I found a tiny, basic and very practical bandwidth meter that just sits in the menu bar: MenuMeters. Can also display CPU, memory and drive use. Free.
A fancier and more comprehensive alternative which monitors many more system functions is iStat Menu, but it’s $10.
In just a matter of a couple of weeks, I’ve discovered three different screenshot capturing tools, each one better than the next… and my new favorite is ScreenCatch. A tiny 193KB tool.
Captures the entire screen with a single click and then allows for cropping before uploading the image and hosting it for free.
Most definitely the easiest way to install all your basic apps after a fresh install of Windows is using Ninite. You simply go to the website, select some popular apps you would install anyways (like Winamp, iTunes, Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, uTorrent, WinRar) and the site checks for the latests version of those apps and then gives you a package to download of all of those apps, and then runs all their default installations disabling all the annoying installation options like ad-ware, toolbars, etc. And done!
Great topic over at reddit.com asking “What’s your favorite software that no one has heard of“. I’m discovering and discovering a lot of gems as we speak.
So apparently Canon hasn’t gotten around to writing a Windows 7 64-bit compatible driver for viewing their digital camera CR2 RAW images as thumbnails in Windows Explorer. Easy fix: these guys at FastPictureViewer have it as a free download here.
For years I’ve been using Bandwidth Monitor Pro but for whatever reason it became buggy when I upgraded to Windows 7. It wasn’t correctly detecting my network cards and interfaces and rather than troubleshooting I decided to look for a free alternative and finally chose NetWorx (free, PC-only). Somehow, I had overlooked this particular bandwidth monitor in my searches the last couple years. And all the other apps that were coming up in my searches were inferior
NetWorx actually has more features than Bandwidth Monitor Pro, but most important to me is it’s simple and straightforward graph. I almost always keep this graph up because it helps me avoid getting frustrated over browsing and downloading slowdowns or videos buffering. This way, if I see no obvious drops in the visual graph of my connection, I get to more accurately place the blame on YouTube’s slow servers or slow torrent seeders.
Screenshots below of how I like my graph and of one of the settings tabs.
My primary audio card on my desktop PC is an M-Audio Fast Track Pro and after I had upgraded to the retail version of Windows 7, it would periodically just stop working (dropout). The sound would not play and some videos would refuse to play since no audio output was available. This would usually happen after I had been away from my computer for a few hours, meaning after no sound had been played for a while. I suspected it might be shutting off after inactivity, but it would also happen only a couple minutes after the most recent audio was played.
I did the usual and made sure I had the latest drivers, uninstalled, reinstalled the device, changed USB ports, etc. I also followed some advice on the M-Audio forums including checking for IRQ conflicts. But the problem persisted, and I finally went to check what I had suspected all along: Windows’ USB power management
THE FIX: Go to Device Manager > Universal Serial Bus controllers > and then right click Properties on all instances of USB Root Hub, and in the Power Management tab, make sure the first option is unchecked. (Source: M-Audio FAQ)
Lifehacker’s High Five topics are an awesome resource, when it’s readers vote for the top five of various tech categories. I’m already using a lot of the most popular apps, but I’ve also learned about a lot of alternatives and discovered some real gems. And now I’m going to double check each of these one by one to make sure that I am in fact using the latest and greatest.
Below are some of their most popular High Five topics of 2009.