Automatically change your wallpaper with WallPaper Master

Overview:

Wallpaper Master is a powerful and highly customizable desktop wallpaper manager and cycler.

It will automatically change your background wallpaper with a huge range of options, and is great for indexing large collections of personal photos or any kind of image.

You can create your own categories using images on your computer, and it will cycle through your images automatically in whatever order you specify: in a shuffle mode, listed order, or based on your personal ratings. The program also has auto-size options to make sure your images are displayed with optimal size.

Features:

• Store multiple wallpaper lists as different categories/libraries – up to 5000 images per category!
• The ability to rate wallpaper, so better wallpapers are chosen more often.
• Customizable Global Hotkeys – Quickly change/clear the wallpaper with any key combo.
• Very high quality resizing of images to fit the screen optimally and keep their aspect ratio.
• Auto change the wallpaper when windows starts, every x minutes, or use the ratings to choose an interval.
• Change wallpaper in order, in shuffle mode, or randomly according to rating.
• Analyse the wallpaper and automatically choose between Resize, Tile, Center or Stretch.
• Uses very little resources.
• Minimises to tray area for easy access.
• Easy to use but powerful interface.
• Desktop Wallpaper Master is a free download (freeware)!
• And more!

Review:

Looking always at the same old desktop wallpaper can get boring very fast. WallPaper master fixes this problem with lots of options. with this program you can select up to 5000 pictures per category and automatically choose one of them as your wallpaper,you can do this by random order or by ratings which is handy in making your favorite wallpapers show up more frequently.
WallPaper Master has a lot of features but the most useful is the “auto resize wallpaper” that will shrink a picture to make it fit into the screen if its too big or tile it if it is too small. This program uses between 10 to 11MB of RAM in my system which is a little high for my taste.Unfortunately WallPaper Master only supports JPG and GIF files which is a pretty small selection. also it doesn’t support vista which is a shame for some of you and the development has stopped in favor of the Pro version. still this is a good wallpaper changer with some neat features. Available for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP.

Get it at http://jamesgart.com/wallpaperchanger/

Reduce the size of attached pictures without losing too much quality using Shrink Pic

Overview:

Today’s high resolution digital cameras produce multi Megabyte photos. These are great for printing but cause a heavy burden when sending over the Internet.

Shrink Pic allows you to send dozens of photos as email attachments – quickly and with no effort at all!

All you need to do is install Shrink Pic. It automatically detects when you’re sending large photo files and compresses them in the background.

There’s no setup, no operating instructions, nothing, nada. Just send your photos normally and Shrink Pic takes care of shrinking them.

Review:

If you have a slow internet connection sending large pictures to someone can be a pain in the ass since uploading big pictures can take awhile. But thanks to Shrink Pic this problem can be solved very easily. This program will automatically compress the size of a picture when you try to attach it to an email, blog post or when sending it trough MSN messenger. The original picture remains untouched of course since Shrink Pic makes a temporary copy of the original pic. You can select from various compression levels but the one that worked for me the most was the “medium” setting that while it reduced the size and quality of the picture a little it still managed to keep the look of the picture while reducing the size aggressively as you can see in the screenshot above. Shrink Pic only uses between 5 to 6Mb in my system which is great considering that you will probably want to keep on the system tray at all times, also you can make a portable installation from the settings menu that you will allow you to launch Shrink Pic directly from the pendrive making this a very handy tool to carry around. Shrink Pic is just great for those of you that constantly send large pictures to other people and want to keep the attachments light. Available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.onthegosoft.com/shrink_pic.htm

Create a PDF with only images using Graphics2PDF

Overview:

Free PDF file creator. Convert your images to PDF document. Supported formats: BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF.

Drag’n’drop your image files into Graphics2PDF, then click “Save as PDF”. That’s it.

Review:

If for some reason you need to put only images into a PDF then Graphics2PDF is just the program for the task at hand. Simply drag and drop the images that you desire inside Graphics2PDF’s window and rearrange them using the arrows located below them. Then simply click” save as pdf” to get your PDF document with the images you selected. Graphics2PDF is very easy to use and just works as it should so if you are ever in the need for making a PDF full of images then Graphics2PDF is what you are looking for.

Get it at http://www.imposant.com/products/image2pdf.htm

UpdateStar will find updates for your installed programs

Overview:

UpdateStar is free software that lets you stay up-to-date with the personal software installations on your computer. It eases your life as a software user and makes sure you always have the most up-to-date software versions. UpdateStar covers all of your freeware, shareware, demos, commercial software, and includes special offers.

Review:

Going to a program’s website to check if there is a new version can be a bother, specially if you have a large quantity of software installed in your machine. Thankfully with UpdateStar you can solve this. UpdateStar will search for all the paid and free software currently installed in your computer and will let you know if there are any updates available, if there are you can quickly go to the program’s page and download the new version. In my computer UpdateStar managed to recognize most of my installed software and most of the current updates available too which is great. Of course there was some instances in which UpdateStar didn’t know about a certain program or the latest update wasn’t listed and this is where you can help if you have some free time. You see UpdateStar relies heavily on user contributions for information about programs and updates, so if you have some free time help fill information about your favorite programs in the UpdateStar website. You can keep UpdateStar running on the system tray so that it can look for software updates daily,weekly or monthly. Also it can work as basic program uninstaller which is a little handy if you ask me.
UpdateStar works well most of the time and is easy to use, tough i had some problems with the system tray icon not showing up. Maybe it’s because i have too many system tray icons, anyway UpdateStar still worked well regardless. Available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.updatestar.com/

Backup and restore your Windows drivers using Double Driver

Overview:

With Double Driver you can view which drivers are installed in your system and you can backup the drivers you choose, save and print the drivers list, and more.

