Windows Tools, Help & Guides

I have two copies of SnagIt to share with readers! SnagIt, in my opinion, is the best screen capture tool available for Windows. With SnagIt, you can take screenshots and organize them easily. SnagIt comes with many built in functions that make it so easy to capture your screen that I now use it as my primary screen capture tool for Windows Guides. More about the program after the competition details.

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I previously covered CCleaner when I first started this website. I still think this is a great tool and the in lieu of writing about Advanced SystemCare this evening, I felt it would be good to remind readers of or introduce them to CCleaner. CCleaner’s purpose is to clean your computer of temporary files, junk files, and invalid file references. CCleaner is highly recommended by Windows Forums members and I suggest, after making a system restore point, that’s you tried this program out to see just how much you can improve your PC.

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I’ve covered this topic already–using Logon Studio Vista. In this guide, I’ll show you how to change you logon screen using, vista Visual Master, which is a tool that will let you tweak other parts of Vista too. Find out more about Vista Visual Master.

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Recently, I showed you how to write a simple VBScript that takes input by text converts it into speech.this script proved to be quite popular and attracted over 180,000 visitors.

Windows Guides reader Harry was inspired by this post and kindly made a tool for all Windows Guides readers. This tool performs the same functions as the original script provided but also gives you a nice graphical user interface to work with when you want your computer to speak back to you. Having your computer speech you can be a lot of fun and now this tool is available to all readers to play around with. In some parts of the world, it still April Fools’ Day– maybe you can think of some fun things you can do with this nifty little program.

You can download this tool for free below:

	Package	Release	Date	Download
	text-to-speech.exe	1.0.1	April 1, 2009	Download (72 KB)
	text-to-speech.zip	1.0.1	April 1, 2009	Download (24 KB)

Thank you Harry.

Windows Guides reader littlelooloo asked the following:

I had a question about this worm that is supposed to wreak havoc on computers tomorrow… the news said most security programs have it taken care of.  I just wanted to get your opinion/confirmation if that’s really the case or should I download a patch from Microsoft?

If you are concerned about the Conficker (a.k.a. downandup) worm, possibly scheduled to wreak havoc tomorrow, April 1, 2009, you can download a cleanup tool from ESET. You can also apply a patch from Microsoft

From the Sophos blog:

It’s quite possible that Conficker will not do anything significant on April 1st. Certainly it won’t be “deadly” and your computers won’t melt. :-)

The fact of the matter is that Conficker is not set to activate a specific payload on that date. Rather, on April 1st Conficker will begin to attempt to contact the 50,000-a-day potential call-home web servers from which it may receive updates.

But it’s just as likely that Conficker will receive instructions to do something on March 28th, or April 2nd, or April 14th as it will on April 1st. The emphasis by some media outlets on April 1st is really unfortunate.

What we can say with certainty is that people should keep their protection up-to-date, ensure that they have firewalls and security patches in place, have a proper policy in place regarding USB usage and passwords. In addition it wouldn’t do any harm – if you suspect you may be infected by Conficker – to run a Conficker removal tool such as the free one from Sophos.

Download the ESET Cleanup Tool

Download the Patch from Microsoft

SmushIt is an online tool that helps you reduce the size of your pictures without making them smaller or losing quality. I previously showed you how to use PNGCrush, which is limited to PNG files. SmuthIt works with all popular image types.

SmushIt even comes with a Firefox extension, which will let you compress pictures when you are using Firefox. SmuthIt will also let you batch process images so you can compress more than one at a time.

Start Using SmushIt