Cyber Bandwidth Monitor does pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to do, and more. This little WIndows utility tracks your upload and download speeds over time and plots your network activity on a little graph. The utility grabs data once per second, but you can adjust the settings so that it refreshes more frequently. You can also tweak a ton of display settings, ranging from the font and window size to the graph scale.
In addition to real-time information, the program also logs all of your activity over time and can send you daily, weekly, or monthly updates. Cyber Bandwidth Monitor also has a few other useful features, like built in Ping and Traceroute utilities.
Advanced Run is a utility that replaces the Windows Run dialog with an advanced version. But it has one feature up its sleeve that you won't find in the Windows run box: the ability to run any program as another user without logging out and logging back in as that user.
You can launch Advanced Run by clicking Run in the Windows Start Menu, hitting the Win+R keys on your keyboard, or startng a new task from Windows task manager. You can also right-click on any program and select Run As to run the program as another user.
Advanced Run works with Windows XP and Vista, but will not work with 64 bit versions of Windows.
That popular Unix and Linux text editor known as Vi is now the proud brother of an online clone that should run in most javascript enabled browsers. It's called jsvi, and now you can write your own programs and HTML code from anywhere!
Such remote locations include but are not limited to:
your local library
the internet cafe down the street from work
your aunt's house
those weird McDonald's locations with internet computers inside
the boss' laptop
Russia
On a more serious note, the Vi simulator works with nearly all the traditional keys and substitution commands, and you can copy/paste from the clipboard. It also includes a built-in spell checker for those long-night moments when you've stared a word for too long and can no longer remember how to spell it. Does that happen to other people, or is it just us?
There are at least three good utilities for backing up your Firefox profiles, passwords, and settings. Which is all fine and good if you use Firefox. But if Opera is your web browser of choice, you're going to need a different tool. And that tool is called OperaFly.
OperaFly is an incredibly powerful and easy to use Windows utility for backing up Opera preferences. You can either install OperaFly to your PC or just unzip the no-install version and click the OperaFly.exe icon. The program will try to detect your Opera installation directory, and then you can select which aspects of your profile you want to backup. Want to save your bookmarks, but not your cookies? No problem.
Your settings will be saved in an FLY file, which you can then use to restore your settings. OperaFly could be a lifesaver if you're setting up a new computer or doing a clean install of Windows on your own system. Or you can make backups on a regular basis so that you won't lose your preferences in the event of a catostrophic PC issue.
Control Running Programs is a free Windows utility that (are you read for this?) controls your running programs. We love it when we find an application that lives up to its name. But what kind of control are we talking about?
CRP has two components. The first controls how many instances of a program are running. For example, if you never want more than two instances of Internet Explorer to run, CRP will automatically close a new window every time it's launched. In other words, you can sort of use CRP as a pop-up blocker. Of course, there are plenty of other applications that do a better job of blocking pop-ups, but we imagine there are a few non-browser applications for CRP as well.
The second component is an instance launcher. When this feature is enabled, CRP will launch any applications you specify. So if there's a raft of programs that you like to run regularly, but don't want to startup when Windows first boots, you can just add them to your CRP list. Then when you're ready for them, just launch CRP and click the start button to launch your programs.
For some reason you can only add programs to the instance controlling list if they're currently running, while you can add any program on your PC to the instance launcher.
Have a program on your USB flash drive that you want to launch every time you plug that drive in? USB AutoRunner is a little utility that will create an Autorun.inf file on your flash drive to let Windows know you want to run your portable web browser, office application, virus scanner, or any other applications installed on your flash drive.
You can also use USB AutoRunner to select documents that will be opened when you insert your flash drive. Your PC will open those documents using the default viewers. So if you've got a PDF that you want to launch, it will open up in Adobe Reader, FoxIt, or whatever PDF viewer is installed on your system.
You could create Autorun.inf files by hand, but USB AutoRunner makes the process much simpler.
It has been a defacto standard for Web Browsers to be a free download for many years now. After all, who would want to pay for something that they can get for free so easily? Well, this is a question that Electrasoft must answer on a daily basis. A company that specializes in Web browsers, network utilities, and 90's era web design, they are among a dying breed for sure. We couldn't resist taking their shareware web browser for a spin, if nothing else for the sake of nostalgia.
