Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Random system utilities I like to use for Windows

Here's just a few of the random utilities I like to use for maintaining and working with my computers:

  • Synergy - great for sharing keyboard/mouse and controlling one computer with another. This is great, for example, when you have 2 laptops (or desktops) and you want to be able to work both of them with a single computer.
  • JkDefrag - very simplistic but effective disk defragmenter
  • PING - Gnu drive imaging software. Seems good for creating a restoreable image of a drive, although I've had some issues restoring it to a slightly different drive configuration (for example backing up /dev/sda then restoring to another computer /dev/hda). Linux based.
  • DriveImage XML - Window (free) drive imager. Recommended by a friend.
  • Screen Hunter - a simple (free) screen capture utility. I actually prefer the older version (4.x) instead of the new 5.x version. (Wisdom Soft)
  • SysInternals - great set of windows utilities for looking at what is going on in a PC
    • Process Explorer - good replacement for task manager that displays a lot more information about the running processes. Shows I/O speed as well.
    • File Monitor - great utility for monitoring file and registry access, very useful for determining why things are failing at times.
  • NetMeter - simple bar graph of network bandwidth upload/download that you are using.
  • PuTTY - great SSH/Telnet client with good key handling capabilities. PuTTY Agent is great for caching passwords and keys for login and tunneling.
  • XMing - easy to install PC X Window server
  • TrueCrypt - encryption utility for creating encrypted drives. Can either be file-based or device-based.
  • KeyPass - great password database. Available for blackberry as well.
  • 7Zip - free and generally good ZIP utility that handles most things.
  • Trillian (Pro) - instant messaging for almost everything. AIM, Yahoo, etc. The Pro version has a Jabber client that works with Google Talk and others.
  • Windows Powershell - a much better shell program than "CMD." Allows good shell programming as well as direct interface to C# code.
  • Console (sourceforge) - a more flexible "shell" window that can start up either CMD or a Cygwin BASH shell (among others)
  • Cygwin - unix utilities for PC. Pretty versatile and makes most unix things work.
  • TortoiseSVN - a development tool, actually. Excellent Subversion client.
  • CutePDF - a free PDF print driver that allows you to print to PDF.
  • VMWare Player - allow you to play pre-constructed virtual machines on your computer
  • VMWare Converter - allow you to create a virtualized image of a running computer
  • VirtualBox - slightly less "full featured" than VMware player, but Free and has versions that run on lots of different platforms. This has been my preferred VM platform on my laptop for quite a while. 
  • GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) - free PGP-compatible encryption and certificate routines
  • PS Pad - free text editor that is good at editing most stuff.
  • OTHER - Text Pad - another popular (free) editor that people use 
  • OTHER - jEdit - yet another popular programmers editor (haven't used it). Recommended because it can do SFTP (ssh) file save/load. (Pure Java, so it works on Unix too). DOG SLOW to start up.
  • WinDirStat - good utility for showing disk space usage in graphical and textual form. Figure out what files and directories are taking up all your space.


I'm sure there are others. I'll continue trying to edit and add them over time.

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