Best Way Find Good Utilities Programs and Software Online Fast
Regular readers know that I am a professional writer. One of the things that I write on constantly for several different clients is computers and technology. Writing about technology means writing about the Internet, websites, and programs. Writing articles about computer technology that are not boring means writing about new and useful programs, whether online services, or locally installed utilities.
In addition to writing about new utilities, I also am constantly looking for new computer tools that will make me more efficient, more productive, and therefore, more successful, all while earning more money. That, my friends, is a tall order.
The key to finding new software is to keep up on technology by reading several of the numerous resources and websites out there that publish Internet news, computer tips, and review new software programs. This works great for finding new things to write about. However, it isn’t so great for finding a specific new utility or program to do something right now. You either have to remember what was already written about and go looking for it, or you have to wait for someone to hit your particular need on the head.
Like Inigo Mantoya, I hate waiting.
Search for Free Computer Programs and Utilities Effectively
Unfortunately, searching for new software isn’t as easy as just typing what you are looking for into Google. For starters, if you are looking for something that is new to you, or that you are not all that familiar with, you might be searching for all the wrong keywords. This happened to me last year when I wanted a utility to make may Windows XP computer boot up in a certain order so that I didn’t get error messages about there being no network connection from programs that booted up before the wireless network was ready.
I searched in vain for boot order utilities and various other keywords. The problem was that there are plenty of good, well-known utilities, that REMOVE programs from your startup. I didn’t want to remove these programs, I wanted them to start at boot-time, I just wanted them to do so in an order that made sense.
Finally, a colleague pointed me to a program called Startup Delayer. Then, the light bulb came on. There are plenty of utilities out there that affect how your programs boot by delaying, or otherwise stalling certain ones. This has the effect of altering the boot-up order, but they don’t describe their features as “Change Windows XP boot order.”
Once I had the right keywords, I was set. As it turns out, you can substantially speed up Windows boot time by using a startup delayer. Just like if you double-clicked a dozen program icons at the same time, Windows would try and run them all at once making every program take longer to start up, when Windows boots, it tries running all those programs at the same time. By delaying the programs that don’t affect your routine or the user interface (like those that run in the background) just a few seconds, your computer comes online and is functional faster. You just don’t notice the other processes are still starting up in the background because you can already start typing, or whatever.
The other, more annoying, problem is that there are too many websites out there that do nothing but catalog EVERY program that comes along. That isn’t very helpful when you don’t want to try out 10 utilities, you just want to pick and choose from the best.
Even trying to search for reviews or descriptions is useless because tons of websites don’t do anything other than copy and paste in the software description right from the developer’s webpage. That is hardly objective. There are plenty of other lazy, sneaky, tricky, or downright unethical websites clogging up search results for computer software as well.
So, how to find useful new software fast and easy?
Use the site operator for your searches.
The site operator works by typing site: into your search query followed by the domain name of the website you want to search. This limits your search to only a single domain. Find a handful of trustworthy sites that feature the kind of software you like and you can use those to find your new utility. Then, click near the top left of the results screen where it says More Options. Click on Past Year. That will help limit your searches to the current crop of software and utilities and make sure that rave reviews you are reading are about the current version AND that they are comparing to the most recent versions of competing utilities.
There are plenty of good sites out there. Currently, I use (in no particular order): makeuseof.com, lifehacker.com, and downloadsquad.com. If I would rather browse, I head over to filehippo.com.
Today I need a new replacement clipboard utility. The one I have isn’t very easy to use and hogs a lot of memory, so it is never running when I need it. I want one that keeps more than one entry on the clipboard, though I don’t need it to keep 100, and it I want it to run in a very small amount of memory. Preferably, I want one that doesn’t require the super resource hogging .NET.
So, I’m off to search: clipboard utility site:makeuseof.com then clipboard enhanced site:downloadsquad.com, and so on.
Wish me luck.
*
*
AVG Anti-Virus Memory Usage Review
I am undertaking an anti-virus review and firewall review after my current solution started having various system issues and errors that constantly caused them to stop working.
