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Windows: If you want to store your Windows profiles independent from your system drive and standard Windows directories to protect against loss and corruption, Profile Relocator makes short work of moving your profiles directory.

The best time to use Profile Relocator is after a fresh install of Windows when moving empty profiles poses minimal risk and the least chance of conflicts. If you’re set on moving your profiles in an existing installation it is possible and Profile Relocator won’t delete the old profiles in the old location so if the move causes any complications you can just switch things back.

Like with all tinkering under the hood in Windows it sounds simple enough to just move your profile directory but any number of complications can arise when it’s done on an established installation. Set a system restore point before making the move and read the included documentation carefully.

Profile Relocator is freeware, Windows only, and requires Microsoft .NET 2.0+. Have an application that’s handy for remodeling the guts of your Windows installation? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows: Comical is essentially an RSS feed reader designed expresely for the reading of online comics. If you love a good dose of Amazing Super Powers or XKCD, you’ll want to check out Comical.

Click on the image above for a closer view.

Sure you could subscribe to your favorite web comics—Amazing Super Powers is featured in the screenshot above—in Google Reader or any other feed reader, but they wouldn’t download and organize your comics for you. Comical not only retrieves the comics for you automatically, but it catalogs them on your hard drive for future viewing and enjoyment—so you’re never stuck trying to tell your friend about that one comic you read last year that would be perfect for his presentation.

Comical comes with 41 popular web comics already listed in its database, you can add in any additional comics by creating a new entry and pasting in the RSS feed link from the comic’s site. Comical is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool for comics or comic books? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows: If you want to print a large image off your home printer and be able to reassemble it, it takes some enormous photo editing cut ‘n crop patience—or a copy of Easy Poster Printer.

Photo by Paulo Barcellos Jr..

Easy Poster Printer works on a simple principle: your image is divided into sections and fed to your printer chunk by chunk so the end result is a stack of segments that can be reassemebled into the large image. The process is commonly known as tiled-printing or rasterbation. You can use online services to create tiled images such as previously reviewed The Rasterbator and Block Posters. Both are great services but they don’t allow you the level of customization affored by Easy Poster Printer and they require you to upload your image and thus have less control over it and less privacy.

Easy Poster Printer lets you tweak the size of the final image, the orientation of the image, the paper used, the print quality, and how much overlap there will be between images for clean border-free alignment. The default set of page sizes is all metric but you can easily add in your own imperial paper sizes—and since you’ll likely not be using anything other than 8.5×11 and 11×17, it’s not much of a chore to manually enter the sizes.

Easy Poster Printer is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool for getting more out of your printer? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows: Booting your computer up in the morning is one of the most tedious parts of starting your computer use for the day. What if you could gain the benefits of a reboot and still start quickly out of a hiberation?

The premise of Boot Snooze is that it takes less time to pull the computer from standby or hibernation mode than to do a full reboot, but rebooting a computer is necessary and sometimes beneficial. With Boot Snooze you shut down your computer, performing a full reboot, and then Boot Snooze puts it back into hibernation or standby mode.

You could obviously do this manually by rebooting your computer every night and then hibernating it immediately after it finished up the startup routines, but that would negate the time saving benefit of having Boot Snooze do it for you and leaving your computer fresh and ready to use in the morning without the down time of booting up.

Boot Snooze is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool of your own for speeding up boot times or just helping you to spend less time waiting for your computer to do things? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows: If you checked out the Mac-only Ommwriter and were disappointed that there wasn’t an equivalent tool for Windows, you’re in luck. CreaWriter is a distraction free writing tool that lets you customize your writing experience.

Click on the image above for a closer look.

CreaWriter is a free Windows download that creates a distraction free writing zone. The screenshot above is the entire screen, no toolbars, alerts, or widgets visible. In fact the icons you see in the upper right corner are only there when the mouse is passed over them—they allow you to create a new document, save your document, and make minor changes like increasing or decreasing the font size for ease of use. You can save your work as a TXT, RTF, and DOC, compatible with nearly every word processor around if you want to important it for post-editing.

