I have found two freeware applications for you that will do the trick. One plain and simple and one with a few more options.

This is also for those of you who desperately miss your MAC taskbar, but have to use XP at work or whatever. Curious? Read on!

Visual Task Tips (What you expect, is what you get)

Visual Task Tips is a straightforward little application that gives you exactly what you’d expect. A Thumbnail Preview. Nothing more, nothing less. Just Download and install.

Visual Task Tips Supports both 32bit and 64bit platforms.

Download here!

Visual Tooltip (The one for MAC lovers)

If you want more than just a preview, then Visual Tooltip is for you. Not only do you get the pretty Taskbar Thumbnails, you also get more.

You can control where the thumbnails appear as well as  how they appear.

With Visual Tooltip you can also replace your Windows Taskbar entirely with a
MAC-Look-A-Like Taskbar similar to the one found i OS X.

We previously covered this program here a couple of years ago and it seems to be running even more smoothly now.

Download here!

The MAC Cloned Taskbar

Further Reading

• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• Collection of 14 Free Windows Sidebar Gadgets [Chameleon Glass Style]
• Clean Up old Windows System Restore Points [How To]
• Remote Desktop, No Installation Required – Freeware

MouseExtender is a small application can be used to start your favorite programs and URLs. Using Drag and drop or the Add function in the File Menu you can add almost any utility, task and web service to the interface.

MouseExtender features:

• Mouse button configuration
• Add items to ME using Drag&Drop!
• Group your items by tabs
• Add Web Address
• Customize item as you want. User can change launch arguments,tool-tips, icons, etc.
• Shutdown/sleep/hibernate with timer
• Automatic updates checking
• Sort Items using Drag&Drop
• Stylized controls
• Enable/Disable option from tray icon context menu
• About information
• Localization
• MouseExtender automatically adds web site icon and title for Web address

Read more here, and download from here: (http://me.krv7.net/)

.Net Framework

MouseExtender is developed on the .net platform and the .net runtime framework is required. Windows 7 users need to do nothing as it comes with the .net already installed.

If you don’t have Windows 7 you need to download and install .net framework (click here).

Enjoy!

Download MouseExtender

Download MouseExtender

Further Reading

• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• Really Take Control over Your Right-click Context Menu [How To]
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• Remote Desktop, No Installation Required – Freeware
• Collection of 14 Free Windows Sidebar Gadgets [Chameleon Glass Style]

If you never had to used it (I’m not quite sure I believe you) or you rarely do, the old (and unused) Restore Points will undoubtedly take up a lot of hard-Drive space. If you are on Windows 7, you may have discovered that Windows on occasion deletes the old Restore Points Automatically so you really don’t need to worry much about it. If you use an older Windows – chances are that your Restore Points are piling up on you.

So How do you easily remove the old Restore Points, yet – keep the new ?

Clean Up Restore Points using the Clean manager

1. Click the Start-Button and type: CleanMgr, Press Enter.
2. Choose your main Hard-Drive (the one where your Restore Points are stored – usually C:)
   Let Clean Manager Search through your system for deletable files.
3. When Clean Manager is done Calculating, click on the More Options tab
4. Click The Clean Up button found under “System Restore and Shadow Copies”, to remove all but the most recent restore point.

NOTE!

Only use this feature if you are certain that you won’t be needing the old Restore Points. Once gone, you cannot have them back. Unless you run a System Restore that is…

Further Reading

• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• Can’t Delete a File? Use the Command Prompt [How To]
• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• Really Take Control over Your Right-click Context Menu [How To]
• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows

If you have Windows 7 and would like to enhance the way Aero Snap works , then This is the freeware for you: Acer Gridvista.

Read on for download link.

More functions than Aero Snap

With Acer Gridvista you don’t only get the Aero Snap function as in Windows 7, you get a better version of it. The program allows you to divide each monitor in up to 4 individual sections, each with its own setting. You can preset zones in which the program snaps a window into place, or you can snap it in place using a custom button which is added to your explorer windows. For Windows 7 users; Gridvista integrates seamlessly into Aero Snap giving it even better functionality.

In Addition is also provides transparent windows and the option to stick a window on-top of others.

