BizzNtech » Software

Backupmate- Backup Orkut Communities

Joel — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:33:10 +0000

Nowadays Orkut is gaining a lot of acceptance in India. Thanks to the new interface, applications and colorful custom themes that has made it possible. Well, if you’re a regular Orkut user then you might be having a community. Just imagine if it’s popular and it gets deleted accidently, how would you feel? Well, prevention is always better than cure. Creating a backup would be a great step to tackle this sort of problem. So how do you create a backup of a community? It’s pretty simple, there’s a program known as Orkut Community Backupmate which helps you to create a backup of a Orkut community. Here’s how you create a backup:

Firstly, click here, you’ll arrive at a new page where you’ll find get a box which has various fields to be filled.
Fill up the required details, i.e. your orkut ID, password, community ID
Once done, click on Create Backup

Can’t find community ID?
If you can’t find the community ID then go to the community and look into the address bar, you’ll see the community link, for instance http://www.orkut.com/Main#Community.aspx?cmm=45618, in this link 45618 is the community ID.

Orkut Community Backupmate

TrayEverything- Minimize Applications to System Tray

Joel — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:26:22 +0000

Previously I had written an article on a program known as Tray it, it’s a small program which helps you to minimize open windows to your system tray, i.e, beside your system clock on the right hand side bottom. Today, I’m going to show you another application- TrayEverything which does something similar to Trayit. Well, this application not only minimizes windows but also helps you to minimize applications to your system tray. Sounds cool isn’t it?

It has an extremely friendly user interface. In addition to this is available for free and is really small in size and light on resources.

TrayEverything Features:
You can minimize to tray ANY window
You can completely hide the window, that is, no icon in the tray
You can hide the window and protect it with a password
You can group icons of the same application in one single icon - let’s not overfill the tray too!
You have FIVE different ways to minimize an application into tray:
Double click on the window’s caption in the TrayEverything main window
TrayEverything can add a new button in the title bar of each window to minimize it
TrayEverything can catch the click on the minimize button of the window and minimize it - no buttons added to the title bar
You can choose a hotkey to minimize windows with a single key press
Or you can let the application go by itself in the tray with the Autominimize feature - inactive windows will be autominimized by TrayEverything
The program has a built-in update engine
English/Italian/Japanese/Portuguese languages available
This program has been created using WinAPIs - no MFC!
Compatible with Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP - Not tested with Vista
Completely freeware

Download TrayEverything

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How to Open PSD Files without Using Photoshop

Joel — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:55:35 +0000

If you use Photoshop you’ll know PSD formats very well. One thing that you might have noticed about these formats is that they can’t be opened in ordinary image viewers like Windows picture viewer or Microsoft picture manager, etc. What if you don’t have Photoshop and you would like to open a PSD file? Well, there are a few alternatives which will help you to open PSD files. Here they are:

GIMP
GIMP is a versatile graphics manipulation package. You can give digital retouching to images, correct distortion, convert images formats, etc. You can use this program as a simple paint program and at the same time you can also use it as a professional tool for retouching images. It is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Download GIMP

FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more.

Download FastStone Image Viewer

Paint.NET
Paint.NET is an image and photo editing which features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. You can find a lot of tutorials, and plugins online. By default Paint.NET doesn’t support opening PSD files. You’ll need to download a Paint.NET plug in for loading and saving PSD files. The plugin doesn’t support each and every feature of a PSD file. First install paint.net, download the plugin from here and copy it to C:\Program Files\Paint.NET\FileTypes.

Download Paint.net, PSD plugin

Artweaver
Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting, i.e. Artweaver offers you all artistic effects which you need for your work. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is thereby so realistic as possible. It opens PSD files but layers aren’t supported in this format.

