Labor-Day Linkfest

Whew!

Looks like I finally am getting back in the blogging-routine!  Sorry for the delays.

I “only” turned out ten posts last month.  I think that is an all-time low.  Granted it was a pretty busy month both at work and home and unforeseen personal issues took their toll on me.

Hopefully this bodes well.

Grab a plate!

These are going to be fast as we have to leave for a family get-together in a short while.

Opera 9.6 Snapshot: Birthday Edition - Desktop Team - Opera Desktop Team.  Beta version of Opera 9.6 is released.

Apple developers get new builds of Safari 4 – Apple Insider. While not easy to obtain, it is there with a bit of work.  Follow the guide I have at the end of this previous post and you should be good to go.  I’ve downloaded and applied it on my Vista system.  I didn’t have to uninstall my previous build of Apple Safari 3, the installer took care of it, but that is recommended.  So far so good, but I’m not a hard-core Apple Safari fan so any changes and improvements are pretty hard for me to detect.  As installed on my system, it now reports as 4.0 (528.1.1).

BurnAware Free - (freeware) – Nice and friendly media-burning tool.  Now offered in a freeware version by the developer.  I like having a wide collection of burning tools so I can tailor the suggestion to my end-user’s comfort level.

CCleaner - (freeware) – This favorite system-cleaner got a nice update.  Changes to version v2.11.636 include: Optimized startup and closing of application, Improved Registry cleaning on 64-bit OS, Improved memory usage on Windows Vista, Added System Tray icon status, Internal refactoring of code for efficiency, Improved Uninstall Tool accuracy with MSI installers, along with minor tweaks and improvements.

JkDefrag v3.36 - (freeware) – This favorite defragger of mine also saw a nice update. Changes:
Upgraded to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 compiler, Changed the default font into a smaller font, a change in the display code to respond faster to multiple redraw requests, for example when the users resizes the window, Rewrite of the subroutine that finds combinations of files to fill a gap, to make it faster, Changed the algorithm for "-a 6" (move to end of disk) to better fill gaps, Changed the way disks are accessed to accommodate special kinds of disks, such as virtual and encrypted disks, change in the disk analyzation code to fix a "zero bytes per cluster" problem and other miscellaneous tweaks and fixes.

CPUID v1.47 - (freeware) – Added support for new processors.

Hexagora Performance Monitor - (freeware) – Nice tool to help monitor various system performance levels.  Review can be found at freewaregenius.com

17 Portable Apps to Help Troubleshoot PC’s - Simple Help - (tips) – Nice blog post roundup of various tools and utilities to help with PC management. No real amazing finds I wasn’t already aware of but it is a nice and basic collection, worth looking at if you support friends/neighbors/family member pc's.

NetStat Live /// AnalogX - (freeware) - Nice full-featured utility to monitor network statistics on a Windows system. Works great on XP but I've been having problems getting to going on Vista.

LyX | LyX – The Document Processor - (freeware) - Not quite another text editor. "LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM), and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG)."  It looks really interesting, especially if you have to compose scientific formulas for publication. Nice review at MakeUseOf.com.

NetLimiter 2 Monitor - (freeware) - I really like this network monitoring and traffic-volume recording tool.  The free version provides great granularity and provides persistent logging results.  It must be installed on a per-system basis and isn't "portable" but is so nice I have gone ahead on installed it on all our Windows systems in the Valca home to (hopefully) provide a tool for me to accumulate some network-usage stats in light of Comcast's move to cap usage at 250 GB a month without yet providing a consumer-focused network usage tool of their own.  See also FreeMeter Bandwidth Monitor For Windows as well as this Grand Stream Dreams post for other freeware network bandwidth monitoring tools.

5 Apps For Painless Windows Reformats - Download Squad provides a nice Labor-Day post to help cut down the labor required in reformatting Windows.  My process is a bit different but these are all good suggestions for those seeing a unified solution.

Stay safe and dry!

--Claus Valca