Whether you are looking to be a bit more flashy or want to increase your productivity, AquaSnap is a freeware application you will want to look into. Having a better way to productively manipulate a multitude of open windows is especially useful when you have a dual monitor setup.

Aside from looking pretty fancy, AquaSnap will dramatically increase productivity for those of you who work with multiple windows. Here is how it helps.

There is a couple of problems I know I always run into when working on a project that involves multiple windows to be open.

1. Constantly toggling back and forth between windows.
2. Needing to re-size windows to make several visible at the same time.

AquaSnap solves both of these deficiencies in the Windows OS along with other time-saving features.

AquaGlass

While moving a window around the screen, the window being moved is automatically moved to the front. Because of the size and opacity of the window, you may not be able to see what is directly underneath.

If you activate the AquaGlass feature, the window you are moving will become see-through. You can choose how transparent the window is in the settings

AquaShake

I am really getting used to having this feature. What AquaShake adds to the mix is one of two choices when you click, hold and shake the front-most window. You have your choice of one or the other.

The first is to minimize the alll of the windows other than the window you are shaking.

The second choice is to make the window you shake stay on top of all of the other windows.

If I could have my wish, I would like to do both. Maybe shake up and down to make the window stay in front and side-to-side to minimize the others.

AquaStretch

AquaStretch is another time saving feature. The end result is similar to the AquaGlass feature. If you need to make the window stretch from top to bottom or side-to-side, simply drag the edge of the window to the top or side of the page.

AquaSnap

AquaSnap lets you re-size windows to ½ or ¼ the normal size by dragging the screen to one of 8 places on the screen. Depending on where you drag it, the window will be instantly re-sized.

In the settings, you can choose between 3, 4or 8 locations on the screen to drag the windows to. You can also pick and choose the locations by selecting custom.

Appearance

In the appearance tab, you can select a few different options to customize the look of the application. There is an option for changing the skin.

This personalization is not seen until you use a feature like AquaSnap. You will see the variation of the skin you have chosen when you drag the window to the edge of the screen, but before you release the mouse button.

Keyboard shortcuts

• [ WIN + Arrow ] or [WIN + NUMPAD] for snapping.
• [ Ctrl + WIN + Arrow ] or [ Ctrl + WIN + NUMPAD ] for stretching.
• [ WIN + Return ] or [ WIN + NUMPAD_5 ] for unsnapping or maximizing.
• [ WIN + Del] or [ WIN + NUMPAD_0] for minimizing.
• [ WIN + Esc ] to close the window.

Adding these features to your Windows machine will surely add some productivity to your normal activities. I know I have had an easier time working since I have been using the AquaShake and AquaSnap features. They have become a big part of how I manage my open windows.

How do you productively handle multiple windows open on your screen?

If you do remember any of that, first of all, welcome to adulthood. Next, I would like to introduce you to FreeMGP (Mega games Pack) Vol 1. It will take you down memory lane, but even if you are too young to remember the games in this pack, playing them might still seem like a fun way to spend a summer afternoon.

Unlike the PC game bundles of old, there is no physical packaging for this game pack. Instead, you must download the 1.82 GB ISO image and burn it to a DVD. The entire pack of games is free (made up of both open source and freeware games), and this Linux version contains less games than the Windows one, only including those that have been tested and work well in Linux. Even with that limitation, it still includes 211 games. Nevertheless, all of the games are Windows games, so FreeMGP requires you to have Wine installed and operational.

Installation and Interface

Once you have the DVD burned, open it in a file browser. There is an autorun file, presumably for Windows, as well as three folders. You have to choose the Installer folder and run GamesInstaller.exe to start the installer program. I had to assume this was the correct way to run the program, as I did not find any Linux-specific instructions.

The Installer itself, however, is attractive and runs perfectly under Wine. It includes a side menu with game categories and a list of each game. To install, you simply click the check box next to any of the games you want and then click “Start”. It really cannot get any easier.

The games install quickly, as would be expected, and do not take you through individual installers. The only anomaly I experienced was that, with my dual-monitor setup, one of the monitors would turn off during installation, as if a game were about to start.

Once the games are installed, they will appear in your Wine menu, providing individual shortcuts for each game.

Gameplay

I did not test all of the games, but all of the ones I did test worked without any real problems. Some of them were even 3D games, and they all ran well. The compilers of the game pack have taken the time to pre-configure the games to work correctly under Linux. For example, if a game did not run correctly in fullscreen mode, they set it to load in a window by default. Like typical older windows games, this presents you with a variety of resolutions and window sizes, something that is unavoidable.

Once you get playing, you will likely forget about anything I just said, mostly because the games are fun, providing you with everything from all-out arcade action to thoughtful role playing. FreeMGP has something for everyone, children included.