Download Artweaver

IrfanView
IrfanView is useful if you want to just open and view PSD files. It’s extremely user friendly and light on resources as well. It works perfectly on Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.
Download IrfanView

How to Get Vista Welcome Center in XP

Joel — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:27:50 +0000

Some of you don’t like Vista as its resource hogging and some even feel that its performance is really poor. So, such people usually stick to XP. But there are lots of people who like Vista user interface and eye candy features. They modify their XP desktop and other GUI to match with Vista. For this purpose they usually use transformation packs. You can find some transformation packs over here.

If you have used Windows Vista you might have noticed the Welcome screen that pops up when Windows loads. In this welcome screen you can change and alter many settings. You can check your computer details, change desktop wallpaper, connect to internet, etc. Well, if you are interested in modifying, tweaking and making your XP like Vista then you might be also interested in getting the welcome center in XP. For this purpose you can try out a standalone application which helps you to get the same Welcome screen in XP that you see in Vista.

Installing Welcome Center in XP:

Download the RAR file which you can find at the end of this post.

Extract it to a specific location, you’ll get a folder containing the EXE file along with other required file/folders.

Run “Welcome Center.exe” and enjoy the Welcome Center.

Download Welcome Center for XP

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Moo0 RightClicker- Enhance the Context Menu/ Right Click Menu of Windows Explorer

Joel — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:17:31 +0000

Here’s an awesome addon for windows Explorer which enhances the context menu (right click menu). It adds several useful functionalities like duplicating current explorer window, open/move to/copy to bookmarked folders, hiding default context menus, and so forth. Copy paste operations can be done even faster with this addon.

Using this addon you can simply right click on a file or folder and copy it to your preferred location by selecting in the right click menu. It also adds a “go up” option to the menu – which is much quicker than moving up to the Explorer toolbar - and the ability to copy a file’s name or full path to the clipboard. There’s also a folder bookmarking feature which enables you to navigate between folders with ease. Another thing that I noticed was the addition of delete permanently option. You can simply right click on the file to be deleted and delete the file permanently, instead of going to the recycle bin and deleting it again.

Moo0 RightClicker is available in free and paid versions. The paid version features are grayed out and disabled in the free version.

Download Moo0 RightClicker

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Vista Visual Master- Customize Vista Theme and Appearance

Joel — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:04:53 +0000

Windows Vista is the best operating system from MS when it comes to visual appearance. Well, there may be several criticisms regarding the operating systems hogging nature but most of them like it for its eye candy features. But if you like to customize Vista’s appearance and other eye candy stuff then it’s not easy. Even changing the boot logo and the icons isn’t easy. You can apply new themes by changing the uxtheme.dll file, for more info look over here.

There’s a utility known as Vista Visual Master which helps to customize Vista theme, icons, boot screen, logon pictures, etc. There’s an option within the software itself to patch the uxtheme.dll file to make new themes work on Vista. You can replace about 40 system icons and hundreds of file icons, including Computer, Recycle Bin or even icons for WinRar, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel files, as well as icons for any file or folder. You can also change other general settings like removing icons from the desktop, remove shortcut arrows, disable the changing of wallpapers in Windows Vista, etc.

Download Vista Visual Master

How to Find Files and Folders Quickly

Joel — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:59:43 +0000

Ever tried using the default windows search function? I’m sure you’ve tried it and ended up finding the file after a long search which took a lot of time. Well, I don’t really like the default search function so I decided to check out for some lighter alternative and which can yield results faster. I came across a program known as Everything. Everything lets you search anything within few seconds unlike the default windows search feature.

This tiny program is user friendly and is really light on resources as well. The best part is that it’s just 293KB! It works perfectly on Windows NT/2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. To use it all you need to do is first download it from below and install it. Once done run the program and enter the item you want to search in the search bar. You’ll be provided with results almost instantly.

