Clownfish is a simple and free utility that hooks into your existing Skype installation; providing translation services between one language and your own – at least within chat windows. Clownfish has the capability to leverage several translation engines including Google Translate, Yahoo Translate, and Microsoft Live. Translating correctness and quality is dependent on the service used and while none are perfect, it’s generally more than enough to get your point across – which is really what communication is about isn’t it?

With Skype running, download, install, and launch Clownfish. You will need to authorize Clownfish to hook into Skype through the notification dialog displayed.

Configuration is handled by access the Clownfish icon from your desktop tray – but you’ll find that the default setup is rather sufficient.

Clownfish will use Google Translate and auto-detect the language used on both ends of the conversation, translating and sending/displaying the text automatically as you converse. Supported languages are limited only by the translation engine used but currently Clownfish supports: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish

Clownfish is quite effective at its main task of text translation but it also includes other features, if not novelties, such as a chat robot with limited AI, voice-changer for audio calls, or even silently recording of your voice conversations. Not bad for a 600KB download right?

Clownfish is compatible with all current iterations of Windows and was tested with Win 7 64 bit and Skype 5.5.

Download Clownfish

Prio is a light-weight extension to Task Manager that allows for the saving of a processes’ priority though the same context menu you are already using manually above. With an application priority saved, the next time it’s launched Prio will apply the priority change silently and automatically.

While Prio’s main task is saving of priorities, it expands upon a few other areas that Task Manager is otherwise lacking in. Application processes are color-coded depending on whether the binary has been signed or not. Digital signatures, or lack thereof, is an easy way to tell whether a piece of malware is masquerading under the guise of a critical Windows process – a common practice used to hide the existence of infection.

Lastly, Prio also allows for the monitoring of network activity on a per-process basis through the addition of a new tab within Task Manager. Not only can you see the existing throughput but also the network address a process is communicating with.

Prio is free for personal use and compatible with all 32 and 64-bit release of Windows.

Download Prio

Window On Top is a portable utility that extends the always on top feature to every software. While running, the functionality can be toggled on and off in any active application window with the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F8 or a drag-and-drop of the hand image onto the desired application.

If you routinely find yourself monitoring particular program processes, like a long video encoding session, or even watching a video while multi-tasking; Window On Top can improve the process easily.

Window On Top is compatible with all iterations of Windows including Windows 7 64-bit.

Download Window On Top

Windows will periodically scan the airwaves for new wireless networks that you may – but quite likely won’t – want to use. Certainly, if you are a desktop user with a wireless network connection you are accessing one and only one wireless network. Roadwarriors using laptops are unique in that they frequently access any number of new wireless networks by virtue of their portability.

Unfortunately, this brief network scan can introduce some latency in an otherwise rock solid network connection. You can see if your setup is susceptible to the problem by running a ping to your local wireless router. You’ll notice your pings are in the 1 to 3 ms range and then suddenly one packet will jump to 300+ ms before quickly returning to the norm of 3ms.

WLAN Optimizer is a free utility that can optimize your wireless connection and thus remove the background scans that hurt your performance. In actuality, WLAN Optimizer disables the broadcast scan ability of the WLAN AutoConfig service in Windows. Unfortunately, as the service is required to initially establish a wireless connection it’s not feasible to disable it outright.

The connection tweak is only applied while WLAN Optimizer is running; as such the portable utility can be executed automatically upon Windows login – even starting up silently. If you are one of the users that suffer from lag or latency spikes it’s worth checking out the application.

Download WLAN Optimizer

Disk Health Monitor is a free Windows utility that can ease much of the hand-holding necessary in maintaining good hard drive health by monitoring and notifying the user of potential problems before they evolve into something critical – as much as possible that is. Notifications can be configured to either produce a balloon pop-up in the tray or generate an email notification, an excellent solution if you’ve got multiple computers in your environment that you aren’t the primary user of.

Configuration is sparse and limited to just the email configuration portion. Disk Health requires a Gmail account, though the configuration allows for a custom SMTP server and port so it’s possible other email accounts will work – I tested with Gmail since it was already my main platform. Complete the form fields as necessary then click Save & Start Now.

Disk Health Monitor resides in the system tray and monitors the Event Log in real-time. When keywords such as Disk, DMIO, or chkdsk are found in pairing with words such as error, corrupt, or  bad block the configured notification preference will trigger.

Disk Health is an excellent utility to leverage the monitoring system already integrated within Windows. It’s compatible with all iterations of Windows including 64 bit releases – though it will require elevated rights.

Download Disk Health Monitor

There are numerous YouTube offline video download applications but not all of them support playlists or subscriptions to a users channel. Free YouTube Download is one such application that fits the bill however. The free windows application allows the user to download a single video or whole collections – whether playlists or subscribed channels – for later viewing.