I found most of the games required the mouse, keyboard, or some combination thereof, with a few responding to a gamepad. Many of the games are undoubtedly familiar and are still popular, like Glest and Wolfenstein 3D. Some, like Tower of Goo (the predecessor to World of Goo), can have you clicking for hours. Others like Aztec Challenge have an annoying nostalgic familiarity that is quite amusing. Then, there are games like Marble Arena that could probably still stand on their own with challenging and entertaining gameplay.

The Bottom Line

Pros:

• FreeMGP is easy to use and will provide you with a plethora of good games.
• It’s free, portable, and redistributable
• Even though you can probably find most of the games separately, FreeMGP will save you the time
• It has been configured to work with Linux. How cool is that?

Cons:

• Most of the games are pretty dated and may even draw an insult or two from your teenage brother
• They are Windows games that still require Wine, often producing wide variety of full screen resolutions or tiny game windows

Overall, FreeMGP is a mega pack of fun games, some of which you will definitely want to keep installed and may even pass along to your children. It is definitely worth a little of your time, and at zero cost, it is unquestionably worth the price.

How to set up Predator

1. Download Predator and install it.

2. Now insert in a freshly formatted flash drive.

3. You will now get to see the “Preferences” window for the tool. You can now set it up based on your requirements or consult the following screenshots for the references.

4. Once you have properly configured the preferences for the tool, go down to the “Flash Drive” section that can be found in the “Main Options” tab. Now press the button “Create key” to create the key. You can see the “Creation in progress…” during the process and “Creation Complete” once its done.

How to enable the guard

Once everything is done you will be asked to restart Predator to enable monitoring (only necessary in the first run). After you restart the application, you will notice a (animated) green bubble in the notification area. You will notice the bubble going red at times notifying the key has been accessed. That is all. You are all set to test the app.

How Predator works

Remove the flash drive now and wait for a while as your PC screen turns complete black. This means that your PC is now locked. You can go around and have your lunch break (without worrying about your boss checking your PC for your secret job applications :) or your colleague simply trying to get a look at your project file). Be sure to carry the flash drive safe in your pocket.

Once you are ready to log in, insert the flash drive and wait. A login screen flashes in where a timer (20 seconds) is running and an password field is present. Enter your password that you used while creating the key and hit enter. If the password is right, you get logged into your PC with all windows (you were working on) minimized.

What if the password is not right? That’s when someone else is trying to log in. Right? That’s when Predator throws a movie-style “Access Denied” screen with an awkwardly irritating intruder alert which is enough to alert you.

How to disable the tool

This is pretty simple. All you have to do is right click on the notification area icon and click “Pause Monitoring” and you will notice the bubble has turned yellow (with no animation).

NOTE: To use this option you have to enable pausing in the tool “Preferences”. To do that open “Preferences”, go to “Advanced Options” tab and select the checkbox named “Enable Pause”.

Other advanced features

Predator has also got one professional version (worth $29) which supports many other features like Twitter Log (that notifies you of any breach via direct message in Twitter, enabling you to keep track of your machine from a remote location), SMS and email alerts, multiple keys and many more.

WORD OF CAUTION :

Two things to be taken care of in Predator are,

1. Be sure to remember the password. You can disable the password check if you have a tendency to forget password. Open “Preferences”, go to Main Options tab and uncheck the checkbox “Always Required” under “Password” field. Disabling this doesn’t mean that the protection is not there. The USB key is still valid i.e without the USB the computer is still inaccessible.

2. I noticed my laptop keyboard wasn’t working when I tried to enter the password to log in using the flash drive. But using an USB keyboard, I was able to enter the password. I do not know if the problem happened for me only but I think you should know about it.

If you are overly concerned about your PC security, this tool is definitely worth paying price for. For me, I am pretty happy with the features offered by the free version.

If you know of any such software that serves the similar purpose, share with us. And also if you face any problem regarding this software let us know.

Automator

Batch renaming in Automator is quite simple, even if you’ve never used it before.

1. Open Automator, choose “Custom” when the screen prompts you to select a starting point.
2. Drag the Automator action “Get Specified Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.
3. Drag the Automator action “Rename Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.

Note: You will be prompted to add a “Copy Finder Items” action.  If you want to be safe you could add this as well, but I usually don’t.

With Automator you can change the file name in the following ways:

• Date/Time
• Text
• Change Case
• Make Sequential
• Replace Text
• Name Single Item

The options are fairly self-explanatory, but there are some limitations.

Date/Time- you can only add a date or a time stamp, but not both.  The stamp can only be added at the beginning or end of the file name.

Text- You can only add text at the beginning or end of the file name.

Change Case- You can only change the entire file name or extension at once.  You can’t, for example, change moscow.jpg to Moscow.jpg.

