Category: Windows 7

Over a period of time of using Windows, it accumulates a long list of junk data in the Windows registry. This junk data is mostly made up of pathnames of the most recently used files or MRU lists in short. Thankfully, MRU-Blaster is here which can help you remove all these MRU entries from your Windows registry.

FreeOCR is a free optical character recognition software for Windows. It supports scanning from most twain sources like scanners and cameras. It can also open most scanned PDFs and multiple page tiff images as well as other popular image file formats. FreeOCR outputs plain text and can export directly to Microsoft Word document format.

PDFsam is an open source Windows application that can help you split a large multi-page file into smaller PDF files or merge small PDF files into a large PDF file. The application gets its name by joining word PDF with sam which is short for split and merge. The program is designed using the Oracle Java programming language and so you need JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed on your PC before you can start using PDFsam.

If you have a laptop with touchpad, then you know how many times the cursor jumps around the screen when you are typing. This happens because you accidentally touch the touchpad with your wrists, arms or palm of your hand. You can decrease the sensitivity of your touchpad from the Control Panel, but some users still experience the bouncy cursor. If you too are annoyed with this problem, then you can try free TouchFreeze software which prevents accidental mouse clicks and cursor jumps.

If you have ever used Ubuntu Linux, then you know how easy it is to click on your user name and select to shutdown, reboot or logoff. But the shutdown options are not so easily available in Windows. The task has been made specially difficult to pull off in Windows 8 – first of all open the Charms bar, the power icon and then the shutdown options. The free zebNet Shutdown Manager can make your life easy by making the shutdown options readily available in Windows 7 and Windows 8.

PureSync is a free Windows application that can be used to synchronize files and folders between two locations, create automated backups, transfer files to & from another computer and copy new digital photos from your digital camera or mobile device. The programs allows you to configure backups and synchronization events using a simple step-by-step wizard mode. It can automatically run a synchronization task when you insert a USB and a particular folder on it is found.

DriveImage XML is free backup and cloning software for personal home use. It uses the volume shadow copy services in Windows, allowing you to make the backup of all the files including those in use by Windows. It stores the image in XML files, allowing you to process them with other third party tools. You can browse through these drive backup images without having to extract files from them first.

Most of the backup software available today compresses the backed up files in order to save disk space. Some of them also store the backups in special proprietary file formats. These methods have advantages of their own but many people want to be able to access files in the backup directly without having to extract them from a compressed backup archive. If you are one of those users then a synchronization tool like Microsoft SyncToy might prove to be more useful for you.

In Windows, almost all the file types are associated with one or other program. If you want to open a program with an alternative program, then you can right-click on a file and select a program from the Open with submenu. The list of programs in the Open with list are automatically added and ordered by Windows and third party programs. You can change the order of the programs in this Open with list as well as add or remove programs from this list.