PawEng

Changing the extension on a file can be very useful, but Windows does not make it easy. However, if you turn on “show file name extensions” in Windows, you can change the extensions by simply renaming the files. Microsoft explains how to show or hide file name extensions on Vista. And Media College explains how [...]

Revision control systems (Wikipedia) manage multiple versions or revisions of documents. It is often used by software developers to manage their source code, but it can be useful for anyone. Have you ever made a change to a document, saved it, and later wished you had an earlier version of it? If so then you [...]

Symbolic links are used all the time on Linux and Unix systems, but I didn’t know they existed on Windows. It turns out, however, that Windows 2000 and higher also supports symbolic links — or junctions as they are called. You can use the program Junction v1.05 to create a link between two directories. This [...]

Windows XP and Vista offer only limited ways to control window placement and size on your screen. Sometimes the built-in features are not enough. For example, on my Windows XP laptop, I use one screen resolution on the laptop screen and another screen resolution on the monitor attached to my docking station. When I undock [...]

I have an old Samsung i730 cellphone running Windows Mobile 2005. I have long wanted to watch podcasts on it, but I have never really found a good way of doing so. But now I finally have something that seems to work. I have downloaded Apple’s iTunes software for my Windows XP PC. In iTunes [...]

Lifehacker has a list of the Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools. They have polled their readers, and the winner is Recuva. Recuva is free to both personal and commercial use, and it runs on Windows from 98 to Vista. The Recuva developers are currently working Windows 7 and 64 bit support.

The gHacks blog has a post about the 5 Things Linux does better than Windows. Reading it got me thinking about a situation I had recently. I had close to 40 thousand text files, and I needed a list of all unique files. I wouldn’t even know how to attach that problem in Windows. With [...]

VLC Media Player version 0.9.9 has been released. It is mainly a bug-fix release. VLC is a free and open source cross-platform media play. It supports a large number of multimedia formats, and it can stream sound and video between computers. VLC is one of my favorite media players. I especially like how it can [...]

Ubiquity is Mozilla’s new tool that adds a command line to Firefox. We reported on it back in August 2008. Since then there have been a number of enhancement and upgrades to it. It is a very useful tool. In fact, it is so useful that I often wish I could use it from anywhere [...]

Dmitry Brant’s DiskDigger allows you to recover files that you have deleted from your hard disk or from a USB stick or memory card. DiskDigger bypasses the operating system and reads the raw data directly from the disk. This means that you may be able to read files even if your disk has been corrupted [...]