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Posts with tag shutdown

How to add Windows tray icons for the trash bin, disc drive, and power

MinibinIt only takes a few clicks to do things like empty your Windows recycling bin, reboot your PC or open your CD-ROM drive. But if you're looking for easy access to these features, why not add system tray icons that give you two-click access no matter what you're doing with your computer?

E-sushi has a series of utilities that add these features to your system tray. Disc Tray Toggler lets you open and close your disc drive through a right-click context menu. MiniBin lets you open or empty your recycle bin. And iPower lets you logoff, shutdown, or reboot your PC.

The company also has a couple of other useful utilities including MyKeyGen, a password generator, and TimeBomb, a tool that lets you shutdown, logoff, or reboot your system after a specified periord of time. There's also a program called RunIdleTasks that's designed to force any tasks that normally run when your PC is idle to run immediately. But to be honest, we had a hard time figuring out if RunIdleTasks was doing anything when we took it for a test drive.

[via Shell Extension City]

TorrentSpy BitTorrent tracker shuts down voluntarily

TorrentSpy shutdown
The same day a major internet service providers was busy making nice with BitTorrent traffic, one of the most popular BitTorrent tracking sites has decided to close up shop. TorrentSpy has been involved in a legal battle with the MPAA for the last few years, and while there's been no court order asking the site to shut down, the TorrentSpy team decided it would be easier to shut down the site than to follow the actual court order, which would have required TorrentSpy to track its users' private data.

Of course, there's nothing illegal about the BitTorrent protocol itself. It's simply a way to transfer files, and the Linux and open source communities have been using BitTorrent to distribute software for some time now. But there's no denying that a lot of what you'll find at popular BitTorrent trackers like TorrentSpy and The Pirate Bay is copyrighted material like music, movies, and TV shows being distributed without permission from the copyright holders.

But is the answer to ask BitTorrent trackers to spy on their users, or to provide alternate, legal methods for distributing your content? Perhaps if the studios did a better job of providing high quality ad-supported videos and music for download, piracy wouldn't be so prevalent. Or maybe we're just living in a dream world.

[via TorrentFreak]

GlobalPandora: The box is ope- er, broken.

Global Pandora - The box is broken Last Sunday we told you about a way for listeners outside of the US to tune in to Pandora without having to deal with proxies: GlobalPandora. We also predicted that it will get shut down - but who would have thought so soon? It looks like the real Pandora decided to block all the U.S. IPs that GlobalPandora was using.

On the site, there's no hint that GlobalPandora is planning on making a comeback besides asking if anyone has "access to U.S. servers or U.S. shells." So unless there are some friendlies out there that will support GlobalPandora, the box will remain shut unless you mind setting up your own proxy.

And if you don't want to deal with a proxy, despite Pandora being as fascinating as it is, there is a nice selection of other online radio alternatives that might work for users outside of the U.S. - a number of which GlobalPandora has been good enough to list on it's "we're down" page.
Thanks Andrew!

Another one bites the dust: Demonoid is dead

In what appears to be a continuing trend, popular BitTorrent site Demonoid, has shut down. Again. On November 9, 2007, the site went dark, displaying nothing more than a cryptic message that seems to say, "the fuzz turned up the heat on our landlord and we had to bail."

It's a sad, sad day for file sharers. Oh wait, that was October 23, when the really awesome site was shut down. Or the first time Demonoid was hit (a few years ago), or back in June, or when the servers went crazy, or when they killed Canadian access...

Not to minimize the pain, but we think many people expected this. The only mainstream public torrent site brazen enough to boastfully do its thing is The Pirate Bay. In the past six months alone, Demonoid, ISOHunt (and all the sites/trackers hosted by ISOHunt), OiNK, and Torrentspy have either shut-down or become crippled to the point of being unusable. This all comes nearly three-years after the first major torrent site, Suprnova.org, shut its doors in December 2004.

Perhaps a proper memorial is in order. We at DownloadSquad, call for November 10, 2007 to stand as the "BitTorrent Day of Mourning."

Dedicated to the brave thieves who risked their internet service so we could get poor quality screeners of Million Dollar Baby...

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Sony to shut down ImageStation online photo site

ImageStationSony seems to be gutting its online media offerings like a fish... or something else you gut. Last month we found out that Sony was closing its Connect music store. Now it turns out the company is also killing the ImageStation online photo sharing site.

ImageStation is dying a slow death. You can no longer sign up for a new account. Some features will be shut down on November 12th, including image uploading, sharing, and shopping. The site will officially close on February 1, 2008.

In the meantime, Sony is offering current users the ability to transfer their photos to Shutterfly. You can also download high resolution images to your computer one at a time, which could take a while. Or for $7.49 per disc, you can order archived copies on CD or DVD.

[Thanks Frank]

Schedule a PC reboot, shutdown, or hibernate with WinOFF

WinOFF
So you're in the middle of downloading a large file, or sending a huge batch of photos to your mom. The file transfer's going to take another 40 minutes, and you really want to hit the sack. But you don't want to leave your computer on all night sucking up energy.

WinOFF is a nifty utility that lets you schedule all sorts of power-related actions. You can set your computer to shutdown 60 minutes from now. Or you can tell it a specific time to shut down. There's even an option to shut down the system when your CPU is idle, under the assumption that this means your computer is probably finished with whatever task you set for it.

Don't want to do a complete shutdown? You can put your computer in suspend or hibernate mode. Or if you just want to make sure your PC is fresh and ready to go in the morning, you can schedule a middle of the night reboot.

[via CyberNet]

Xecutor - Windows scheduling on steroids

XecutorWhile Windows has the ability to automatically schedule the execution of processes, it is quite limited with respect to handling more interesting process triggering criteria. For example, if you're looking for a way to run a specific process (defragmenting your hard drive, for example) before shutting down, Xecutor is the ticket.

It can automatically intercept the Windows shutdown command, and trigger your commands allowing them to execute to completion before actually shutting down the computer. Further, you can schedule certain tasks to occur only on certain days of the week, for example have system maintenance tasks fire on the weekend.

Xecutor is free for home use, but the developer requests that if you are going to use it at home that you send him a postcard.

Make Windows shut down faster

Shut down Windows fasterI haven't tried it out to see if it works yet, but it looks promising: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service is a free  utility from Microsoft that's supposed to speed up Windows XP shutdown times considerably. The article at IntelliAdmin says the biggest culprit for slow shutdowns "is a problem unloading the current user's profile," and what the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service does is in the background and cleans up user profiles automatically. I'm not convinced that it will reduce my ~1.5 minute shutdowns to a few seconds, but every little bit helps. Oh, and FYI, after you've installed the app you'll have to reboot once before it will kick in.

Shutdown After - Timed Windows Shutdowns

This is a quickie. Ever wish you had a snooze button for your PC? For example, you have a job running that you know will take about an hour to run, so you’d like to be able to tell your computer to shutdown after 2 hours. While this can be done with the task scheduler, it’s far easier to use a small, dedicated utility to perform this function. And that’s exactly what Shutdown After is.

[via Lockergnome]

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