It allows users to control USB devices such as, storage, printers, scanners, audio, and other devices.

It can also be used to lock a device. Suppose you want to disable printing, scanning, or a storage device, first disable it and then go to options to password protect the settings.

This can in fact be very useful. If you have a computer in office workspace and are worried that someone might copy a file then you can disable storage devices and password protect it. Once done, all USB inserted in your computer will fail to work.

There is also an option to enable hotkey, start with windows, and hide it from the system tray.

Download USB Manager (Site is in Russian, download link given directly below the heading)

It works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003/2008, and Windows 7. Enjoy!

Watermark Image Software allows users to batch watermark their images using either text or photos. You will find all advanced options to watermark the images. Select the source folder that contains the watermark and the destination folder where you want to save the watermarked images. Choose the resize option, transparency option, and the exact watermark location.

Once all is done, choose either text or image watermark. For text, there are options to choose font, text color and text size.

We cannot compare this tool with other batch image processors that we mentioned above because they belong two two different categories. Overall, it does a very good job to batch watermark the images.

Download Watermark Image Software

It is a portable tool that works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Enjoy!

You can tweak almost every aspect of Firefox from about:config, but this can be done by advanced users only. So how will the basic novice users tweak Firefox? The answer is Configuration Mania add-on.

Once installed, navigate to Tools > Configuration Mania and you will see all browser settings neatly laid out. You can change every type of settings from here, the developers have however not included the settings that users should not touch. But having said that, there are lots of options that you might want to actually access.

Below you will find screenshots of Security and User Interface settings. Options to tweak Javascript, Popup Windows, Antivirus, SSL, Network, Privacy, Mouse Wheel, Multi-Touch, Find In Page, Key Navigation and others are neatly laid down as sub-tabs.

This is a must have add-on for novice and semi-advanced users alike. Even though I am experienced with about:config, using this add-on will actually make it much easier and faster. Don’t you agree?

Configuration Mania Add-on For Firefox

It works on all versions of Firefox from 3.0 to 3.6, including the latest up-to-date release. Enjoy!

via Lifehacker

Check it out yourself in the screenshot below:

The Upload Center is started during startup and I cannot disable it from Notification Area Icons window because of “Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar” checkbox which is enabled. In fact, the Notification Area Icons feature is only able to hide the icon, not disable or remove it.

Microsoft has given the option to remove the icon from the system tray in Upload Center settings. Since it is given in-between other options, sometimes it can be confusing to find it. You just need to uncheck the “Display icon in notification area” checkbox and the icon will be removed.

Additionally if your system starts up pretty slow, you can disable Office 2010 from loading during startup. Type msconfig in Start Search and hit enter. Now go to Startup tab, disable Microsoft Office 2010, and hit OK.

Outlook Data Export is a free add-in for Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 which adds an additional option to quickly export Mails, Contacts, Notes, Tasks, and Appointments to several different file formats, such as, MSG, Unicode MSG, RTF, TXT, CSV, ICS, vCard, HTML, and XML.

This add-in makes exporting a piece-of-cake. Once installed, you will find the Outlook Data Export drop down menu under the Add-Ins tab as shown in the screenshot below.

First select the type of data you want to export, then select the export directory, export options, start and end date to schedule export(for mails only), choose the output format, and finally select the file name options(for mails only).

You can either export an entire folder and sub-folders, or you can export only selected items.

This add-in is the best thing to happen to Outlook in a long time. It is indeed useful and allows users to export in just few steps.

Download Outlook Data Export Add-in

It works with both Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007. Enjoy!

Move everything into the Dropbox folder? Nay!

Now there’s a little problem with Dropbox: it creates a folder (My Dropbox) and only synchronizes whatever is in that one folder. This means that you would have to move all the documents, photos, application data, and maybe even programs into that single folder. Apart from having problems with the programs having their location changed (or needing to reinstall them), you’ve probably already got yourself a nicely organized folder structure of your own.

No need to mingle with that then, use symbolic links to point Dropbox to the folders! Symbolic links are, simply put, transparent shortcuts to a file or folder somewhere else (locally or via a (SMB) network path). This means that the files can be accessed from such a symbolic link just as if they were physically there. The only difference is that if you remove the symbolic link, the actual (source) file or folder will not be removed.

This does have a downside, though, as Dropbox will not monitor for file changes in the symlink folders and will update them only at startup.

How to make it work

First of all, you have to make sure that your Dropbox folder is not inside a folder you want to backup (a folder of which you want to create a symbolic link in the Dropbox folder). That would – for Dropbox – create an infinite loop My Dropbox\Folder containing ‘My Dropbox’\My Dropbox\Folder containing ‘My Dropbox’\ etc. You can change your Dropbox folder path in the Preferences dialog.