After you download and install the program, you’ll find a blue monitor icon in your Taskbar. Right-Click it edit the settings and how many zones you want to divide that monitor into.

Features

Once Installed, and monitors divided – just drag a non-maximized window over an active zone to snap it into place.  You will also find three custom buttons at the top of each window you open. These buttons let you choose which zone to use, if that window should always be on top or not and if the grid should be magnetic or not.

Yes, This Freeware is developed by Acer Computers, and originally developed for their notebooks. I have not found any official download link on the Acer Website but it is freely available for download on the net. More information on features here.

Download Acer Gridvista

Download Acer Gridvista

Further Reading

• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows
• Remote Desktop, No Installation Required – Freeware
• Clean Up old Windows System Restore Points [How To]
• Collection of 14 Free Windows Sidebar Gadgets [Chameleon Glass Style]

Windows Guides’ Rating	User Rating	Compatible with
4+ out of 5	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

PROS: The program is very easy to use right out of the box. It works quickly and silently in the background without taking up too much of you CPU. CONS: The final reports after analyzing and de-fragmenting can be long and difficult to read for novices. I would want to see more help-information being provided in click-able links throughout the reports. VERDICT: An affordable defrag solution that actually improves your computer and registry without causing new errors. PRICE: $34,95 per license (3 user license) VERSION REVIEWED: 4.4.2 DOWNLOAD: http://www.advanceddefrag.com/

It is inevitable that your computer becomes slower and slower over time. Even a tuned and high-performance computer will after a while take a long time to start or turn off. Problems with programs hanging or total computer freeze, error codes and slow overall performance at times, is what we all encounter, now and then.

Sometimes the errors are traced back to faulty drivers, or hardware, but usually most of our computer problems is in our clogged registry, fragmented hard-drive and so on. There are many programs out there that promises to solve this, some a free (like the Windows Defragment utility) other cost money.

Personally I don’t like the Windows Defragment Utility, mainly because I don’t find it very user-friendly, it is slow, it hogs up cpu power and it generally doesn’t do a very good job (not on my system anyway).

Advanced Defrag 4.4.2

During the years I have tested many defrag solutions and have very often come up short. But this peace of software really impressed me. Okay it has an odd-looking interface – but when you look into it is actually very intuitive as it resembles your Hard-drive. The software is very straightforward and easy; select your drive, press a button and voilà.

This version of Advance Defrag offers to take care of your registry, hard-drives, External USB devices. It also comes with real-time defragment and scheduling settings.

Interface

The interface shows you a large disk divided into cells which I represent each cluster on the disk. After Analyzing my disk it shows not only how much of the disk that’s fragmented, but also where it’s stored on the disk. An Easy-to-follow color scheme makes it very easy to read and where to direct your attention. If you click on a Cluster you get information about that block and what it contains.

Registry Defrag

When it comes to my registry I am always both careful and suspicious. I don’t trust anyone to mess with it. 9 out of 10 times I have tried a Registry-Fix-Utility I end up running system restore after failing to get my computer back up and running. So it was with a slight nervous excitement I pressed Start Defragment Registry. To my great relief, not only did it find and fix errors, but my computer survived. No trouble what so ever.  Phew.

The software also did it in less than 5 minutes – which I also find very impressive.

Hard-Drive and USB

When you click on Start Defragment you get two options: “Quick” and “InDepth“. The Quick Option runs through your disk de-fragmenting it in a matter of minutes – a really impressive speed. The inDepth-Option is what you do every to or three months to make sure that your system runs on as “little fuel” as possible by rearranging often used files, freeing up more space and improving the overall performance.

They promise that the InDepth-Option  won’t spend more than 20 minutes on any disk you throw at it and to test this I started writing this article as I started de-fragmenting my main Hard-drive. As I reach this paragraph it’s not half way through my 250GB Hard-Drive (56,8 GB used space) – so the total amount of time they claim, is probably measured on an idle computer. I will check the report when it’s done.

Real Time Defrag

Now this is a feature I really like.  Every defrag utility with respect for itself will have an option to run on a scheduled time (so does this one). But the option to run it; Real Time, is something different all together. Real-Time Monitoring is what you expect any decent anti-virus or firewall application to do – but I have not as of yet seen it on a disk management program (I know I might be proven wrong).

