Linux fans who run Windows (for any number of reasons) can finally rejoice, xkill has essentially been cloned and is available as a free download . This Windows copycat of the popular xkill utility is aptly named – Kill.

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.

If you live in the United States then you probably won’t get the Hulu.com reference, however if you live anywhere else, chances are you know exactly what I mean. 

For those not familiar, Hulu is a popular video playback site from NBC that streams many mainstream television shows right to your browser.  The biggest problem with the site is that it blocks access for users outside the continental United States.  Hulu isn’t the only site in the world that does this either.  Many sites restrict access based on the IP Address that you are currently connected with.

This is where Hotspot Shield comes to the rescue.  Hotspot Shield is a free software download that allows you to use the internet anonymously – for both Windows and Mac computers.  It works by providing you with a different IP address than you would normally get, allowing you to bypass country-type restrictions. 

Here’s a look at just how easy it is to use.

Have you ever wondered what all those svchost.exe processes running on your Windows machine are for ? Ever thought what effect will it have on your system, if you kill them ?

If you haven’t or aren’t too sure how to check for running processes on your system, press Ctrl + Alt + Del and a utility named Task Manager will popup. The Processes tab of Task Manager should give you a list of all the processes running on your system and this is where you’ll see multiple svchost.exe processes, along with the rest of the processes running on your system.

Don’t let the simplicity of the name fool you, Free Disk Analyzer by Extensoft is packing plenty of features.

In a previous post I talked about a great disk usage analysis tool called TreeSize Free that visually summarized how your disk was being used.  Free Disk Analyzer performs a similar task, however it also has some added features and some better graphics.

In this walkthrough I’ll show you what Free Disk Analyzer is all about and we’ll look at some comparison shots with TreeSize Free.

The Windows registry is a database which Windows uses to store all user and system related settings. Most Windows software also use the registry to store their settings. Most, if not all, of these software packages also do not remove their entries from the registry when uninstalled.

Needless to say, the windows registry tends to be in a mess most of the time.

As a Windows user, you also might have noticed Windows becoming progressively slower as you use it, installing and removing software, going about your daily business. One of the reasons for this is because the Windows registry tends to get bloated with stale entries and such, over time and since it is stored in the memory as long as the computer is being used, it slows down the whole computer.

Navigating the desktop trying to find the correct shortcut icons to launch an application can sometime be a chores, if you have a overcrowded desktop filled with plenty of icons. With Fences, you can now organize your desktop into a more manageable manner and even hide your icons when you have no use for them.

How many times have you been listening to a song and wanted to sing along, but couldn’t because you didn’t know the words?  Even better is when you know most of the words but there are two or three that you just can’t get.  Those days are about to become history.

There is a powerful little plug-in that you can download for Windows Media Player that will show you the lyrics of the song as it plays.  Now don’t get too excited, this has been done before, but not with the incredible simplicity of Lyrics Plugin.

If you’ve used Windows for any length of time, you must have noticed that it tends to get slower over time. One of the reasons for that is that the filesystem becomes fragmented with use.

Defragmenting is the process of reading all the bits on the file system and re-arranging them to be contiguous.

This is a pretty time intensive process and is quite complex for an operating system to handle. Imagine, you’re trying to access a file that you know resides on particular place and the next time you go to access the same file, the file’s position has changed, since the user ran a defragmenting utility over the file system.

With the cost of digital cameras steadily decreasing and the perpetual increase in available resolutions, it’s easy to accept that the average household is going to have one or more kicking around.

With my wife being an amateur photographer, I’m often exposed to the trials and tribulations that come with digital photography.  Once such dilemma is the fact that pictures taken with today’s digital cameras are often incredibly large in size.

For example, I took a picture of my monitor the other day and the actual file was 2.81 MB with a resolution of 3008 x 2000 pixels.  The truth is, I’ve seen her produce much bigger pictures than that!  It needed to be about 500 pixels wide

When I took that picture, I also took about 100 more in the same session.  Imagine how quickly the post grew in size when I started writing an article using these images.  They had to be resized, but there were 100 of them and that would take forever.  Enter Bulk Image Resizer from MariusSoft for Windows.

It seems like everything that Piriform produces becomes a handy tool to keep in your PC toolbox.  Recuva is no exception.  This handy application offers Windows users the ability to restore important files that have been deleted from the system.  Much in line with CCleaner and Defraggler, Recuva is a free utility that provides unquestionable value.

Recuva allows you to selectively search for specific files such as pictures, music, videos, and documents or you can search for any deleted files if you are looking for something outside of a specific niche.  This handy walkthrough will show you just how easy it is!