Windows Vista and 7 have a nice command-line utility mklink to do the magic. In order to use this, open up a command prompt window in the folder you want to create a link in – so the My Dropbox folder – by using SHIFT+right click and choosing Open command prompt here.

For creating a symbolic link to a folder, type:

mklink /d NameForMyNewSymbolicLinkToADirectory

and drag the folder to the command prompt from an Explorer window. This will add the folder’s name to the command line. Now press Enter.

Want a little more help? Try the little program called Link Shell Extension (download below), which adds some context menu items for files and folders to copy a file/folder and paste it somewhere else as a symbolic link.

OSX and Linux

These two operating systems have the same sort of command-line tools available:

ln -s /the/full/path/to/target/folder ~/Dropbox/NameForMyNewSymbolicLinkToAFolder

A Caveat

Like most solutions of pure elegance, there’s always a downside. As said before (to spare you from a disappointment after reading this all, Dropbox seems not to be able to directly pick up on changes made in a folder it only has a symbolic link to. How this exactly happens is a question I herewith pose to you. In most cases, it will suffice that Dropbox checks for changes every time it starts, but for folders that require immediate backup, such as you Documents folder, you can also turn all this around: put the real files in the My Dropbox folder, then create a symbolic link to the folder, now in My Dropbox, in the original location.

Download Link Shell Extension

Upload Center has two benefits, first and foremost it allows users to quickly monitor the pending documents and second that it can be used to verify that the document has been uploaded successfully.

Further advantage is that it allows users to quickly open the desired document on the web, save the uploaded documents to the desktop, and more. These options can be found under Actions menu.

You can select to upload all documents and pause them using the desired buttons given next to Action menu.

The Upload Center sits in the system tray and notifies the user of any failed uploads, pending uploads, and paused uploads.

You must be wondering how it can save the document to the desktop from Upload Center. This is because it caches all documents that are uploaded.

You can change the maximum cache size by going to Settings. In case you are wondering, the documents are cached by MS SharePoint Workspace.

In conclusion, we can say that Upload Center is one of the best new additions to Office 2010. Now let’s hear what you have got to say on this feature. Do you think MS did a good job or is it just another feature that will soon die after the initial excitement?

The latest version of Office 2010 includes the long awaited Save To SkyDrive feature which can be found in the Share tab under File Menu. For the sake of convenience we will show you the steps required to save a Word document in SkyDrive.

Go to File > Share and select Save To SkyDrive option.

Now go ahead, click Sign In and login with your Windows Live ID. Once inside, it will display all folders in your SkyDrive account with an option to create a new folder. Now select the folder where you would like to save the document and hit Save As button.

Now it will contact the server and after some time show the Save As dialog window from where you can select the format you want to save it in. When you hit Save, it will begin uploading the document to the server.

The Save To SkyDrive feature in Office 2010 is the final confirmation that Microsoft is transforming SkyDrive into a central destination for storage. You should expect to see more features in and around SkyDrive in the future.

Before you give Office 2010 a shot, make sure to read what’s new in Word 2010, Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010. Enjoy!

There are two parts, you can either search by file date or file size. Both are helpful in narrowing down to the exact files that are needed. What most users don’t know is that you can use less-than(<) or greater than(>) signs in Windows Explorer Search.

Search By Date

To search between any two dates, click the first date and drag the mouse to the second date. It will become:

datemodified:[first date] .. [second date]

To search for files before or after a specific date, use the operators < or > before the date. They will become:

datemodified:<[date]     (To search for files before a date)

datemodified:>[date]     (To search for files after a date)

where [date] is any date. Note that there should be no spaces between operators, signs, and the date.

Search By File Size

By default it will show you a list of choices to choose from but sadly there is no way to customize these choices. It might require hacking of registry.

To search for files that are greater or less than a file size, we will put < and > before the file size. They will become:

size:<100MB  (Search for all files that are less than 100MB)

size:>100MB   (Search for all files that are greater than 100MB)

you can use either KB, MB, or GB. You can also use decimals, such as, 1.5MB.

The above mentioned search operators can be used in Windows Vista as well. I am not sure if they would work with Windows XP too.

Editor’s Notes: This post is targeted for those users who have upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 or are new to Windows 7 in any other way.

Update: It seems like this post shouldn’t have been written. You can compress the files in zip in Windows XP as well. My bad.

Microsoft first introduced this feature in Windows XP and is now available in Windows 7 as well. It doesn’t compress like 7-zip, but for faster and quicker compression it does the job.

Just right-click file(s) and/or folder(s) and select Send To > Compressed (Zipped) Folder.

Once compression is complete, you will see the compressed zip folder in the same directory as source.

Compressing a bunch of files can save you hard disk space, bandwidth, time, and lots of other difficulties. Sadly there is no way to password protect the compressed zip folder, this is something you will find in 3rd party tools such as the widely recommended 7-Zip. Enjoy!