Advanced Defrag will actually monitor your files as you store them and when the load on your CPU is low – it will make sure it’s stored in a contiguous space, and thereby maintaining the overall performance.

After Advanced Defrag has analyzed your disk, it presents a detailed report of any problems found and what  you should do to resolve it. In the interest of finding Cons, I do find the report a bit hard to read, if you are not too familiar with this kind of information; it is very detailed and feels a bit daunting. I would love to see Click-able links in the report with links to vocabulary, dictionary and extended information where available. As we are used to find in website blogs and tech-sites.

In Conclusion

I am impressed with Advanced Defrag. It does what it’s supposed to. It does so in a small amount of time with little to no CPU-Load. It feels as if it actually has improved my three year old computer. I shall continue testing the software (especially the real time monitor function) and will update this post with any noticeably differences that might occur.

This is a program you really should try for yourself – and I do believe it to be worth the money.

Download you trial here: Advanced Defrag, 7 day trial

Further Reading

• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows
• Really Take Control over Your Right-click Context Menu [How To]
• Clean Up old Windows System Restore Points [How To]
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]

Oh, I can hear you: “yes, but I use the “take ownership” function that I’ve added to my Context menu”. ALAS, Sometimes not even that will work – what then ? Do you have to Reboot your computer to be able to delete that file ?

Earlier, Harry had an article about the Command Prompt (read it here) and his top ten commands. One of those were the command we are looking to use now: DELETE (DEL).

The Command Prompt (cmd.exe) is what’s left of the old DOS (Disk Operating System) and some of us are old (shudders) enough to have actually used it as our main OS. Okay, enough of that.

Delete Troublesome files

This tutorial requires that you open the Command prompt as an Administrator and that you can access the folder from Windows.

1. Click the Start-button and type CMD in the search field (Do NOT press Enter)
2. When you see the program in the list, right-click on cmd.exe and choose Run as Administrator. This will open the Command Prompt Window with Administrative Privileges.
3. In you Windows Explorer, open the folder you want to delete or remove a file from. Click on the Adress-field to reveal the true folder path.
4. Highlight the path from the Colon (:) and to the end as shown here)
   
5. Right-Click the Highlighted part, and choose Copy (or Press Ctrl+C)
6. Go back to your Command-Window and type: CD\ (This will open the Root Folder)
7. Now Type: CD\ and Paste in the path using Right-Click, Paste (Ctrl+V will NOT work).
   Like this: CD\testfolder
8. To make sure you are in the correct folder you can type: DIR. This will show you the folder contents.
   
9. To delete the file causing you problems, type: DEL[filename] /F /Q.
   Like this: DEL filename.dat /F /Q.
   The F means: Delete File even IF it’s reported as Read Only.
   The Q means: you don’t have to Confirm.
   If you want to delete all files in the folder, you can use wildcards instead of Filename
   like this: DEL *.* /F /Q

Delete Folder which Contains Troublesome File(s)

Sometimes you need to delete the problem file before you delete the folder, but this is what you do:

Follow steps 1 through 6 above then continue here:

1. In The Command-Window type:  RmDir /S /Q [Paste in path using Right-Click, Paste], Press Enter.
   Like this: rmdir /S /Q c:\testfolder


2. Folder and contents will be gone forever.

Further Reading

• Really Take Control over Your Right-click Context Menu [How To]
• Clean Up old Windows System Restore Points [How To]
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows
• Remote Desktop, No Installation Required – Freeware

From time to time you’ll find link to free typefaces and fonts here on mintywhite which I’m sure you have put to good use – I know I have. I always thought that it was heavy colors and graphics that caused my ink to run out faster than greased lightning. But now it turns out that by choosing the right font when printing your documents, you  can actually save lots of ink and money.

Designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth looked at ink usage of some commonly used typefaces, by hand-drawing them with ballpoint pens. And the results really amazed me.

Read on to see which font is more economical in use…

The Winner is…

Not too surprisingly the font Impact uses a lot of ink, and so does Cooper Black. But I was quite stunned to find out that even the good old Times New Roman isn’t the most cost-effective font you can use either.

