Monday, January 21, 2002		Downloads of the week

 Effective Desktop

Effective Desktop is a set of utilities to extend your Windows desktop and make it cleaner and easier to use. It has two utilities - With ExplorerX, you can hide unused icons in the tray notification area and change the logo or the text of the Start button. TaskbarX adds more functionality to the Windows taskbar and provides modules like calendar and clock. The other utility is ExplorerX. Each icon in the notification area has an id. ExplorerX distinguishes these icons based on which process (program) the icon belongs to and what id the icon has. ExplorerX's tray manager displays this information in the "Customise" dialog. The problem is that the id is not globally unique and each program can decide what id it will assign to the icon in the notification area. So a program may generate a random id each time you restart the program and ExplorerX may not recognise the icon. Therefore ExplorerX provides three different modes for each tray icon. These are Show this icon, Hide this icon and Hide all. The first two modes do not need any explanation and the third one simply hides all icons from a specific process. You should set an icon to this mode only if the icon reappears each time you restart Windows. You can change the icon and text in the start button and the logo in the start menu. If you use a picture as desktop background, you can make the icon text transparent. TaskbarX makes it possible to add more power to the standard taskbar in Windows. To use TaskbarX, you need to run Windows 98/Me/2000 or 95/NT with Active Desktop activated. You can activate TaskbarX by right clicking the taskbar. Then select "Toolbars" and enable "TaskbarX." Windows X is a hidden application running at background all time. It provides the basic functionality to switch desktop and to move a window to another desktop. It also handles the hotkeys you set to switch desktop. If you wish to see a user interface to WindowsX, you need to activate a WindowsX client. One such client is included as a plugin to TaskbarX. Effective Desktop is freeware. Download is available from www.ministars.com/ed

Have you ever installed a program for trial, and then discovered that sometimes you can't get your system back to normal afterwards? Have you found out what happens when some trial programs associate themselves to working files, like zip or bmp or tif?

You may have even lose some very good context menu features, and when you uninstall the program... you're stuck with the changes. It might never be the same again! Not any more, now you can experiment safely. As you may be aware, the Registry is a database of essential information for applications and the OS. When experimenting with programs, it's easy to import values into the Registry that do destroy the original settings. Even if the programs are uninstalled, it can still be impossible to get the Registry back to original. The data that controls file associations and context menu displays is just some of the information that can be altered during a software trial. When testing a zip program, for example, any existing zip context menu features will almost inevitably be changed, and will not be restored when you uninstall the trial program. Certain graphic programs become associated with particular file types, and former associations are not reinstated when that program is removed from your system. Other types of programs may also cause irreversible changes to the Registry. TestRun looks after the Registry in a different way than providing a Registry backup that could be used to fix the Registry "after" any corruption. Instead, TestRun provides an "inert" Registry especially for testing trial programs. After testing a program, you can switch back to your normal Registry and install it, or uninstall it before switching back. TestRun is very easy to use, and provides you with a visual reminder when you have the "inert" Registry in place. This program is freeware. There are no secret files written to your hard disk, and no Registry entries made on installation. Download it from www.testrun.cjb.net

This is an emergency hard disk recovery tool for Windows 95, 98, Me, NT and 2000 users. Drive Rescue can find any lost and deleted data on your hard disk even if the partition table is lost. Lost data, that is the result of a system crash can also be recovered. It can discover important file system tables of your hard disk, including partition table, boot record, FAT and file/directory records. It supports FAT 12/16/32 file systems. The following are system requirements to use this program: Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, or 2000. A second hard disk is recommended for recovery. How much does it cost? Nothing. This program is a freeware. Download from http://skyscraper.fortunecity.com/amd/887/rescue

The biggest nuisance for Net surfers these days are the PopUp windows that open up themselves as you take rounds of different Websites. These not only irritate you, but also grab attention and memory slowing both you and your system. PopUp Stopper is a nice little program that can stop these popup windows from opening even after scripts are run by the sites you visit. It can be configured to suit your preferences. It just sits in the task bar preventing unwanted windows from popping up. You may get this freeware from www.panicware.com

— Raman Mohan