Fences is a desktop icon organization program brought to you by Stardock the same people that made ObjectDock, which I have been using on a daily basis recently (and also the publisher for Sins of a Solar Empire, which I'll get around to playing one of these days). Fences allows you to create groups on your desktop for icons and such. Sure, you can cluster your icons (trust me, … [Read more...]
Sandboxie – Sandbox applications to keep your system safe
Sandboxie is another application developed with the intent to keep your computer safe. Sandboxie works by creating a, you guessed it, sandbox for applications to run in. Specifically, it addresses the problem of: "I downloaded this file and I'm not sure I trust it. I need to run it though. How do I find out if it's malicious or what changes it will make to my computer?" Besides … [Read more...]
Hardcopy Advanced Configuration (Part 2)
Continuing my series on making Hardcopy do just about everything you want, I present Part 2 of the walkthrough for Hardcopy. This will get into some more advanced topics, but increases the versatility of what Hardcopy can do. This will also incorporate any new things I've found (best practices) from working with individuals to configure Hardcopy for their environment. In the … [Read more...]
ThreatFire – Proactive Antivirus and Spyware Protection
What they call Behavioral Virus and spyware protection, I call proactive. Instead of being reactionary and delayed behind viruses and spyware, ThreatFire is able to analyze the behavioral habits of programs to determine if it is a virus before a definition (thumbprint identifying the virus) even exists. Chances are if it sounds like a virus and quacks like a virus, it's … [Read more...]
A Smorgasbord of SysInternals Tools
SysInternals offers a lot of useful tools for Windows computers. These can either add more functionality, work-around different quirks, or gather more information for debugging. This article is divided into two sections. I tried to separate the utilities into General use and IT use. Those in the General use category might have a larger interested audience and those in the IT … [Read more...]