CreaWriter has both a background image and background ambient noise enabled. You can disable them all together and just have a white writing space, but we customized ours—we liked the RainyMood site so much that we shared with you last week, we made our background noise a rainstorm and found a picture similar to the background image of RainyMood. If you want an in-depth look at all the features you can check out the overview at How-To Geek or jump right to the author’s site below to download the application.

CreaWriter is freeware, Windows only.

Windows: If you use a 3rd-party application dock in place of the Windows taskbar, you may have noticed that you can’t completely get rid of the taskbar. Taskbar Eliminator helps you turn it off and keep it out of the way.

You can minimize the taskbar in Windows but you can’t full-out remove it. This can be a bit of a pain if you’re happily using a 3rd-party application dock and you don’t like the taskbar popping up or even taking up that tiny sliver of screen real estate to say “I’m here!”. Taskbar Eliminator is a single-purpose application that removes the taskbar from the screen and keeps it from popping up or getting in the way, letting you use your 3rd-party dock in peace.

Taskbar Eliminator is freeware, Windows only and works on Windows XP through Windows 7. Have a shell-tweaking application you find useful? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows: Want to try out a flavor of Linux or other LiveCD-based tool without installation or even having to exit Windows? MobaLiveCD has updated to include support for both LiveCDs and bootable USB devices.

We introduced you to MobaLiveCD around this time last year—then, it only supported LiveCD disc images. Now you can use both LiveCD ISO files and bootable USB devices. In our tests we were able to boot a variety of Live USB installations like Ubuntu, GParted, and BackTrack.

Using MobaLiveCD is significantly slower than actually booting into the LiveCD/USB and notably slower than running the same LiveCD/USB in a virtual machine. Nonetheless, it’s free, an absolute breeze to use, and it allows you to rapidly check out a Linux distribution with very minimal hassle.

MobaLiveCD is freeware, Windows only.

Originally posted 2009-09-11 18:25:20. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Windows: JDContextMenu is a small application that adds a variety of useful shortcuts to the right-click context menu in Windows.

None of the shortcuts are things you couldn’t do within Windows with a few extra clicks or with a small 3rd-party app, but JDContextMenu bundles them together into a small menu with one-click ease. You can copy the full filename to the clipboard, alter the time and date stamp of a file, run an MD5 checksum to verify file integrity, and create new folders—the new folder tool allows you to create a variable number of numbered folders in a series.

Have a favorite shell extension of your own? If you’ve got the perfect tweak for your Windows context menus, we want to hear about it in the comments. JDContextMenu is freeware, Windows only.

Windows: Quick access to key folders on your system can be a big time saver. MedalFolders puts all your favorite locations two clicks away in the system tray.

After installing MedalFolders, open up the main window from the tray icon and drag and drop your favorite folders to add them. Once you’ve got all your folders set up, you can access them from a menu by clicking the tray icon to open your folders in a new Explorer window. Despite its name, you can also add executables and other files to MedalFolders to launch or open using their default applications.

The only problem I found while setting up my folders was that MedalFolders didn’t want to recognize system folders like My Documents when dragged from the My Computer location. In order to add them, I had to find them in the Windows directory structure and add from there. A minor annoyance, for sure, but one that only has to be dealt with once. MedalFolders is freeware, Windows only.

This application is far from the first to tread in this territory, so let us know how you get to your favorite folders in the comments.

Originally posted 2009-09-20 18:25:44. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Windows: Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 has no option for remembering the position of individual windows. If you miss having Windows remember how you arrange things, ShellFolderFx can help.

It’s a small thing, certainly, but if you’d grown used to Windows keeping track of the size and position of your windows—especially important for multi-monitor users!—then the removal of that feature in Windows 7 was more than a minor annoyance.

ShellFolderFix is a small application that allows you to enable folder and size position saving as well as maintaining folder browsing history between sessions. Once you set the options you want and send the application to the system tray you never need to bother with it again, it runs in the background keeping track of the folders and restoring them to their respective positions.

For another way to get a piece of Windows history back in Windows 7 check out how to get the classic network activity indicator back in Windows 7. ShellFolderFix is freeware, Windows only. Have a trick or application for restoring functionality from past versions of Windows to Windows 7? Let’s hear about it in the comments.