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A little known set of tools to enhance your Windows XP experience are known as Windows XP PowerToys. Would you like to be able to simulate multiple computer screens at once? (Try 4!) Below is a list from Microsoft with descriptions. Below the list, I will explain the benefits of some these wonderful Windows XP powerful tools known as power toys!

Color Control Panel Applet

Professional-level photographers and designers know that getting consistent, accurate color from file to screen to print and beyond is a requirement for great results. This new tool helps you manage Windows color settings in one place.

SyncToy

With new sources of files coming from every direction (such as digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops), SyncToy can help you copy, move, and synchronize different directories.

RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer

Are you a serious photographer? Now you can organize and work with digital RAW files in Windows Explorer (much as you can with JPEG images). This tool provides thumbnails, previews, printing, and metadata display for RAW images.

ClearType Tuner

This PowerToy lets you use ClearType technology to make it easier to read text on your screen, and installs in the Control Panel for easy access.

HTML Slide Show Wizard

This wizard helps you create an HTML slide show of your digital pictures, ready to place on your Web site.

Open Command Window Here

This PowerToy adds an “Open Command Window Here” context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.

Alt-Tab Replacement

With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.

Tweak UI

This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.

Version 2.10 requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2003.

Power Calculator

With this PowerToy you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions.

Image Resizer

This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.

CD Slide Show Generator

With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show. The Generator works downlevel on Windows 9x machines as well.

Virtual Desktop Manager

Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.

Taskbar Magnifier

Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.

Webcam Timershot

This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate.

Before we discuss the benefits of the powertoys, let us just ask a question.  Why were these tools not included with XP (maybe even in Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2).  And a better question, why are these not included in Windows Vista?  Mull those questions over as to why Microsoft does what it does, but more importantly, be glad they actually released these instead of simply shrugging off the fact that they do not think of upgrading their programs as they know they should.  Anyhow, here is a run down of the benefits of some of these programs.

Open Command Window Here - Now I understand that having a shortcut for everything defeats the purpose, but it is very useful for those who do windows programming with Ruby on Rails, PHP, or any other language in which you have to run the script from a certain directory.  Just saves time.  And what do programmers like?  Saving time, reusing code, anything to limit the amount of work.  This is one of them, especially if you need to constantly test your code, etc. and need to reopen a cmd prompt, or several and hate navigating to the correct folder in order to run what .exe or other file you made need.

Alt-Tab Replacement - This is something they have implemented in Vista, and I believe the reason why they didn’t fully release this to the public was that it was one of the many new features in Microsoft Vista that was supposed to attract current Windows XP owners to “upgrade” (I use the quotes, because I do not believe it is an upgrade until they fix all of the bugs and driver issues).  Anyhow, back to the plug-in.  Ever have 2+ windows of the same application running, or don’t remember what you have on those windows without having to click through to each one?  This powertoy is great!  I would recommend running it if you have a decent video card, as it may slow down some that are not equipped well enough.

Tweak UI – This program should be used by anyone that wants to enhance any of their settings and allow them to customize their computers any and every way they can.  The note says to not use the program unless you have installed at least Windows Service Pack 1 (which unless you have some kind of program compatibility issue with Windows Service Pack 2 you should have that installed).  Anyhow, this is just reiterating my point of why not release it with the service pack?

Power Calculator – This is a calculator.  Great for anyone that is doing Chemistry, Physics, any higher level Mathematics, and especially people in college!  This is also great for those that want to quickly convert numbers to binary or hex (hexadecimal).  But it has a lot more options than those, such as log functions, graphing, and other functions which you would find with a high end scientific calculator.

Image Resizer – This is great for those who publish blogs, put your photos on flickr, or pretty much if you want to save space on a drive after taking a lot of pictures.  Whatever your reasoning is, this image resizer quickly allows you to do just as the title says, resize an image.

Virtual Desktop Manager – This is a really good powertoy (although it comes standard in X-Windows for *nix) which allows you to have 4 “virtual” desktops.  Once installed it will put a toolbar at the bottom of your screen with a shortcut for each desktop (labeled 1, 2, 3, 4) and one that does a quick screenshot of each screen so you can decide which one you want in case you forgot what you had running on each.  Turn off animation if again you do not have a decent video card.

Summary

The other power toys that were not discussed further after the initial list are mainly for photographers or are taken of by other third-party programs.  With any of these, simply try them.  They are easy to install and easy to uninstall.  Any by being made by Microsoft, these Power Toys are free of malicious code and spyware.  Enjoy!