Download Everything

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How to Quickly Resize a Picture

Joel — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:52:18 +0000

I’m sure you might be having snaps taken from digi cams or pictures which are pretty huge in resolution which you would like to compress and upload over net or send them to your friend or maybe use as a profile picture in Facebook. Most of us usually use Microsoft Picture manager to resize images and pictures. I found a great app- adionSoft Fast Image Resizer which allows you to quickly resize images and pictures in high quality. The software has an extremely user friendly interface. The software is freely available and works perfectly on Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

Features
-Dual and Quadcore compatible
-Resize images to any size quickly and in high quality
-Create thumbnails for your website images
-Resize Algorithm quality and JPEG quality configurable
-Create resized files in new folder, or in the same folder as the source
-Use EXIF information to rotate your pictures to the correct orientation
-Copy EXIF info from source image
-Easy resizing by using windows explorer Send To menu
-Automatic cropping option
-Can read JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and HD Photo (.wdp, .hdp) files
-Writes JPG files

Download adionSoft Fast Image Resizer

Windows Vista Battery Saver

Joel — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:11:15 +0000

Vista drains a lot of battery when you compare to other operating systems like XP. It’s said that the main culprit is the Vista Aero interface and other eye candy stuff like the Vista sidebar. There’s a program known as Vista Battery Saver which has been specially designed to deal with the issue of faster battery drain in Windows Vista. It gives the user options at hand to turn off the Windows Aero interface and the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to the software developers the software saves up to 70% of the battery. That is certainly a lot, isn’t it? Hopefully it’s right. The best thing is to see if it’s true. You can do so by checking the time taken to drain the whole battery when the application isn’t installed. Later, you can use the app and check the time.

Download Vista Battery Saver

Download Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Final

Joel — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:47:06 +0000

The wait has finally come to an end. I can now finally stop using the beta version which took around 15-20 seconds to even start. Yahoo messenger 9.0 is available for both XP as well as Vista. So what’s new in the final version 9.0? Yahoo! Messenger Pingbox, a new application has been introduced. This is great if you have a blog or a website. All you need to do is just embed it in your site, if anyone wants to contact you they can do so by chatting from that window. You’ll get the message in your IM. Great isn’t it?

To make things colorful there are 12 skins (3 new ones- Silver, Ruby Red, Mystic Black included in final version) which can be switched between. Switching between skins is pretty easy, if you have tried the beta version you’ll know about it. Well, if you don’t then you just need to click on the red button on the right hand top of your screen and choose your favorite skin.

Hows the black skin? Looks great isn’t it?

Other features in the final version:

Return of the original emoticons: The emoticons are back and are smaller with original designs.

Ignore list enhancements: This feature had been a little buggy, in the betas. It’s fixed in the final version. The “ignore anyone not on my Messenger List” option won’t affect messages when you’re in a chat room, but it continues to apply to IMs.

Inline video & picture viewer, New emoticons inspired by our users, Import Contacts wizard, Yahoo! Updates, Call forwarding & new voicemail delivery, Yahoo! Games.

Download Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Final

Graphics2PDF- Create a PDF out of a Set of Pictures

Joel — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 08:47:35 +0000

Graphics2PDF is a freeware which can turn a set of photos and images into a PDF document. It’s pretty useful if you plan to combine a set of pictures or photos or maybe to hide pictures from children. Pictures for that matter maybe in any format, for instance bmp, jpg, gif, png or tiff. You can different pictures of different formats and create a single PDF file or several PDF files.

Using Graphics2PDF:
The softwares user interface is great, it’s really user friendly. The user can drag and drop images into the window which are then displayed as thumbnails in the order of appearance in the PDF document.

You can change the order of their appearance in the PDF by using the <> keys that are visible below each image.

To save the PDF simply click on Save PDF and the images will be converted into a PDF document that can be viewed with Adobe Reader or another compatible pdf reader.

Download Graphics2PDF

PowerPoint Joiner- Merge/ Join two or more PowerPoint Files

Joel — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:23:09 +0000

PowerPoint Joiner is a program which allows you to merge or combine multiple PowerPoint files. This is pretty useful if you want to maintain a single PowerPoint file. In addition to this if you have several charts, diagrams, which are used regularly then merging is a good option. We had many competitions in our college which involved lots of PowerPoint presentations. They were pretty cool. I have merged all of them into a single file and kept it safe. Well, this is my final year in my college, I’m gonna miss my college days.
It has an extremely user friendly interface that requires almost no interaction. It works by using a text document that lists the PowerPoint document that should be combined. One thing I didn’t like about the program is the inability to add PowerPoint documents to a list and sort them the way the user wants, it would have been much better if such a feature was included.