Make Sequential- You can only add a sequence at the beginning or end of a file name.

Replace Text- This is where I think Automator really falls short.  You can only replace a specific string, meaning the file name has to contain what you want to replace in order for Automator to do anything. What if I wanted to remove the last 3 characters from a file name and replace it with “xyz”?  Not in Automator.

Name Single Item- I don’t know why you wouldn’t just change the name of the file in Finder without launching Automator, but for completeness the feature is included. You can change the base name (file name without extension), full name (file name with extension), or extension only.

- Choose which action you want and adjust the parameters of the action to suit your needs.

- Drag the Finder items to be renamed into the proper Window.
(Note: with “Get Specified Finder Items“, Automator will not distinguish between directories and files when running.  If you want to drag a folder into Automator and have it work on the folder’s contents, use “Get Folder Contents.”)

- Press “Run.”

Automator is included with OS X and is located in the Applications directory by default.

Name Mangler

Name Mangler picks up where Automator falls short. While Automator has a wealth of other actions that you might find useful, Name Mangler does one thing and does it well.

To rename files, drag them into the left-hand window pane. The list of files pops up, and you can select filters (Folders, Folder Contents, Files) to dictate what gets renamed. This also means you can just drag a Folder into NM to rename the contents.

NM offers the following default options:

• Find and Replace- includes regular expression matching and an option to preserve extensions and ignore case.
• Number Sequentially- Allows you to number in steps other than one, set a prefix and suffix, keep or remove the original name and extension.  Unlike Automator, NM allows you to define a prefix or suffix to the sequence.
• Change Case- Allows Capitalization, all capitals, or all lowercase.  Allows similar preservation or changing of extensions.
• Set Extension- fairly self-explanatory.
• Add Prefix/Suffix- again, self-explanatory.
• Remove/Insert Characters- this is where NM really has an advantage over Automator.  You can remove any number of characters from a file name and specify an index to start with.  So for example if you had a series of files named
  Lyrics_ACT01_Maria.txt
  Lyrics_ACT01_Tonight.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_TheRumble.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_Somewhere.txt

  You could remove the “ACTXX” characters very easily by defining the number of characters to be removed (5) and the index to start removing at (8- the 8th character from the beginning, starting at 1).  Furthermore, you can replace those same characters by inserting text at a specified index.  Instead of “ACTXX” I might want “WestSideStory.”  To make things even more customizable, you can specify whether the index should count from the beginning or the end of the file name.

But perhaps the most powerful feature included with Name Mangler is the ability to thread together multiple functions in the “Advanced” window. It’s name conversion description language allows you to write pseudo-scripts to tailor your file names to what you want. It might seem a little daunting, but it’s actually very easy for even a beginner with no programming knowledge to pick up the basics after reading the documentation.

Finally, Name Mangler allows you to save your settings as droplets so you can just drag and drop a collection of files to be renamed without actually launching the program.

I use Name Mangler almost exclusively at this point and haven’t found anything that even begins to compare.  Do you know of other free batch renaming utilities?

Though manufactured by different companies, GPU-Z from TechPowerUp does look a lot like the aforementioned CPU-Z. The interface is eerily similar and the name is a perfect match. On the positive side, these two Windows applications bring incredible value at a price that can’t be beat – free! The pair complement each other as incredible tools to have on your belt.

Let me take you on a tour of this powerful graphics card information utility.

Also in line with CPU-Z, this product doesn’t come with an installer. You simply download GPU-Z from the TechPowerUp website, save it to a folder and run it. At the time this article was published, the current version was 0.3.2

Vista users may experience a warning from the UAC security system, which asks if you are sure you want to run the file. No worries, click Run and wait for the application to load. You should see a splash screen while the information about your graphics card is collected.

Now the fun begins. The main window is divided into three tabs. There is the Graphics Card tab, the Sensors tab, and the Validation tab.

The Graphics Card tab is the default tab that loads when the application starts. It also contains the most information about your graphics card. Everything you ever wanted to know, and more, is displayed here.

As you can see in the image below, this tab tells you which graphics card you are using, the GPU, BIOS Version, Bus Interface, Memory Type and Size, Clock Frequencies, and much more. It has everything but the kitchen sink.

This information is great for anyone looking to upgrade their video card, or overclockers looking to get more performance out of their current setup. If you are running multiple video cards, the drop-down list at the bottom lets you select the card that you want to see the details for.

Moving right along in our tour, the next tab is the Sensors tab. There is no shocker here, this tab displays sensor data coming back from your video card.  Another great tool for overclockers, you can monitor things like Clock Speeds, GPU Temperature, PCB Temperature, and Fan Speeds.

There is also an option to log the data to a file and another to continue monitoring while GPU-Z is in the background. I like the last feature because it lets me monitor the change in my graphics card temperatures when I am in full screen gaming mode.

