Category: Windows 8

When you open File Explorer in Windows 8, it displays all the partitions on all the drives attached to your computer. By default, it displays the drive letters for each of the partition. Although drive letters make it easy to identify the drives, some people do not want to see the drive letters. If you want to know how to toggle on and off the displaying of the drive letters, then you can follow these simple instructions.

If you want to upload videos to websites then they must be in a format that can be played easily in a web browser without requiring any additional plugins. Most popular of such video formats are FLV, MP4 and WEBM. You can use the free EasyFLV Web Video Encoder to convert any video into these formats. This free software also has the ability to add a custom text or image logo to your video.

When you start Windows, many programs are automatically loaded along with it. Some of these programs are not required for Windows to work properly and only make Windows slower to start. You can remove these unnecessary startup items using the free Synei Startup Manager. This freeware program can automatically scan the startup items and show you which of them are not needed or which of them should be disabled.

Just like your car, Windows also requires cleaning and oiling from time to time. After some time of use, Windows gathers all kinds of junks files and registry entries. You can hose it down and clean Windows using the free Synei Disk Cleaner. It is a small but powerful tool for Windows that can clean junk files from Windows, your web browsers and more than a thousand third party applications like VLC Media Player, Microsoft Office etc.

PDF Reducer is a free and fast software that allows you to reduce the PDF file sizes. It can achieve the compression through a multitude of optimizations and compression levels. It can re-compress the embedded images in such a way as to reduce their size without affecting the quality that much. For my files, it could compress them to around 90% of the original file size.

Windows comes with a defragment utility, but its not as powerful as the free OptimalDisk Basic in optimizing and defragmenting your hard disks. OptimalDisk basic can optimize and defrag not only your hard disks, but also individual folders and files. It claims to turn your slow aging hard disk into a faster hard disk just like the day you bought it.

If you have multiple windows opened on the desktop, then it becomes a struggle to switch from one to another of the open windows. The Alt + Tab switcher does not work for shortcuts in the taskbar. If you want to switch to any item whether its an open window or a program shortcut, then you can use the free 7+ Taskbar Numberer. This freeware tool sets numbers to all the items in the Windows taskbar, and allows you to switch to them using their numbers.

Although software like Microsoft Office come with spell check and auto-correct feature, but it is not available in rest of the text editors like Notepad and Wordpad. Using the free Word Expander software you can add auto-correction feature to all the applications of Microsoft Windows. It is basically a word expander program for medical transcription work, but it can also be used to auto-correct misspelled words.

The File Explorer in Windows 8 shows all of your hard disks and other removable storage media. It labels all these drives with volume names followed by the drive letters, for example, Local Disk (C:). But this can make it confusing to find a drive by drive letter if you have a large numbers of disks. What you can do is make Windows display the drive letters before the volume names, for example, (C:) Local Disk.