PowerPoint Joiner is a portable application, you can carry it anywhere in your pen drive. It also works perfectly on Windows XP Service Pack 3 and Vista.

Download PowerPoint Joiner

PC Decrapifier 2.0- Remove Common Bloatware with Ease

Joel — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:06:31 +0000

PC Decrapifier is one software that everyone must have in their pc. So what does it do? It helps you to uninstall many of the common trial wares and annoyances found on many of the PCs from big name OEMs. Here is the current list of software and items that the PC Decrapifier can detect and remove. It detects the items and displays in the form of a list. You can choose the ones you want to remove.

Installing and using PC Decrapifier:
Download PC Decrapifier and open up the zip file and run the EXE. There is no installer necessary. If you have an anti-virus software installed, it may complain about this program but don’t worry, these warnings can be safely ignored.

Start PC Decrapifier and click Next

Now on the next screen select ‘Create a Restore point’ in order to enable you to restore.

PC Decrapifier will display a list of all the available bloatware, you can choose the ones you want to remove and click next.

Download PC Decrapifier

Quick Media Converter- Convert Media to any Format with Ease

Joel — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:28:21 +0000

Nowadays there are lots of file formats. It sometimes becomes difficult to choose the best format. The worst part is that some formats aren’t supported by certain players, making it difficult to convert the format to the supported format. For instance music players, mobile phones, etc mostly support mp3 files. I have lots of music in .rm which I hate the most simply because I have to convert it to mp3 while transferring to my cell phone. You can find free as well as paid softwares to convert files. I prefer free ones, but getting a freeware which can convert media files into various formats isn’t easy.

Today while browsing I came across a wonderful program which converts media files into various kinds of formats. It’s known as Quick Media Converter. It has a very user friendly interface.

Using Quick Media Convertor:

1. Firstly select the output format by clicking on an appropriate icon in the top bar. For instance, if you have an iPod you can click on the iPod button and select the desired format under it for using the file on your iPod.

2. Now add the file to be converted by dragging it into the box.

3. Select the output directory, the converted file will be placed here.

4. You can also configure other settings or jump to the next step.

5. Click on the start conversion button to start converting the file.

Download Quick Media Converter

Replace Annoying Windows UAC with Smart UAC

Joel — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:40:44 +0000

If you’re using Vista you might have come across UAC (User Access Control). It’s a security feature which protects your computer from various threats like malicious programs, privacy breakers, etc. Whenever you open a new program or start an installation or anything for that matter, it opens up a box in which you have to give your permission to continue. Well, this is pretty good as it protects your computer but at the same time it’s a bit annoying as it keeps on popping every now and then and it doesn’t remember users choice, so you have to keep clicking continue even on the application that you launch frequently. Some people because of these cons simply disable UAC.

To overcome these problems and still serve as a good security protection, a new updated version known as Smart UAC Replacement has been developed by Security Stronghold. All disadvantages of Windows UAC have been corrected in this version. Smart UAC unlike the default Windows UAC remembers users choice, you don’t need to keep continue every time you launch the same program. It also has an extensive database of more than 300 000 known threats raises your protection level even higher.

Smart UAC Replacement Features:
>Smart UAC remembers your choice!
>Smart UAC Replacement tracks harmful and suspicious processes and finds both known and unknown malicious programs and prevents their activity.
>Proactive protection kills rootkits and viruses on the avenue of approach
>Regularly updates database of more than 400,000 known threats complements proactive protection to make it absolutely impenetrable
>Possibility to edit any security rules, created earlier
>Works with Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista

Download Smart UAC Replacement