My first test is AVG Anti-Virus which has both a free download version for home users and for pay upgrades to "professional" versions. I started with it because it comes highly recommended among the user community, at least among those who still consider anti-virus software necessary. There is apparently a growing number of people who question their need, although as a writer who does a lot of articles about various software and utilities that I download from around the Internet (not always from the most friendly of websites), I still feel more comfortable knowing that someone is at least doing a double-check of my computer.
All brand-name virus scanners, and all of the top-rated free anti-virus utilities do a pretty solid job of detecting and eliminating most viruses. The effectiveness tests that often accompany most anti-virus reviews or comparisons generally involve the ability of the software to catch unusual or brand-new viruses. While this is certainly important, for my purposes, an anti-virus program that catches a virus 2 days later than another is good enough.
With that being said, my primary criteria in evaluating both anti-virus and firewall software are ease of use, and most importantly, system resource usage. I have my PC finely tuned to run as fast as possible. I don’t take kindly to system resource hogs. If it bogs down my computer it is gone.
AVG Memory Used Amount
Although imperfect as raw data, the RAM used as "Private Bytes" as shown in Process Explorer from Sysinternals is good enough for comparisons of one program to another. How much memory does AVG use?
I’m not too concerned with how much resources my anti-virus utility uses when running a virus-scan. Generally, I do full scans or even partial scans when I’m not actively using my computer, so I want them to finish as quickly as possible; I don’t care how much RAM or CPU is used.
However, I don’t want my virus software hogging my memory or CPU while I’m trying to get work done with my computer. So, I monitor to see what kind of resources are used by the processes that are "always on" in the background.
That works out to something like 15,000 K to 18,000 K of RAM. How does that compare to other anti-virus software? I’ll find out as I try them out going forward.
I have all of AVG’s bells and whistles disabled, as well as any Internet scanning or phishing protection not running. Real-time active virus detection is running. Under these conditions, AVG keeps three processes running continuously by default.
- AVG Watchdog Service
- AVG Resident Shield Service
- AVG Tray Monitor
Under normal use on my PC, that is Internet connection on, web browsers open, and maybe something running in the background like a download manager or uTorrent, these processes use the following amounts of RAM memory as measured in private bytes.
- AVG Watchdog uses about 4,500 K of private bytes.
- AVG Resident Shield Services uses between 9,500K and 12,500 K of private bytes
- AVG Tray Monitor uses about 850 K of private bytes.
Keep an eye out for more comprehensive anti-virus reviews of system usage, or save yourself the trouble and grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed.
*
*
RescueTime Time Tracker Offline Version ManicTime
I’ve been a fan of RescueTime for a while. I like the way that it automatically logs what I’m doing, when I’m doing it.
I frequently finish writing up a great article or other project and look up the clock and wonder, “How long did that take me to write?”
The issue is that as a freelance writer, entrepreneur, and business owner, I multi-task, a lot. Whenever I read some time management guru give advice about focusing on one thing I laugh out loud. Anyone who has ever run their own startup knows that breaking your day out into inviolable blocks of scheduled time during which you ignore other tasks and activities is a fantasy.
That means that sometimes, I start an article, and then get a phone call from an important client (Let it go to voicemail the “experts” say. Yeah, right. The reason I’m their first phone call is because I not only answer the phone, I answer on the first ring. You don’t get the high paying, emergency, super-short deadline project when it takes you 30 minutes or an hour to get back to them. By then, they’ve already called six other firms.)
That phone call may lead to six other tasks I have to do, some quickly, and others later. Some of those tasks may require waiting (like having a call returned) during which time I might work on the article. The extra tasks may cause the time I am spending writing the article to run into an appointment that I have scheduled, so there is a pause while I go to the meeting, and so on and so forth.
In other words, an article that took from 1:30 PM until 4:20 PM in total, may have only taken me 45 minutes to write all together. There is no way I would ever be able to find that out without an automated time tracker.
What I like about RescueTime is that it only counts the active application as using my time. This means I don’t get fake counts because I have Word open in the background. Also, it stops counting automatically when I stop using my computer so that those 4 minute phone calls don’t end up falsely adding an extra 16 minutes.
But there has always been one thing that really bugs me about RescueTime. It’s a web enabled Internet application for no reason. (After reading Tony’s comment below, I am retracting the no reason thing. There are good reasons. They just aren’t the ones I have use for.) Sure, if you are collaborating with a team, or if your boss is reviewing how you spend your time, the online thing is great, but if you are a single freelancer working out of your basement office, there is no reason to be sending all that data out into cyberspace.
Sure, they have a privacy policy, and yes, they have security, but as the recent Twitter thing reminded everyone, that isn’t enough. Besides, it is yet another, no profit, tiny revenues, free-version with a pay-version, company that could go out of business at anytime or get bought out by someone else. If that happens, all that data may just well be the most valuable asset the company has, and investors and founders looking to get the money back could sell it easily.
Unfortunately, there is no offline, no network, local install version of RescueTime.
Today, I found ManicTime, which is, for my purposes anyway, everything that RescueTime is without the online web-based part. ManicTime installs locally, doesn’t make me register (and give out my email address), and doesn’t make me log in so that someone, somewhere could find out exactly what I was doing every day for a week, a month, a year, or longer.
I’m still testing, but so far, so good. It looks like RescueTime will be out and ManicTime will be in.
Windows Live Writer Crashes Fix Solution
Yea! I have my Windows Live Writer back! I downloaded BlogDesk but haven’t really messed around with it yet.
The truth is that I can’t spend too much time on my own blogs and get all of my writing work done at the same time, so learning a new blogging program wasn’t top on my list.
For those of you who are not familiar with Windows Live Writer, it is an offline blogging utility from Microsoft. Unlike many Microsoft products which seem to earn the automatic ire of the blogging community, this one has gone over pretty well, probably because it is a pretty good program.
One of the huge things it does for me, is that I can Copy and image off of a website or from a Word document, or wherever and then Paste that image directly into the post I’m writing without having to first save it to disk and then upload or attach the file to my post. Just by pasting it into the post, Live Writer handles getting it up on my WordPress site as part of publishing the article.
Sure, there is a lot of junk code that it puts in (go figure) and some things don’t work exactly the way I would like, but nothing else works as well yet, nor as fast, and since time is money, I’m going with Live Writer for the time being.
Live Writer Crashes Caused By Auto-Link Feature
I had been using Windows Live Writer for several months now, since it was beta, with no real problems. Then, it suddenly started crashing on me every time I clicked on the LINK button. Also, Live Writer crashed whenever I clicked on Options inside the Tools menu.
After a search I found a thread at Microsoft from someone who seemed to be having the same issue and was eventually directed to this guy where it turns out that if you have an empty auto-link entry somehow then Writer throws an exception and crashes.
And, by the way, big kudos to Microsoft for monitoring the thread and posting a solution. Even letting us know that a bug report has already been logged and that they hope to fix it in the next version. Thanks!
That wasn’t my problem exactly, but it gave me a place to start and upon further examination I found out that if you have a duplicate auto-link entry, Windows Live Writer will throw an exception. I had apparently already setup an auto-link for my Dad View of Parenting Tips and Advice website when I accidentally setup another one.
Auto-link entries are stored in an XML file in c:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\LinkGlossary
If you have an empty entry, you will have <text> </text> tags with nothing in between them. Either delete that whole entry (not just that line) or put something in between the tags. To find a duplicate, just go through the file and look, or carefully read Windows Live Writer error message which will tell you which entry is a duplicate. Then, just find and delete one.
So, either don’t use the Auto-Link feature, or try and remember what you have already set to auto-link. If you ever accidentally hit the auto-link button, don’t just cancel out. Fill in some junk text and then go back and delete it so that you don’t accidentally create an empty field.
*
*