The install program is a humble 300 kilobyte download, and installs in mere seconds. With another nod to old school internet culture, the installer is powered by the classic Winzip self extractor. Once installed, 32bit web browser delivers on its promises: it is indeed quite fast, and loads quickly. It seemed to render everything just as you would expect, and even supported flash out of the box. It's hard to say it it uses its own custom rendering engine or not, but it reports as Mozilla 1.6 to browser agent finding scripts.
While we can't see any use for this program in the mainstream, it might be a welcome addition to the many Pentium based Windows 98 machines that still hum away in some homes. It is fast, small code done right. It is available for $20 from the company's ordering page.
While not every program that posses a threat to your PC will attempt to write changes to your Windows registry, an awful lot will. So one way to keep your computer healthy is to track any changes to your registry. RegRunner is a free utility that hangs out in your system tray until a registry change is made, and then it pops up to let you know that something's going on. In other words, if you install and uninstall software on regular basis, RegRunner could be just as annoying as the user account control pop-up in Windows Vista. But just like the UAC, RegRunner can also prevent you from doing anything too foolish.
RegRunner also has a couple of other useful features. It will show you a list of programs that load when Windows starts. Another tab shows running processes.
The program does not include an uninstaller. If you want to remove RegRunner from your system, you'll have to delete installation directory and the shortcuts from the Startup folder in your Windows start menu.
While we know a lot of folks like to pan Windows Vista's new graphics as useless eye candy, there are a few aspects of the Aero interface that are actually pretty useful. For example, in Windows Vista you can get a real-time thumbnail preview of running applications by scrolling over the Windows taskbar. But you can get this feature without switching operating systems, thanks to Visual ToolTip, a free application from Chris'n'Soft.
In order to run Visual ToolTip, just download and unzip the file and click on VisualToolTip.exe. The settings menu will open up, but you don't have to configure anything if you don't want to. You can just start scrolling your mouse over your taskbar to see previews of your running applications. You can click on the Visual ToolTip icon in your system tray if you do want to adjust the image size or animations.
Because Windows XP lacks some of the under the hood features included in Vista, Visual ToolTip doesn't show you real-time previews, but it will make a new snapshot every time you mouse over an icon. In other words, if you've got a video playing, you won't see a tiny video show up in the thumbnail. But you should see the frame that was playing when you moused over.
Visual ToolTip also packs a program launcher dock which you can use to replace the Windows taskbar. But there are far better dock applications out there, including RocketDock and ObjectDock if you're looking for a program launcher.
Deleting empty subdirectories seems like something Windows ought to do automatically, but for some reason that function just isn't included as part of the OS. Luckily, you don't need to download a utility to do it; instead, you can create a single line batch file that will do exactly what you're looking for:
for /f "usebackq" %%d in ("dir /ad/b/s | sort /R") do rd "%%d"
Raymond Chen, the venerable Microsoft coder, explains how this works. Basically, it uses a trick to enumerate the directories in reverse order. Since you can't delete a directory that contains data (including other directories) the only way to automate deleting directories is to start at the very bottom of the tree and work your way up.
XNeat Windows Manager is a nifty little shell utility for WIndows XP and Vista that adds a few extra options to your taskbar, toolbar, and right-click context menus. For example, you can click on the toolbar of any window and set it to always display on top of other windows, minimize the window to the system tray, or hide a window from view entirely. You can also change the window's transparency level and behavior, or alter the priority of the window or the running process.
You can also use XNeat to change the appearance of your Windows taskbar by hiding elements like the start menu or the clock. You can even change the taskbar transparency/opaqueness level so that you can see through the taskbar to your desktop when it's not in focus.
These features are just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many things you can do with XNeat that the developers haven't even bothered to list them all on the product website.
Ever wish that Derek Zoolander had decided to open a night school? Or maybe opened a secondary school, so that once those kids that couldn't read good or do other stuff too well got better at it, they could go on to learn to do other things? What if Zoolander teamed up with the University of Phoenix, and offered online courses?
Your prayers have been answered, sort of. Gramlee is an online service for grammar checking and proofreading (and yes, there are definitely differences between the two). The idea behind Gramlee is fairly simple. You just cut and paste your writing into the Gramlee submission form, supply your email address, and an editor (yes, a live person) will proofread it for you and make revisions.