The software’s interface is simple yet elegant. While you can download the file in the original YouTube format, the real interesting functionality is the applications ability to then convert the video into other file formats, such as MP4 or WMV, automatically. Further, Free YouTube Download can be configured to download a specific quality by default – so if a video is available in 720p HD you can be confident you’ll grab the highest quality for later viewings.

Lastly, Free YouTube Download has full iTunes integration. Download files can be added automatically to an iTunes playlist where they can then be synced to your iDevice for portable viewing – an extremely handy value-add to an otherwise great piece of software.

Free YouTube Download is compatible on all recent releases of Windows and requires the .NET framework.

Download Free YouTube Download

Installing and configuring Network Spy is extremely simple – one of the huge advantageous the software has over similar applications. The download is quite large, over 60 MB, but it includes both the client and the server installs. Install the server application by executing the appropriate exe; setup and configuration is no more troubling than providing a port number and click Listen. You can hide the window at this point but you should know it’s only visually hidden – a savvy user can see the application running in Task Manager, where it could be killed.

Now install the client version of the software on which ever computer that you will use as the viewer. Connecting the server is as simple as supplying the IP address and then the port number you configured in the previous step. Then click Connect. During use I noticed the first screenshot took a bit longer to appear than you’d imagine – perhaps 15-20 seconds. Just maintain patience, the program didn’t crash or otherwise hang!

Network Spy is compatible with all recent iterations of Windows, from XP to Windows 7 64 bit.

Download Network Spy

If System Restore sounds like a good thing, it’s because it is. Unfortunately while it’s implementation and usage is simple, it might just be too simple. In its current implementation System Restore is unable to selectively restore files or folders – a restore is an all or nothing affair. As a result, it’s quite feasible to lose desirable changes to the Windows system while trying to fix a recently uncovered problem.

System Restore Explorer is a free Windows utility that can mount and then allow the user to browse any of the system restore snapshots, just like a normal folder from within Explorer. Being able to selectively recover folders or files can remove the necessity of a complete restore while still addressing the problem at hand.

Locate and mount the system restore in question.

The restore point is mounted and displayed in Windows Explorer where you can then grab the files or folders you need, copy them back into the appropriate locations, and get back up and running quickly!

Download System Restore Explorer

One of Firefox’s awesome strengths is its vast manner at which it can be tweaked or configured. The browser extension model is no longer unique to Firefox but it still remains arguably the best. Chances are, if you’ve used Firefox long enough you’ve also dabbled in about:config - the under-the-hood preferences system where Firefox can really be customized to fit your needs. While not for the faint of heart, about:config is still relatively painless to dive into.

If you heavily rely on the array of about:config changes you’ve made over the years you no doubt realize the pain that is involved when you move to a new computer or otherwise have to reinstall Firefox and thus lose all that customizing. The user-modified preferences are in bold in the listing but that will entail an awful lot of scrolling to locate them all. Instead, you can pull out just the preferences you changed with the lesser known about:support though the Firefox address bar.

Once in about:support scroll down to the section titled Modified Preferences. While this isn’t entirely stream-lined if you are wanting to transfer the settings to another install – you’ll have to apply them all manually unfortunately – you can at least grab a complete listing of the tweaks, which can then be copy and pasted into a file for later use.

Know of a better method to apply customizations on a different Firefox install? Let me know in the comments!

If you are someone who uses removable USB thumb drives or hard drives I hope you have gotten into the habit of using the Safely Removing Hardware wizard. The wizard should be initiated anytime you are removing a portable device from the system – it’s the only way to ensure Windows isn’t still accessing or using the device in question. Removing a device prematurely can lead to all sorts of data problems, including out right corruption and lost files! The wizard can be initiated through the Desktop notification tray by clicking familiar USB-looking icon. Unfortunately, in an effort to stream line the interface, Windows can often hide icons that aren’t used often – at which point the icon is effectively out of sight, out of mind. If you need an extra jolt to your memory you might try adding the Safely Remove Hardware option to the Windows Desktop context menu.

Open the Windows Registry through the Start search menu with regedit.

Traverse the tree to the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DesktopBackground\Shell\

Right-click on Shell and create a New->Key titled Safely Remove Hardware

Now within the Safely Remove Hardware key create a New->String Value called Icon via a right-click.

Double-click on Icon and set it’s Value data to hotplug.dll,-100

Right-click on the Safely Remove Hardware key and create a New->Key titled Command

The new key will have a Default value which you should set to C:\\Windows\\System32\\control.exe hotplug.dll with a double-click.

Returning to your Windows Desktop you should now notice a new option in the context menu – Safely Remove Hardware. Selecting this entry will then initiate the Safely Remove Hardware Wizard.