Everyone loves computer apps. Those wonderful time saving Utilities that usually do one job very, very well.
Perhaps you could share your favorites? The ones you absolutely must install on any pc that you personally use?
I’m looking around now for a utility that compares two documents and shows the differences. It would be very helpful if it could read Ms Word Docs.
Let’s restrict this to shareware or something fairly inexpensive (under $75).
Favorite Utility…
Mine is Snag It. A few years ago, I got my boss to buy enough licenses to cover all the staff pc’s in our department.
I’ve used Snag It for over 12 years. Primarily for quick captures of screens. I use it a lot at work creating help files. I capture a screen, annotate it, and often draw arrows or boxes around items I want to highlight. Saves me a lot of time. A picture really does save a thousand words.
Recently I discovered Snag It creates PDF’s.
I had written some documents in Ms Publisher. I tried using Adobe Acrobat Pro 7 to convert them to PDF. No luck. It didn’t recognize that format. Acrobat does convert Word Docs. So, I tried converting the Publisher Doc to Ms Word. Still no luck (the converted doc only had the text and no graphics).
Finally I thought of Printing my Publisher Doc to the Snag It Printer (anything sent there is captured). From inside the Snag It editor I easily saved it to pdf. So simple. I can’t believe I’ve over looked this feature.
I’m using Snag It 8. I’m a couple versions out of date. There’s no telling what new features they’ve added.
Windows 7 now has a Snipping Tool, so you don’t need Snag It.
One utility I thoroughly recommend is Treesize Pro. It will tell you exactly what is using exactly how much space on your disk. Very useful for servers.
The PC now has a PrintScreen key, so you don’t need either of those. Seriously, there is a key right on the keyboard that copies the whole screen to the clipboard, and if you hold down Alt it copies just the active window. How much easier can it get?
My favorite utility is PureText. In use, it is a little square with “PT” in it, and sits in the system tray. If you have formatted text in the clipboard, and click this square, it becomes plain text. Now you can copy bits and pieces from various sources without making your document look like a ransom note. Beats me why “ransom” is the default style for the clipboard - for all I know PT merely overrides the hidden “behave stupidly by default” switch momentarily.
Maybe, but the snipping tool is so rudimentary that you do need a proper utility for any remotely serious use. I don’t think it can capture menus, for example. I use freebies Greenshot and/or MWSnap myself.
One essential tool for computer administrators is a disk usage visualisation tool like JdiskReport or Spacemonger (there are probably better ones out there, but they work for me). If a volume is getting full you can see at a glance what is using all the space. [ETA] whoops, Quartz already mentioned this category.
Hey Napier, PureText is the cat’s ass, isn’t it? I like your description. It truly does tell Windows “temporarily suspend the bozo bit” while I paste.
That’s fine for the occasional screenshot, but it has been my experience that folks would take a Windows screenshot, open MS Word, paste it in, and then send the bloated Word doc via email “This is the problem I am having”
On the other hand, when you are documenting something that desperately needs screenshots, Snagit is sweet: you can do regions; it remembers all of the screenshots you took in a queue; it supports all kinds of annotation and tweaking; you can easily save in many file formats.
The editing/annotation part is particularly nice. You can add a nice torn-page edge to the image, multiple colored and shaded circles/boxes, arrows pointing to important things, balloons with annotation text, and so on.
I opened this thread to pitch Fastone Capture, but it sounds very similar to Snag It. Yes, as Napier mentions, the print screen key also does screen prints, but if you need certain bits of the screen - not whole windows - and want to annotate them or move things around or whatever, a utility is WAY better. Faststone capture lets me highlight whatever bit I want to capture, and pull it into an editor where I can make annotations, save it, or put it in an email very quickly & easily.
It also has a screen ruler for measuring pixels and a color capture. I use 'em both a lot in my work.
I’ll have to check out Snag It and see if it’s better.
Yeah I went through a process a lot like that for years, until I realized there were apps out there that took those 9 steps and turned it into like 3 steps. MUCH better.
Mac Automator. Just a simple scripting program but requires no knowledge or experience with writing scripts. You’re limited to the pre-programmed actions but there are enough that I’ve managed to use it successfully to complete projects in seconds that would have taken me a month to do manually.
A third vote for PureText!!! I learned about it here on the Dope, and just last month recommended it to another grateful doper
I always put the XP Powertoys Calculator on my computers and put it right in the Quick Launch bar. It blows the regular Windows calculator away. Except I see that Win 7 blows the Powertoys calc away so whatever.
My free file size app of choice is WinDirStat. I have it on all the servers. I think I heard about it here, too!
I also like Notepad++ over regular Notepad. It goes in my Quick Launch as well.
You can script all kinds of neat stuff in Windows using that.
For making professional installers for free, use ISTool on top of Inno Setup
(though ISTool looks like iStool, which would either be those stools at the Apple Store Genius Bar or something that is flushed in Cupertino bathrooms)
Another great util I found here on the Dope is Ninotech Path.
Right click on a folder and you can copy the folder name into your clipboard. Or you can get the entire path and name.
I use it a lot creating m3u playlists. ctrl-a to select all the files, right click and get the file names, paste into Notepad. Without this util I can’t imagine how I’d ever create playlists.
I still have a copy of FTPx (FTP Explorer) that I got off some CD included in a “Discover the internet!” book from the mid 90’s. I think I bought the book because the CD had Netscape on it and it was quicker than downloading Netscape at 33.3 baud dial-up.
Anyway, I still have FTPx installed on my work computer today and use it with a fair amount of regularity. It’s a simple interface and gives me some flexibility over the FTP “clients” embedded in modern browsers. And it still works with today’s versions of Windows.
It has been a while since I had to install it, but I think it was a single file that I plopped in a convenient directory. Once you start it, you can set it to autostart.
The default hotkey is really easy: instead of Control-V for paste, hit Flag-V (the Microsoft Flag key + V). It plays a little cowbell sound when it pastes.
And I use this daily
An awesome tool for copying formatted stuff to paste into spreadsheet cells.
Process Explorer. Pure gold for seeing what’s running and doing things about it. Great for finding malware running on a PC. Also wonderful for restarting processes. i have a program for my Logitech LCD keyboard that I need to restart after playing a gaming session. Instead of rebooting, I can just restart it with Process Explorer.
A couple of years ago Microsoft bought the company that made it, so it’s a microsoft tool now.
I maintain computers in a small school in my spare time, and I use wpkg (a cool tool in its own right) to push down several different applications to all of the machines. One of the first things that goes on any networked machine in that school is Process Explorer.
That way, when I am sitting at some random machine trying to figure out why it is acting up, I can hit Flag-R and type “procexp” and immediately see what is hogging the machine’s resources.
I also push down a few other command-line things that no one knows are installed:
vim
tail
putty
taskkill
Resolution Changer
Not that any kids are going to be using vi to edit their homework; I just want to have a basic toolkit available wherever I happen to plop down.
One I like and use almost every day is called Angry IP Scanner. I use it to ping computers (individuals or entire subnets) and to get the IP address, MAC address, computer name and username for systems. I’m sure there are other things that will do the same thing but I like this one.
