, there is no doubt that one of the most important components is the battery. If the battery completely dies you can always plug the system into the wall to use it, but that defeats the purpose of a laptop. Therefore, it is essential to take good care of your battery and a program which can help is the appropriately named utility:...

I had the opportunity to check out the next version of Windows Live Mail, that being Wave 4, a.k.a. Build 15:…and here’s my take on it. The ribbon interface There are many that say the ribbon interface is one of the worst things Microsoft has ever done, but, the one thing the naysayers always forget to mention is that any clickable function...

The need to convert text to speech is probably more common than you think. It is useful for applications such as automated systems, custom programs and sometimes is just fun to play with. With that said, if you ever have the need to do this, an application which can make this process easy is SayIt. AnalogX SayIt gives your computer a synthesized voice to rival...

As you probably know, your hard drive is the device which is most likely to fail. While a hard drive can fail at any time without warning, the S.M.A.R.T. sensors build into modern hard drives are a good indicator of your overall drive health. A very simple tool which allows you to view this data is Nirsoft’s DiskSmartView. DiskSmartView is a small utility...

For those of you that have ever used JkDefrag, MyDefrag is what it has evolved to, and it’s still as great as ever. When it comes to running a file defragmentation on your Windows PC, the only thing you truly care about is getting it done as fast as possible with no fuss. MyDefrag does just that. What are the improvements over JkDefrag? Here are five good...