customization

so all the talk about spyware made me think of all the stuff i am running on my comp to customize it to just the way i like it, and since i already posted this to another forums, i thought i would post it here for everyones viewing and using pleasure.

first up are two tools provided by microsoft, go figure. they are 'power tools' and can be downloaded at the microsoft link.

first is tweakUI, which gives you access to all sorts of options that are normally hidden. like say you want to get rid of the stupid arrow that shows up on shortcut symbols, simply open tweak ui, navigate to explorerhortcuts and change the setting. there is a whole lot of crap you can change, from the startmenu to the logon screen, well worth the download.

the second 'power tool' is the virtual desktop manager, it gives you four desktops to play with, which is nice to keep the window clutter to a minimum.
the taskbar magnifier is fun, useless, but fun.

ah joe is a nice liittle app that comes into play when you are alt-tabbing through your programs. if you hold alt-tab, then you can then use your mouse to select the program you want to jump too. the alt-tab, and shift alt tab still work but are not necessary. it is a japanese product, with an english version, so here is a link to the english portion http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA031384/software/Joe.html. there is also a 'powertoy' taskmenu that generates a thumbnail of the programs as you cyle through them.

next is quickmenu, which allows you to customize the right click menu to your hearts content, well at least sort of. it basically nullified the start menu/quicklaunch menu cause i set up a folder system full of short cuts to the programs i use. this is a japanese app that has been translated into english, so it has some funny moments in its wording

just go to this page to find out about tclock2. basically it gives you full control over the taskbar, the start menu, and the clock.

Displayset is basically a gui for chainging the color scheme and text styles of your dektop. it is pretty sexy.

Serious Samurize and the little blurb at the top says it all.

now for the non customizing stuff!

bkreplace - will search any number of text files and replace whatever you are looking for with whatever you want. it can do both the standard search where you give it a sequence to find, and also a more complicated search that similar to perl's string matching of regular expressions.

it would appear that Peer Guardian has gone out of business, but you can still find their software here. Basically it is a mini firewall that blocks all sorts of tracking and spyware. as an example, if peer guardian is logged in, i can't acces the realnetwork ip because it tries to totally screw with your computer and is completely blocked by peerguardian.

and finally, KeyNote which is a pretty bad ass note taking application.

have some fun!

this guy does some really good work, and has a list of the programs he uses, some of the ones i mentioned, but there are others as well.

also there is some good stuff to be found here

oh and the standard disclaimer is that some of this stuff is pretty tech heavy, so don't be screwing with stuff that you aren't sure about cause... well computers can be fragile

Thanks, Nada.