The best font you can use when you want to save money is: Garamond. Garamond uses about half the amount of ink needed when compared with Impact or Cooper Black.

You can read more about this experiment here!

Further Reading

• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows
• Office 2010: Modify The Ribbon [How To]
• Best Windows Freebies and Guides 18 [September 2009]
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]

The creator of the package has done his best to tweak the gadgets to fit nicely with Windows Aero (tho not all are transparent). You get 14 gadgets like Calendar, Email, CPU-monitor, stats, recycle bin, weather and one that I really liked; The Radio Gadget. You can choose from a range of music categories or add your own URL. Start and stop your favorite station with a single click.

The Email Gadget checks your POP3 accounts at intervals of your choice and displays all new and unread emails. Hopefully they can get it to work with Hotmail, Yahoo, G-mail etc. very soon.

You can download it here: Download from DevianArt

Further Reading

• MouseExtender is an iPhone-like Menu for Windows
• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• Best Windows Freebies and Guides 18 [September 2009]
• Remote Desktop, No Installation Required – Freeware

Here’s how to really do it in the fast and reliable way…

The pst-files contains all of your emails and contacts so really all you need to do is make a copy of it. Then when you need to restore or connect a fresh installation of Outlook to your “old” emails and contact you can import the “old” pst-file into the Outlook Pst Folder.

Making the Backup

1. Open Outlook
2. Open the Tools Menu, choose Accounts
3. Now you see the Account Settings Window
   

   

4. Click on the tab named Data Files. In the window you will now see all the PST-files that Outlook is presently using. If you have let Outlook run the Archive Function there will be two pst-files.
5. Click Open File Location, Windows Explorer will now open a window at the default location.
   
   
6. Close Outlook, but leave the Explorer window open
7. Copy the pst-files of choice to a new location, for example a CD or an online backup site.
8. Voilá

That’s all there’s to it.

Read on to learn about how to restore your pst-files into a clean Outlook

Further Reading

• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]
• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• Download Free Vista/XP Virtual Desktops PowerToy
• Clean Up old Windows System Restore Points [How To]
• XdN Tweaker Customizes Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista, and 7

With Google launching their new DNS Server not long ago, aptly named; Google Public DNS, I’ve been playing around with my DNS server to see which is the quickest!

This guide will show you how to change your DNS server and verify the settings in Windows 7.

See here to test your DNS server.

Step 1.

Open the Network & Sharing Center by either clicking on your network icon in the Notification Area and clicking  Open Network and Sharing Center (1), typing network in the start search box (2) or through the Control Panel (3).

(1)

(2)

(3)

Step 2.

Once Network & Sharing Center is open, in the left hand pane, click on Change adapter settings.

Step 3.

Right click your network adapter and choose Properties (if you get a UAC prompt, accept).

Step 4.

In the following window, under “This connection uses the following items”, click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click Properties.

Step 5.

Under the General tab check the Use the following DNS server addresses radio button, and enter your prefered DNS server address, in the guide we’ll be using Google’s DNS server address which is 8.8.8.8 /8.8.4.4

Make sure that Validate settings upon exit is also checked and hit OK.

Windows Network Diagnostics will now attempt to detect any problems with the addresses you’ve specified, leave it to work and hopefully it’ll report that troubleshooting couldn’t identify the problem.

Close the troubleshooter and that’s it done!

So, why change your DNS address?

“The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.”

By using a faster DNS server, your browsing speeds can increase, security can be improved and you get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

Return to default.

Returning to default is as easy as changing the DNS address.  Repeat Step 1 – 4, in Step 5. Check the Obtain DNS server address automatically. Hit OK.

Changes are made straight away, either way, no need to reboot.

There are hundreds of different DNS server addresses you can use.  OpenDNS is preferred by many and considered one of the best out there.  As always, experiment as YMMV.

Enjoy!

Further Reading

• Acer Gridvista Enables Aero Snap Features [Vista and XP]
• Can’t Delete a File? Use the Command Prompt [How To]
• Remote Desktop, No Installation Required – Freeware
• ImgBurn, Free CD/DVD Burning and Backup Tool
• Get Windows 7 Style Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in XP [How To]