The last tab is labelled Validation, and it allows you to submit your information to the GPU-Z website. I couldn’t find any information as to the purpose of this feature, however it does let you share the details on the web and track changes to your graphics setup.

GPU-Z is another one of those lightweight, must-have tools that just about any user can make use of.  It really goes a long way to help you understand your graphics card.  You don’t have to take my word for it though, try it out for yourself!

Kill allows you to end the process behind an application simply by clicking on the application Window.  Think of it like having the power to terminate in the tip of your finger.  When you load up Kill and left click on a window, Windows attempts to close it as though you had simply clicked the close button.  This will cause the program to close in its normal way, often prompting you to save your work.

Holding CTRL while you click the application triggers the more dangerous end-process that would normally be done through the Task Manager.  This immediately kills the underlying process and forcing the application to terminate.  No prompts this time.  Here’s a demo of Kill in action.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words.  In this case, six pictures will tell the story of how to use this amazing little utility.  For my example, I’m going to kill calc.exe, the calculator application that comes with Windows.

Start by downloading Kill from DonationCoder.com.  The current version is 1.0 and the total download is 205KB.

Here you see that Calculator is open and to the left of the program is my desktop icon for kill.exe.  Start the Kill utility by simply double-clicking it.

If you are using Vista, the following warning will likely be displayed.  Click Run to allow the Kill program to continue.  Once loaded, your mouse cursor will change and you should now see a skull and crossbones next to it.

Now click on the window of the application that you want to end.  In this case I’ll click on the Calculator window.

And voila!  The program ends.

Again, this is great for applications that have frozen up and just won’t respond to the conventional mouse clicks to close it.  I really love that this utility is no fuss, no mess – meaning that it doesn’t install itself into your system.  You simply run it when you need it.

If by chance you activate it accidently, you can get your cursor back to normal by pressing the ESC key.

As an additional tip, the author recommends placing Kill in your Quick Launch bar for easy access.

As it turns out, there is a great application out there just for the Windows home user.  It’s called EASEUS Partition Manager, and you should download it today!

In this short tutorial, I’m going to increase the size of the C: drive on my Windows Vista PC.

Important Note: Please backup your data before attempting to make changes to the partitions on your computer.  There is always the potential for lost data – so take the time to ensure you have a good backup.  If you need some help getting that started, check out this post on Backing up Your Windows Data the Simple Way – with Cobian Backup.

As you can see in the image below, My C: drive is about 40 GB, with only 5 GB of free space available.  My D: drive is a second partition on the same physical drive as my C: drive.  Under that you’ll notice I have 10 GB of Unallocated space.  This is space that was never assigned to anything.  I’m going to expand my C: drive to include this space – for a grand total of 50 GB.

The real trick in resizing the first partition on a multi-partition drive is in allocating the space in precisely the right location.  In this example, all of the unallocated free space is at the end of the D: drive, which means I’ll have to move it to the beginning of the D: drive, so that I can eventually add it to C: drive.  First, I’ll select the D: drive and click on the Resize/Move button.  A new window opens up and lets you enter the new settings that you would like to use.

To move the unallocated space from the end to the beginning, simply copy the size from the Space After box and paste it into the Space Before box.  The former will automatically reset to zero.

Now you can click Ok.  It’s probably best to note that no changes have actually been made at this time.  All that has been done is simply a list of changes has been added to a queue.  Changes only take complete effect after a reboot.

Now, we still haven’t allocated any space to C: yet, we’ve only re-arranged D: drive.  This time, select the C: drive and click the Resize/Move button.  Once again we are presented with the change window.

As you can see, the unallocated space is now at the end of the C: drive.  This time, drag the little arrow on the right-hand side of the yellow bar all the way to the right.  This will stretch the D: partition to the end, and leave you with no unallocated space after.

This essentially completes all of the configuration required to resize the partition.  Click Ok.  You should be back at the main window again.  If you are ready to complete the change, click the Apply button on the lower left-hand side of the window.  Like any good piece of software, EaseUs Partition Manager will prompt you several times to make sure you want to continue.

Before you click Yes to both of these, please make sure that you have backed up your important data.  Resizing a partition can be dangerous and there is always a risk of failure.  If you have confirmed that you have a recent backup, click Yes and get ready to kill some time.

The operation as described above took almost four hours to complete.  I wasn’t expecting it to take that long, so it actually seemed much longer as I watched the clock waiting for the work to finish.  Here is a screenshot of what you can expect after the reboot.

After the four hour waiting period, Windows booted back up as normal and the new sizing was in effect.

Just to recap, EASEUS is a freeware partition manager for Windows.  Most versions of Windows are supported, however 64-bit Vista is not.  Don’t forget to get your copy from their download site.