Have you ever had your CD drive disappear from the explorer window and no matter what you did you couldn’t get it back. Then if you go into Device Manager you notice that it is saying your CD drive has an invalid drive? Only to search and find there are no specific drivers for you to update? Well if you have like I recently did download this little zip file and then run the registry file to clean out the issue. It seems it comes down to a registry hack to fix this issue and it is pretty common in Windows XP. I am not a fan of running registry files and adding them but this one did exactly what I needed it to do.
Category: Software
Well I finally did what I always make fun of other people for doing. I deleted a file that I needed (The last 3 years of my email!) Luckily searching Google I ran into a Lifehacker article that listed a few applications and I tried this one and was very successful it just takes a while to get the files back but it is super easy to use. I have attached it to this post in-case if it disappears as software likes to do these days:
WinDirStat is a great little application that walks your file structure and then tells you the size of each folder as well as giving you a graphical representation of what files are the largest and taking up the most space. I have never been a big fan of heatmaps but in this case it actually seems to work. This is just a nice little clean up application and is available for both regular install and of course as a portable app.
It looks like you can run BitPim (Phone Manager for CDMA phones) as a portable app. All you need to do is download the application, I have already packed everything up and it is good to go. Bitpim Portable
But if you need to do it from scratch first download the application and unpack all the files. Then delete the uninstall files and add a ‘config’ subfolder. Then just create a batch file with the following code:
bitpim.exe -d config
Then you will be able to run Bitpim from your pen drive or external hard drive.
Teracopy allows you to copy multiple files to another location very quickly and securely. I just recently used it to transfer 50GB from my old 100GB external to my new 500GB external drive. This did it very quickly and didn’t seem to lock up Windows at all and basically did it in the background without any interaction.
The interesting thing is that you just copy the files like you normally would in Windows and Teracopy takes over when the action happens. There is also a portal app version of this application out there so you can run it from your pen drive. If you are going to be copy mass amounts of files I would suggest using this application.
I have attached a copy of the most recent version but I would suggest going to their website to pull down the latest and greatest
This is a handy light weight application to clean up the right click function in Windows. This is really nice for things that sneak onto your context menu that you never use and a good way to only show the ones that matter.
Download Local Menu Maid: Menu Maid
So tonight Laura needed to convert a WAV file to an MP3 file because she needed to send the file via email. Well the WAV file was about 23mb while the mp3 came down to 2.5mb. This application which is an open source application will convert any audio file type to mp3, ogg, FLAC and any other encoders you want to add. This is a great utility to have. It will also rip CD’s to that format.
Website: BonkEnc
Latest version: 1.09 Local Download
I am always on the search for the best utilities for basic computer needs. This one came up as the best free CD burning software via LifeHacker. It does everything that you need it to and has a super clean easy interface. I like this one because the last free burner software I was using didn’t allow you to burn from an ISO image which was a huge pain in the butt.
Local Copy: setupimgburn_2420exe
I probably use this at least 2 times a day. It will decompress/compress any type of file .tar, .gz, .zip, .rar, .7z to name just a few of them. I almost always use it via the context menu as it is easy to get to. The application also will .zip a file at a higher compression then Windows can and is super lean and quick. There are also a host of settings that you can play with when you are creating the compressed archive. As I said this application is a must have.
Sometimes you just need a quick and dirty way to convert a document into a PDF quickly and effectively. I used to us PDFCreator a lot but have run into a few issues installing on my work laptop as well as running with Vista. It seems that this software called Bullzip works the exact same way with the exact same result without any issues.
Download Bullzip PDF Printer From their website
Download Version 6 (local copy) bullzippdfprinter_6_0_0_702