Features:

• View installed drivers
• Backup drivers
• Restore drivers
• Save drivers list
• Print drivers list

Review:

Double Driver is a program for the backup and restoring of Windows drivers. To backup a driver just do a scan and either select all the results or using the “provider” option you can quickly choose important drivers for Windows, video card, printers, Etc. Double Driver is pretty fast and is very easy to use. Available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.boozet.org/dd.htm

JkDefrag is a simple but powerful hard drive defragmenter

Overview:

JkDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64. Completely automatic and very easy to use, fast, low overhead, with several optimization strategies, and can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows. Included are a Windows version, a commandline version (for scheduling by the task scheduler or for use from administrator scripts), a screensaver version, a DLL library (for use from programming languages), versions for Windows X64, and the complete sources.

Review:

JkDefrag is a lightweight defragmenter that focuses on speed and simplicity. Jkdefrag by default will analize, defragment and optimize all the mountable hard drives that it can find, it does all of this without any user input which is handy if you want a fully automated process. Of course you can make some adjustments by using command line options that will allow you for example to defrag a specific hard drive or folder. In conclusion Jkdefrag is a fast, simple and just great defragmenter, tough having to use the command line to access extra options may prove too hard for newbie users. Available for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/

Print files into PDFs with DoPDF

Overview:

doPDF is a free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create PDF files by selecting the “Print” command from virtually any application. With one click you can convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents or your emails and favorite web sites to PDF files.

Review:

doPDF is a simple utility that will install a virtual PDF printer in Windows allowing to pretty much print any file into the PDF format. Using doPDF is extremely easy since all you have to do is to open a file and select “print…” from the file menu and print the file using the doPDF virtual printer. doPDF justs works so get it if you need it. Available for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.dopdf.com/

FairStars CD Ripper is a simple but effective CD ripper

Overview:

FairStars CD Ripper is a free powerful software for ripping audio CD tracks to WMA, MP3, OGG, VQF, FLAC, APE and WAV formats files on-the-fly. Free CDDB is supported(Querying & Submiting). It supports normalization when ripping, and also support ID3 tag. FairStars CD Ripper also supports playback with its built-in player.

Features:

• Rips CD to WMA, MP3, OGG, VQF, FLAC, APE and WAV on-the-fly.
• Supports automatic volume adjustment(normalization) during ripping.
• Supports multiple CD/DVD drivers.
• ID3 tag support.
• Support automatic saving ID3 Tags when converting, and also support ID3 tags display and edit.
• Query and submit CD disc information from/to the freedb(the Internet Compact Disc Database).
• Audio Playback control function Support.
• Easy-to-use user-friendly interface(skin support).

Review:

I had to rip a CD recently and the programs that i tried were not up to the task for several reasons. Either i had to download a library or the interface was too complicated so i made the decision to look for something more efficient and after a while i came across FairStars CD Ripper. This program comes with all the required libraries for ripping tracks into the most common formats and has a simple interface. All you have to do is to introduce your music CD, select a destination folder, output type and click extract. ID3 tag support, volume adjustment and querying CD information from the freedb database to fill out missing details are among the other features that FairStars CD Ripper has. As you can see FairStars CD Ripper is fully featured and should suffice most standards need like the one that i had. Available for Windows 2000/XP/XP MCE/2003/Vista/2008.

Get it at http://www.fairstars.com/cdripper/index.htm

FileHippo.com Update Checker can let you know if your programs have updates available

Overview:

The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to FileHippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.

Review:

FileHippo.com is a great place to find free programs (some of the programs featured in this blog have come from there) so if you have programs that you download from there then FileHippo.com Update Checker is a pretty good way to keep them up to date. Just download the installer or the portable version and run it so that it can check your installed programs, a browser window will be opened with direct links to download the newest versions of your software. Unfortunately FileHippo.com Update Checker can only check programs that are added to the website so if you have programs that are not there you are out of luck. You could try Updatestar tough which is another software update utility with a larger software database but it’s not portable.
In conclusion if you only have programs that are on the FileHippo.com website then this update checker is a good way to keep them up to date. Available for Windows 98/ME/2004/2003/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/

Diagram Designer is a powerful tool for creating flowcharts and other types of diagrams

Overview:

Simple vector graphics editor for creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.

Features:

• Customizable template object palette.
• Spellchecker (see below about dictionaries).
• Import/export WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF and PCX images.
• Slide show viewer.
• Simple graph plotter to plot mathematical expressions.
• Advanced “pocket” calculator with equation solver.
• MeeSoft Image Analyzer integration for bitmap image editing and extended file format support.
• Uses compressed file format for minimizing drawing file size.

Review:

Diagram Designer is an amazing open source program for creating diagrams. You can easily create flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows using a simple drag and drop interface. You can customize your diagrams with all sorts of colors and text formatting codes which makes Diagram Designer very powerful. You can optionally download dictionaries for spellchecking , use a simple calculator for advanced operations and export files into several types of image files, Oh and did i mention Diagram Designer is fully portable? In conclusion Diagram Designer should be the program that you use whenever you are making some diagrams. Available for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://logicnet.dk/DiagramDesigner/