Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Microsoft Windows shares it’s processing time (CPU cycles) with every program that’s running, including the programs that are running in the background. This makes the program you’re actually using at the time run slower than it really has to.
A free utility called TopWinPrio allocates extra CPU cycles to whichever program is currently active while reducing the number of CPU cycles allocated to those running in the background. This makes the active program run faster. [Read more…]
Chances are you use the Windows Task Switcher utility by pressing Alt+Tab in order to scroll through a series of thumbnails representing all the open windows, then switch to a different task.
If so, you are probably aware of how difficult it can be to find the task you want to switch to if there are more than just two or three windows open.
A while back I began using VistaSwitcher, a free replacement for the Windows Task Switcher, and it has turned out to be a major timesaver!
I usually have over a dozen windows open at once, and VistaSwitcher makes it easy to quickly find the one I want to switch to and get me there in a jiffy.
Once running, VistaSwitcher can be called up in one of two ways: [Read more…]
Like many of you, I have used the Windows Snipping Tool to capture screenshots for quite some time, and I must say that it does what it’s supposed to do extremely well.
But a few days ago a reader (thanks Shirley!) sent me an email recommending that I download and try out a free screen capture utility called Skitch.
After using Skitch for a couple of days I removed the icon for the Windows Snipping Tool from my Desktop and permanently replaced it with the one for Skitch. Read on and I’ll tell you why… [Read more…]
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might remember this post about Process Explorer, a powerful free replacement for the native Windows Task Manager utility. If not, I suggest you check it out because it is vastly superior to Task Manager.
If you downloaded Process Explorer and gave it a try, you might be wishing you could have it load automatically in place of the native Task Manager after pressing the Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard combination. Well, you can, and it’s very easy to set up. Here’s how: [Read more…]