It’s been awhile since I’ve used my Vista boot but I’ve been on Vista almost constantly for the past week or so due to gaming needs (there is no Half Life 2 on Ubuntu to my knowledge) and yearbook work (I’m a Photoshop user and will probably continue to be until I die). As such, I have finally started accumulating applications on Windows for my day-to-day clutter/use/life, only I decided I’d be looking for open sourced/free software (that actually works better than many “brand” name wares in many cases). Here’s my latest roundup of applications for just about everything:
- Virtual CloneDrive
If you’ve ever needed to mount those “application” (i.e. video game disk) ISO and DAA files (disk image files) but didn’t have the tools (e.g. PowerISO, UltraISO, etc…) this app is for you. It’s lightweight, simple, and gets the job done. It adds an extra drive icon under My Computer which is treated as a normal CD/DVD drive, but loads digital files instead of plastic. - winLAME
This piece was suggested to me by Herman but I never used it until now (I don’t think there was a Vista compatible one way back then). The lamer is an MP3 conversion tool (i.e. from “X format” to MP3, not from Buddhist to Christian) that runs decently enough. In the past, I’ve used many converters, like Xilisoft’s “WMA MP3 Converter”, COWON’s “jetAudio” media player/manager, and even resorted to importing and exporting with Audacity (for the tricky formats not supported by anything else). So far, winLAME’s been simpler than the rest (no extra crap, unlike jetAudio) and stabler (I ditched Xilisoft because it would crash frequently) than anything else. This is a good investment (small and useful) if you’re someone, like me, who is very obsessive compulsive about the way their music is formatted, tagged, and organized. - XdN Tweaker
If you’ve ever felt the urge to fine tune your Windows system, but haven’t the time to Google up anything, fancy, this tweaker is a good place to start. It’s hard to grasp all the different little things this application does (mostly through changing your registry in safe, reversible ways). XdN lets you add or remove options on your context (read: right-click) menu, change the way files and folders are treated, and many other options you probably never knew existed/could be changed. I’d say get this for quick and convenient access to changing options (many of which would require manual registry hacking without XdN). - UltraDefrag
My father was the one who told me about this application (he knows his way around computer maintenance). I used to use programs like O&O Defrag to clean up my drives. Defragging, for you less hardcore computer users, basically takes your hard drive’s collection of data and rearranges it so that 1) file splitting is avoided and 2) data and empty space are sorted nicely. It’s sort of like cleaning your room from time to time, but for your drives. This makes your hard drive’s life a little easier and speeds up read speeds. Anyway, UltraDefrag is like a normal defragger program, only extremely simple. Analyze, defragment, compact, rinse, repeat. Very nice, very small, very stable, and very fast. The download page may look a little n00b/sketchy but I assure you, it’s all good and safe to try.