HitsGarden

Windows has a number of diagnostic and system monitoring tools built in but this one, called System Explorer puts everything you need to know about your computer, and what’s it doing now, and in the past, into one very convenient and easy to use package. Here’s just a taster of what it can do. You can view information about running processes, startups, Explorer, IE Add-ons, uninstallers, drivers, services, connections and open files. You can check which programs and files were opened, and when, take snapshots of your Registry and later compare them if something has gone wrong to see what’s changed. It uses fewer resources than the Windows utilities and there’s even a portable version that you can run from a pen drive. Try it, get to know it and one day it could save you a lot of time and trouble if your PC throws a wobbly…

Microsoft has been busy showing journalists some interesting bits of Windows 7, which you can expect to see on a new PC near you sometime in 2010 or 11, probably… Anyway, the OS still very much in its early stages of development is now being made available to developers to tinker with. Most of the new features have been heavily trailed so there’s no big surprises but the Touch screen stuff does look very impressive. It’s all very Minority Report, with lots of finger wiggling and hand movements, making things whizz around the screen, and pictures twist, tumble, enlarge and reduce, the only thing it doesn’t do is clean off the sticky finger marks afterwards… Read the rest of this entry »

calibrize

I get a lot of emails and letters asking why the colours in printed photos sometimes don’t match what’s on the screen? Sometimes it’s the printer, but more often than not it’s simply that the monitor hasn’t been properly set up. Monitor calibration is essential if you work with graphics or photo editing software but how many of us ever take the time to adjust our monitors, apart from twiddling the brightness and contrast controls? Not many, I bet, but there’s no excuse any more. A freeware program called Calibrize takes you gently by the hand, and in three simple steps helps you to adjust your display; from start to finish it only takes around 2 minutes and the new settings or colour ‘profile’ is then saved and applied every time you start Windows. It’s also handy for those who, like me, use two monitors, making it easy to accurately match the two displays.

apricot

Those of you who have been around computers for a few years may well remember the Fruit Wars of the early 1980s, indeed one of the very first home computers I wrote about was the Tangerine, back in the late 1970’s. In fact it was little more than a very large printed circuit board, smothered in logic chips, and you had to add your own keyboard and light bulbs, but it was a start… Anyway, soon afterwards we had more useable machines from the likes of Apple, and Apricot, not to mention quite a few lemons, though to be fair I don’t remember anyone actually using that name. But the rest, as they say is history, with only one fruity PC maker managing to survive.

Anyway, this preamble is by way of reintroducing the Apricot brand, last owned by Mitsubishi though by the late 1990s it had all but disappeared. Read the rest of this entry »

I have to say that if you feel the need to install this little application on your PC, then you probably need a larger hard disc drive. Tray DisK Free sits in the System Tray – next to the Windows clock — and it does just one thing, it displays the amount of free space left on your disc drive. If you hover your mouse over the icon there’s a more detailed analysis. Nominally it’s set for your main drive (usually C:) but it can be set to monitor any drive on your PC. The menu option lets you change how frequently the program checks the drive, and if you want to have a fiddle with some command line switches, you can change the display and text colour.