There's no word on what the Gramlee submission form does with smart quotes, but they do seem to heavily recommend a text editor (like Notepad) for document creation. There's no reason why you couldn't use Word, but we're having a lot of fun imagining editors using some colorful language when they get certain document formats.
To get you hooked, the first hundred words are free. You can buy additional words (up to 2,625) for varying amounts, or email a longer document for a price quote. Turn around time is allegedly about twenty-four hours on most documents.
The disclaimer here is that we didn't submit a piece to Gramlee. The "Examples" page shows some nicely edited pieces, complete with red ink mark ups. It would be endlessly cool if documents were revised with the revisions somehow marked. We fear they aren't marked, and that makes our linguistic spidey-senses tingle. So if you use the service, proofread the proofreaders, please. Even people who write good well make mistakes.
And of course, we needn't tell you that it's really not a good thing to submit your term paper to Gramlee for editing, right? Um. Right?
If you have Windows Update configured to automatically download and install hotfixes, security updates, service packs, and other updates, it's not always easy to see exactly what you're installing or what's already been packed onto your PC. WinUpdatesList is a simple application that brings up a list of all the updates that have been applied to your PC.
You can run WinUpdatesList simply by downloading and unpacking a ZIP file and clicking on the executable. There's also a version with an installer/uninstaller available if you'd rather go that route. The program presents a detailed list of each update, what programs it affects, and a brief description, which may or may not be utterly meaningless. But if you double-click an update, you can get a link to the Microsoft knowlede base article, which will (occasionally) make order out of the madness of Microsoft's hotfix naming scheme.
There are plenty of free CD/DVD burners for Windows, and to be honest we haven't often been tempted to look beyond CDBurnerXP and InfraRecorder, which both seem to handle pretty much any tasks you can throw at them. But while reading an article about BurnOn over at Life Rocks 2.0, we noticed a link in the comments to StarBurn. And while we might check out BurnOn later, we were kind of blown away by StarBurn.
The application can handle all of your basic tasks like burning data, audio, and video discs. It supports a wide variety of formats including CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. And it has some nifty features like the ability to either rip audio CDs or compress audio already on your computer to MP3, WMA, or OGG formats.
One StarBurn feature that you don't often see bundled with disc burning utilities is a virtual drive mounting application. In other words, you can use StarBurn to create a disc image or ISO file, and then mount that file as a virtual disc so you can see how it performs without actually burning the file to a disc and sticking it in a drive. This can come in handy if you want to see check an image before burning it, or if you want to mount an image you've created or downloaded on a system that doesn't have a working optical drive.
StarBurn is free unless you want the network version, which offers network burning features and costs a whopping $495. The full functionality is included in the free version, but you can only use the network features during a 30 day free trial period.
Z-Cron is a free task scheduling utility for WIndows. But wait, doesn't Windows aready include a task scheduler? Yes, but it's not exactly what we'd call user friendly. And while Z-Cron might look a little intimidating at first glance, it includes a nice long list of activities that you can schedule with just a few clicks. Here are just a few of the tasks included:
Alarm CLock
Cleanfile - delete old files
CopyDir - Copy a directory (great for performing daily, weekly, or monthly automated backups)
Delete files
Download files
Empty trash
Hibernate
Log out
Move a directory
Switch a screensaver on or off
Send an email
Shutdown
Standby
While there are a ton of tasks built into the interface, you can also create your own by selecting programs you want to name and scheduling a time for them to run.
Cyber Bandwidth Monitor does pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to do, and more. This little WIndows utility tracks your upload and download speeds over time and plots your network activity on a little graph. The utility grabs data once per second, but you can adjust the settings so that it refreshes more frequently. You can also tweak a ton of display settings, ranging from the font and window size to the graph scale.
It has been a defacto standard for Web Browsers to be a free download for many years now. After all, who would want to pay for something that they can get for free so easily? Well, this is a question that 
Deleting empty subdirectories seems like something Windows ought to do automatically, but for some reason that function just isn't included as part of the OS. Luckily, you don't need to download a utility to do it; instead, you can create a single line batch file that will do exactly what you're looking for:
