Revo Uninstaller: all installations will bow in fear.

Don't get me wrong, Window's uninstaller is ok, andCCleaner's uninstaller is even better, but it still lacks something. That something is Revo Uninstaller.

Here are a few key features it has:

-Comprehensive installation list: I've gone through a few uninstallers, and I have to say, Revo brings up most of them, if not all. I do have to complain though, it does take a while to update the list for a large amount of installations.

-Hunter Mode: As if uninstalling wasn't enough, Revo adds "Hunter Mode" which is essentially a target that can be dragged onto a shortcut or a running application, and then you can uninstall that application. This will sometimes work if the application doesn't happen to show up in the list. But then, other times it won't. So it's a nice feature anyway.

-Autorun Manager: Yup, this too. This program actually live monitors and alerts you when something is added or changed from the startup list. It actually gives a little more functionality than CCleaner, as you can actually click "Go To Location and zoom to that place in the registry.

-Junk Files Cleaner: Kinda like CCleaner, but not as good, in my opinion. I haven't used it as much, but it actually looks like it searches for differnet types of files than CCleaner. I just now, literally, learned that it also has an option to delete cookies, cache, etc of IE, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape, and other things like Microsoft office cleaner, and more things like I listed in CCleaner. Just my preference, but I'll stick with CCleaner.

-Secure Deletion: Again, just learned about it, but apparently, it has an option for secure deletion of files and folders. Never used it, so I can't say anything at this point.

-System Restore before uninstall: Perhaps my favorite feature; if you're into system restore, you'll probably love it too. What if you uninstall something, and you change your mind? You'll have a restore point to go back to. Also, it provides a bunch of system restores to go back to in case something else goes awry, since I'm not normally thinking about planning ahead for disaster....

-Scans for leftovers:My other favorite part. Almost every -EVERY- uninstall I've run, there are at least 4 leftover registry items. Revo finds those. True, this is kinda what CCleaner does, but Revo searches for Start Menu and does a better job, in my opinion.

-Google integration: Maybe a bad term for it, but I love that right clicking, it says "Search Google For:" and then the program or the company or what have you. Makes it easy if I don't know what something is.

It's alot of stuff packed into an uninstaller. The only thing I can't figure out is what the different modes are. Built-in runs only the normal uninstaller, but Safe, Moderate, and Advanced confuse me. But I suppose it's all about preference....I usually just use Moderate.

Visit RevoUninstaller's website for Download

Disk: Not to be confused with Apple's software...

i.Disk is a small utility that can tell you how your disk space is divided. According to the developer's site, it "scans directory trees and displays the total space used by each directory in an easy to use form." It's basically skin and bones, nothin' fancy, just shows you what you need to know. Here's a few pluses:

-Colored sublevels: each sublevel's is a different color, so it's easy to tell what level the folder is at.

-Copy and Paste: Easy copy and paste, within seconds, the entire tree, even the expanded subfolders. Very nice if you are on the go.

-"Browse": Nice, of course. You are able to open a folder straight from i.Disk.

-"Replicate"?: Apparently it has some feature called "Replicate," which is really like a folder syncronizer. You pick two folders and have the options such as "Replicate all files/folders from A to B" or vise versa, "Process subfolders," and "Include..." and "Exclude..." as well.

-Portable; You can either run the installer, copy the files, then uninstall it, or just use the Universal Extractor.

Here's a few things that I don't like about it though:

-No "Now Searching" dialouge": When it searches, i.Disk doesn't really tell you when it starts or finishs. The only way to tell is if the "Stop" button is lit up, and the "Open" and "Refresh" buttons are dimmed. It would be nice to have just a little text that says "Searching..." or something somewhere, but you get used to it.

-Doesn't show files: In the list, it doesn't show files, only folders. Other programs have this, such as WinDirStat.

Otherwise, it's an awesome little program. It's lighter than programs like WinDirStat, so if you don't need all the graphical interface or smoothness, you can use i.Disk and save on memory and space. The install is only 470kb with the installer, 439kb without, so it's very compact and ready to go.

Visit i.Disk (MemeCode) website for Download

Audacity: The bravest audio editor around.

It's a sad life, living off Window's Sound Recorder. Enter Audacity. Audacity is an open source, cross platform audio editor.

It's hard to capture this program in one blog post, but let me just say: it's terrific. If you want to cut a track for ringtones, Audacity can do it. If you want to cut the first 5 seconds out of that song for your iPod, Audacity can do it. You can generate tones, silence, static, and a ton of other things. It has a ton of effects:

• Amplify: Either increase or decrease the sound of a song. Allows you to check a "Allow Clipping" box if you don't want any distortion at all.
• Normalize: Amplifies (positively) all of the tracks, but does not allow clipping.
• Delay: A more advanced Echo. Check the description in the program (or ask in a comment) if you want to know more.
• Echo: Very simple Echo.
• Compressor: basic compressor
• Leveler: I haven't a clue.
• Auto duck: No clue.
• Bass Boost: Boosts the bass!
• Low pass filter: Complicated...I dunno
• Equalization: EQ the track.
• High pass filter: See Low pass filter.
• Phaser: Dunno.
• Tremelo: Wha?
• Wah Wah: Creates something like a wah wah pedal on a guitar...
• Change Pitch: Changes only the sound. Like taking in helium.
• Change Speed: Changes both Pitch and Tempo. Like playing a record player very fast.
• Change Tempo: Changes only the tempo. As in, witha metronome, upping the beats per minute. This means the sound is the same pitch.
• Vocoder: Codes the vo? I dunno.
• Cross Fade In/Fade Out: ???
• Click Removal: ???
• Clip Fix: ???
• Noise Removal: ???
• Repair: ???
• Fade In/Fade out: Very nicely fades in or out your selection.
• Invert: ???
• Normalize: ???
• Vocal Remover:

And even more. As you can see, I am not the most audio knowledgable person on the earth. HOWEVER, maybe you are! If you have a good, simple explanation (or correction) to any of the effects above, send an e-mail tofreewarewire@gmail.com, and I'll totally give you credit!

Anyway, I feel really stupid not knowing many of those things. But there's even more good things about it:

• Project saving: If you want to save something, channels and all, you can save it as an AUP file, so you can open it back up and edit it, just as you left it. KEEP IN MIND, Audacity projects are HUGE compared to even a WAV of that project. In addition to the project file (example: project.aup), there is a folder created that contains the project files (example project_files).
• Metadata editing: Yes, you can open a file, edit the metadata, and export it again.
• MIDI viewer: You can do "File>Import>MIDI."
• Export/Export selection: This is key. In Audacity, "Save" is for Audacity projects. "Export" is for exporting to an mp3, a WAV, and....
• FFMPEG support: Finally! This is only in the latest Beta, but Audacity can finally import and export m4as, and other things that use FFMPEG. Just download a library, just like LAME MP3. Visit this site for more info.
• Portable: Heck. Yes. PortableApps has made a portable version. Edit audio on the way.

A few bad things.

• No MIDI editor: You can open and view them, but no editor.

That's all for now. Again, this program is very vast, and if you have anything you'd like to ammend to this post, send it in an e-mail (NOT in the comments, unless it's like 1 or 2 sentences) and I will give you credit.

Visit Audacity website for Download

Taskbar Shuffle: Fate has dealt a good hand.

Taskbar Shuffle is a very simple little program to bring control back to you when it comes to the taskbar. Here are a few of the ways that it does that:

-Install and forget: Just set it to startup, configure your options, and then you will almost forget about it. It doesn't need anything at all, it just runs in your tray, ready to be used. Or, if you want, you can turn off the tray icon, and it will run silently.

-Rearrange taskbar: Ah, yes, the main feature. How many times have you wished that your programs were in a different order in the taskbar? Youcould quit and restart them until you got them in ther order you wanted, or you can just drag them with Taskbar Shuffle. It works just like rearranging tabs in tabbed browsers, just drag where you want it, and let go. It also has the choice of having to hold down Control, Alt, Shift, or the Windows key if you're afraid of accidentally dragging, or no key if you want to drag quickly.

-Rearrange tray: Everything above, except with the tray. If you are extremely picky, you can drag and rearrange your tray to be in just the order you like.

-Grouping options: I don't know about you, but I never liked it when taskbar items collapsed to one button. (As a kid, one of my greatest joys was filling up the taskbar so much that everything was squished really small. Heh.) Now you can take control. In addition to turning off grouping as a whole, if you do want grouping, you can do "group tasks in order started" (the default option), "group tasks with __ number windows" (my favorite), or "group tasks, but never collapse to one button". I pick the second choice, and set the number to 99, partly for giggles, but also because if I ever have 100 windows of one app open, I wouldn't mind them collapsing into one button. But seriously, it's not a bad idea to pick a large number, like 10 or 20, so that it won't completely take over your taskbar if things get outta hand.

-Allow middle click to close: I don't use it, but you can make it where a middle click will close either an item in the taskbar, or a group.

-On/Off switch: If you get kinda tired of it but don't want to have to start it again, no worries, there's an on/off switch.

-Small: The entire install is only just under 1mb, which is most excellent. All that is required is the program, a dll, and an ini.

-Portable: Download the zip, extract to a USB drive, and you have control on the go. Is this completely practical? Maybe not. But it's good to have the option sometimes.


Visit Taskbar Shuffle (FreeWebs) site for Download

Google Chrome: From the people who brought you the best thing ever.

A few years ago, if I would have said that Google made a web browser, people would say "Yeah, in your dreams!" If you would have asked people who could give Mozilla a run for their money in the department of web browsers, Google would have come up pretty quick. Well, here we are.

Google Chrome is a web browser, but not just any web browser. Of course, it's tabbed (nothing can be considered a browser anymore if it isn't), but there's a few other nice things.

-Nice interface: Very, very different. No menu bars, very strange tab interface, but overall, very warmy and nice. Different, but nice.

-Lite: Compared to Firefox taking up usually 80+mb of RAM, Chrome is a welcome break, using usually around 30. Probably not the lightest, but still good. However....

-Different processes: This is new. With Chrome, every single tab has it's own process. This is supposed to reduce the entire thing from crashing. But to be honest, when one tab gets overloaded for me usually the whole thing is inopperable. Still, I like the fact that Google is thinking out of the box. They even include their own task manager to deal with each tab.

-Fast: Main attraction right here. Google Chrome might not have the shnazz that Firefox has, but it is FAST. At least, it was. When I first installed it on my comp, it loaded everything in half a second. But now it's kinda slowed down. It's not incredibly fast, but I'd definitely say it's faster than Firefox.....for now....

-Incognito mode: If you want to browse anonymously, just open up incognito mode, and cruise the web. Another plus to this is that you can quickly open up two different types of chrome, so if you want to open two different Gmail accounts, open one in regular Chrome, and one in incognito. At least, that's what I use it for......

-Downloads and homepage: One thing I do like, Chrome gives you the option to run an EXE, and the downloads page is pretty good. It's similar to Firefox's, except it pops up as a tab. Also, each download is shown on the bottom of the tab that it was downloaded from. And my FAVORITE part, you can make Chrome save an EXE, then click the downloading icon, and it will run it as soon as it's done. As for the homepage (or really the page that appears when you open a tab), it's a simple page that shows your most recent bookmarks, most popular pages (including screenshot), your recently closed tabs, and your searches. Not bad, Google, not bad at all.

-URL bar searching: I do like that -just like Firefox- you can make search engines linked to a tag, so that in the URL bar, you type "g I love Freeware", and it will bring up Google's results for "I love Freeware." However, what I kinda like about Chrome is that when you type a keyword, like "g", it will replace that keyword with "Search (Search Engine):" That way, you can be remembered what your keywords are, and if you forgot what your keyword for the thesaurus is, you aren't searching for nothing.

-Pop-out tabs: A very nice feature that I've always dreamed of in Firefox is the ability to pop-out/in tabs. Because each tab is a separate process, they don't have to stay in one window. Now, in Firefox, you can grab a tag, and drag it to another window of Firefox, but then the page has to reload. With chrome, however, you can grab a tab, drag it to another window, or even just create a new window of its own, and the page will not reload. That means that if you're watching a streaming video (let's say, Hulu, for example), and you want to combine your tabs to one window, you don't have to be afraid of reloading the tabs, and thus having to start your video over. To put it short, it's a very nice feature.

-Portable: Not officially, but some Dutch dude totally rocked and made aportable version of Chrome. Very, very cool, as I find portable Firefox to be a bit heavy at times


But there are a few things I don't like as much.

-Unreliable Java: Something I've noticed since making Chrome my main browser on one of my PCs is that it doesn't exactly do everything right. One example would be Java. Chrome flickers a ton whenever you have a Java applet in a window. Also, it doesn't work in alot of things like Google products. One prime example is here on blogger when making a post. In Firefox, when I put an image into a post, I can just click on the image, cut, then paste it somewhere else. In Chrome, you have to go into the HTML and cut/paste it somewhere else in the code. Chrome also has problems in the "Edit Posts" section when you click the arrow to expand the post. It has problems in Google Reader also. It just doesn't work perfectly in everything, which can be extremely annoying.

-Tab "independency": I know that Chrome boasts the whole if-one-tab-crashes-the-others-are-unaffected, but I just don't see it. Every time one of my tabs becomes slow or freezes, the others follow suit, even if it just losing the ability to scroll. It's a very nice idea, but I just don't see it in action most of the time I use Chrome.

-Not customizable: Again, it's built for speed, but it's really not customizable........at all....period. A little skinning would be nice, eventually.....


Overall, it's a great browser. But to be honest, currently, at version 1.0.154.43, I'd say that in my opinion, it's a secondary browser at best. I love that I don't have to wait for Firefox to start up and all, but I just cannot stand being without any customization. But still, if you want something lite, give it a try. To each his own, and to many people, Chrome is their own.

Visit Google Chrome site for Download

Unlocker: it's like the anti-Microsoft.

So you're crusing along, fluidly flying from one task to another, but then suddenly "Cannot delete folder, in use by another process." Wha? Bah! Unlocker to the rescue!

Unlocker basically unlocks. It sits running in your tray, waiting to spring into action. When you attempt to delete a file, move a file, or eject a drive and it fails because it is in use by some process, Unlocker springs into action. It pops up a window showing all of the processes that are currently using whatever is trying to be deleted/moved/ejected. Then you can click through the processes and click "unlock", or just hit "unlock all," and wham, now the folder/file/drive can be deleted/moved/ejected.

Sometimes windows gives you an error when nothing is wrong, at least according to Unlocker. In this case, a window pops up that says "No handles found" and you have the choice of deleting, moving, or renaming whatever is supposedly messed up.

The last thing I like would be the shell context. Unlocker installs an option in the explorer context menu, so that something doesn't have to be wrong for you to unlock something. Just right click your desired file/folder, and click Unlocker, and you have all of the functionality mentionedd above, but you don't ahve to try to delete/move/rename something to see if it is being used.

Probably my favorite thing about Unlocker is that it actually saves Explorer. I've noticed that alot of times, if something is being used and there are no obvious program that could be using it, explorer.exe can sometimes be using it, I dunno why....so I have to end it, delete/move/rename the file, and start it again. Unlocker saves it.

There is a program, though, that runs all the time, called "Unlocker Assistant." At the moment, it's consuming 1.8mb of RAM for me. You don't necessarily have to add Unlocker to startup, but if you don't, you'll have to manually navigate to the file/folder and unlock it rather than have a window pop-up when there is an error.

Also, Unlocker is portable (at least I believe.) I mean, I don't know if the Unlocker Assistant is portable, but I am fairly sure that you can just drag anything (folders, files, drives, etc) onto Unlocker.exe, and it will perform just like normal. I don't understand why it would write to the registry, but I'm fairly confident that it's portable.

Let me put it this way: on my personal PC, I try to keep the programs installed to a bare minimum, and Unlocker is one of those programs.

Visit Unlocker website for Download

Tweak UI: Microsoft made something......good???

Wait, let me get this straight, MICROSOFT actually made this?

Usually, if I hear that Microsoft released a program, I turn off my internet and hide down in a cellar with all my computers for a few days, just to be safe. But then I stumbled across TweakUI. Mind you, when I installed it, I didn't know Microsoft was the one who made it, but I was impressed.

TweakUI essentially provides an easy interface for you to make tweaks to your system, so you can get it how you like it. I'm fairly sure that you can do everything inside of TweakUI elsewhere on the computer, but it makes it aheck of alot easier. Basically, it has alot of "tweaks" that are small edits to Windows. Also, it's really nice because TweakUI does tweaks that paid programs do, except for free. I used X-Setup Pro, which is shareware (which isn't bad since really, you only have to tweak once), and I found that TweakUI does all that I want.

If you want a detailed explanation of every tweak, TweakUI provides a brief description that usually suffices. Also, this is kind of a tool that you need to know what you want when you start it. There's no dire consequences if you click something and then change your mind, but it helps alot if you know what is what.

To be honest, it's very hard to describe this program, because it has so much. Other than listing every single tweak, there's no real easy way to do it. So here's a few of the tweaks that I love:

Remove prefix "Shortcut to" - I never really liked this, so I love that you can make it automatically remove "Shortcut to" to new shortcuts.

Start Menu frequent programs - The start menu picks programs that you've used recently, but some that it choose, you may not want, so you can go through and uncheck programs that you never want to show up there.

Taskbar grouping - If you don't use a program like Taskbar Shuffle, then you can make it where Windows will never collapse programs in the taskbar to one button.

First Icon on desktop - You can choose what you want to show up first, "My Documents" or "My Computer." I don't use desktop icons on this computer, but if I did, I would make sure to pick my preference.

Drive Letter Location - You can make the drive letter come before, after, different between network drives and local drives, or none at all.

Templates - One of my favorites, when you right click in a folder and go to "New," there's a list of file types. I never liked those file types. Who does "New > Audio file"? It lets you delete, create, and edit these entries.

Rebuild Icons - If your icon seems to be messed up, such as Explorer using the wrong icon for something, then use this.


That's just a few of the things. There are alot more, and if you want to see them, again, download the program. It really is handy, even if you install it, tweak, and uninstall. There is ONE downside that I've found so far....and it is Microsoft-related.

-Installs to system32: Of course, Microsoft can never just make a program that does not intertwine itself with the system. TweakUI -and all XP Powertoys, I believe- install to system folders. You can still uninstall it, but I just never like putting more stuff in system folders than I need to.

However, according to Portable Freeware, TweakUI is indeed portable. Unfortunately enough, though, Universal extractor does not work, so you have to install, copy, then uninstall. Or, you can download it right here. I'll try to keep it up as long as I can, but if a ton of people download it, I'll have to take it down...I'm just using a free service.

Visit TweakUI site (Microsoft XP Powertoys) website for download