Life Rocks 2.0

Disk Cleaner Cleans up Application and System Temp Files

Nirmal — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:00:26 +0000

Disk Cleaner is a free and open source application to quickly and easily clean your hard disk from temporary files in the system temporary folder, the Internet Explorer Cache and Cookies folder, and the Recycle Bin. It also cleans up recent data in the installed application like Adobe Reader, IE, Office, Firefox etc. Disk Cleaner is very easy to use and all you need is to select the items which you want to clean up and then click clean button.

Despite the ease of use, the extendibility by plug-ins, which in fact are just simple text files, make that Disk Cleaner can also be used by power users to clean specific items. You can create plugins using any text editor like textpad or notepad.

Disk Cleaner is a handy tool to clean up temporary files and also free up hard disk space. Disk Cleaner is also entirely self-contained: no other (large) DLLs are necessary to run the application, so it can even be run from a USB drive without trouble.

Download Disk Cleaner

Show Desktop Button for Windows 7

Nirmal — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:02:26 +0000

Previous versions of Windows, including Vista had an option to show the desktop when you have too many windows open. The show desktop feature in previous versions of Windows minimizes all the open programs. In Windows 7 the position of show desktop is different and it has another feature called Aero peek which will actually peek into the desktop without minimizing the applications. But if you want the show desktop feature in Windows 7, here is a small application, called Show Desktop, which will do the same task as in Vista and XP.

There is no installation for this program and when you execute this, it will actually minimize the application windows and show the desktop. So in order to have the same option through taskbar, simply drag and drop the exe file to the taskbar and pin it to the taskbar.

Now, every time you want to use the show desktop feature, just click on the icon in the taskbar.

Download Show Desktop for Windows 7

System Explorer Provides Detailed System Information

Nirmal — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:30:54 +0000

System Explorer is a freeware tool for Windows which will provide you with in depth details of your PC. display details about the startup programs, running processes, Internet Explorer, IE Addons, installed applications, network connections, Windows OS, services, drivers, and opened files. Action History for monitoring processes activities. It provides performance graphs for monitoring usage of system resources in time.

You can also create a snap shot of files and registry using this tool. System Explorer is an all in one tool for Windows and provides lots of features.

Features:

Detailed information about Tasks, Processes, Modules, Startups, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files.
Easy check of suspicious files via VirusTotal or Jotti service.
Easy search details about file/process via online databases.
Security Extension for automatic check of processes,modules and selected files.
“New Task…” dialog with integrated Auto Search and Auto Completion.
Action History for monitoring processes activities.
Performance graphs for monitoring usage of system resources in time.
System Snapshots for easy finding of system changes.
System Report builds rich text report containing major information about your System.

Download System Explorer

Remove Antivirus and Incomplete Uninstalls with AppRemover

Nirmal — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:30:22 +0000

Many times when you uninstall an antivirus tool, it might not be removed completely leaving some traces of the tool as antivirus are installed to protect all the files in your PC. AppRemover is a free utility that enables users to remove antivirus and other applications as well as left over files from incomplete uninstalls. You do not have to manually edit the registry to remove these applications. AppRemover provides you with two options, one is to remove an antivirus software installed on your PC and second one is to remove any failed uninstalls on your PC.

Once you select the option, it scans your PC to find all the installed antivirus tools and you can select the ones you want to remove.

An incomplete uninstall may also occur when a machine crashes during uninstall, leaving the product in an unstable state where it is not functional enough to uninstall, and yet many files and OS objects are left behind. The “Clean up Failed Uninstalls” option to should be used only in failed uninstall scenarios.

AppRemover supports the thorough uninstall of hundreds of antivirus and antispyware applications including the popular ones like Kaspersky, AVG, Avira, ESET, McAfee, F-secure etc.

Download AppRemover

How to Create a Business Card with Publisher 2010

Nirmal — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:00:44 +0000

We have previously covered how to create and print a business card using Word 2007. Publisher 2010 included with Office 2010 has also good options to create business cards. Publisher 2010 has much more options when compared to Word when creating business cards. Once you create business cards with Publisher 2010, you can directly print them. There are variety of templates to chose from, for making your business cards. To create a new card, Open Publisher 2010 and click file tab. Click new and select business cards.

This will open up the templates available under business cards. There are installed as well as online templates and you can filter between them. Templates are available for different international sizes as well as manufactures.

When you select any particular card, you can see options to customize the color and fonts in the cards. There is also option to select the page size as well as logo.

Once you have finalized the options, click create and Publisher will open with the selected business card. You can now add you own text and other details you would like to have in the card.

Once you are done with the customization, you can print the card using your color printer and a good quality paper.

Site Performance Tool in Google Webmaster Central

Nirmal — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:26:42 +0000

Google has introduced a new experimental feature in Webmaster Central called Site Performance. This Webmaster Tools Labs feature shows you latency information about your site. It shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make the pages load faster. Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser.

To see this feature, you need to verify your ownership of your site within Webmaster Tools. This feature is available under Labs-> Site Performance.

This data collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature. Data may also not be available for your site if not enough users (with Google Toolbar and the PageRank feature turned on) have visited your site’s pages during the time period displayed.

It often represents an aggregate of thousands of data points, collected from all around the world, over various network connections, browsers and computer configurations. So if your site does not have high traffic the results may be not accurate.

Check out Site Performance

Scan Files Online with Filterbit

Nirmal — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:50:14 +0000

Although the safest way to protect from viruses is to install a antivirus software on your PC, sometimes you would want to cross check your downloaded files with online virus scan. We have covered online antivirus tools like Virus Total and NoVirus Thanks. Here is another tool called Filterbit which can scan your files online using different antivirus tools. Filterbit can also scan, analyze and individually identify multiple files contained within a file archive such as Winzip, WinRar, PKZip and other types.

Filterbit uses antivirus scan provided by AVG, Kaspersky, ClamWin, CA, McAfee VirusScan, Norman and others. You need to upload your files for scanning and Filterbit facilitates rapid detection of viruses, trojans, worms and other malware that may be contained within your uploaded files.

One thing missing in Filterbit is the ability to scan online files. Say if I have uploaded the file to online file sharing sites, currently Filterbit does not provide an option unless I download and then upload to their servers.

Filterbit Online Scan

Automatically Logon to Windows 7 and Lock Desktop

Nirmal — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:40:42 +0000

We have previously written on how to automatically logon to Windows 7, but logging to Windows using this method is not safe all the time since this could provide unauthorized access to your PC without your knowledge. Here is a simple tool which will automatically logon to Windows when you boot your PC saving your time and at the same time it provides security by locking the workstation so that there is no unauthorized access. With Auto Logon & Lock, you can have your Windows PC automatically logon to a user account on boot and then lock the desktop so a password is still required.

How to use this tool:

Run “Lock.exe” from the archive to test if the application runs without errors. If all is well your desktop should lock. Logon again and Windows Explorer should be open. You might want to create a System Restore Point before proceeding just to be safe.
Copy the files “Lock.exe” and “LockCMD.exe” to your Windows directory. (Ex: C:\Windows)
Run “lockcmd.reg” from the archive and click Yes in the dialog box. You must run this while logged on to the account which you want to enable auto logon for.
Click Start and type “netplwiz.exe” (Without the quotes) and press Enter.
Uncheck the box “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer” and click OK. Enter the Username and Password of the account you want to enable auto logon for.
Reboot your PC to test it.

Why use this tool?

Faster boot time. The additional post-logon start up items are also started after Windows boots. Which means when you press the power button on your PC and come back after a few minutes, its booted up. No need to wait for additional software to load after you logon.
Automatically resume downloads etc. when your PC reboots due to a power failure or crash. On XP you could do this by installing the application as a system service. In Vista and 7, Session 0 Isolation makes using a system service a pain, not to mention it’s insecure. Just put your applications in the regular Windows Start Up folder and they will be launched after the auto logon.
It password protects Safe Mode as well. Existing auto logon methods leave Safe Mode unprotected.
It locks the desktop before Explorer is started. Other methods auto-lock using an autorun/start up entry which leave the PC logged on and unlocked until the autorun entries are executed (which can even take several minutes).

This tool has been tested on Windows Vista (32-bit & 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit & 64-bit).

Download Auto Logon and Lock

Winter Theme Pack for Windows 7

Nirmal — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:22:53 +0000

We have covered a variety of Windows 7 theme on this blog. Its holiday time along with Christmas and Winter and its time to customize your Windows 7 with Winter theme pack. Winter Theme pack for Windows 7 comes with combination of Winter wallpapers and sound effects to spice up your desktop. All you need is to download the theme and execute it locally on their Windows 7 computer. The package comes not only with free backgrounds, but also new sounds.

The wallpapers are set to change every 30 minutes, but you can change the settings to suite your style.

Download Winter Theme Pack

SceneGrabber Creates Screenshots from Movies

Nirmal — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:00:57 +0000

SceneGrabber is a freeware tool which can create screenshots or rather scene shots of movies. It provide you an easily way to create scene shots from movies. You can grab manual or automatic frames from a movie and join then in a single JPG-image. Apart from this, you can also add to the single JPG image information like movie name, resolution, codec-info, movie length and time of scene shot creation.

You can create a single scene shot or specify the number of scene shots you require. When you click the zoom button, it opens up the properties window and you can specify the file details.

Scenegrabber.NET supports a wide range of movie formats. You can use all local installed codecs for this program. You can configure some settings like width and height of tiles, font, color and much more.

Download Scenegrabber.NET