Reasons you may not realize why you should document:

-Just because you finally figure something out, does not mean that you will at a later time or that the next person will figure it out. If it’s not already written, write it down, even if it’s a temporary fix. It may turn into the only fix or help you find a permanent solution later with more information or further knowledge.
-Something that may seem simple to you at that time, may not be simple later or to the next person. So if it is not common sense, DOCUMENT!.

And documentation should extend to keep all licenses together and safe. It’s very hard to tell a customer that you cannot help them because they do not have their license with them. And for all types of documentation and licenses, do one thing and keep them protected. I would recommend buying something like a firesafe that they can keep those and extremely important records such as portable media backups of tax information, databases (if you do not have off site storage as well as on site for redundancy). While a fire may be devastating, it may be a breath of fresh air to know that you still have some things safe.

Another thing you may encounter is a program called Yardi.  If you do, make sure that wherever your files are located (I was lucky enough to have two sets of data for different purposes), write down what users have what access to those files.  In my case, the people trying to access both sets of data had to log into one, then open another database and change the location.  It was not giving them a choice for the data, so you must log on with whatever user has access to the first one you setup and then switch to the second.

If anyone has problems with either application, comment on this article or contact me via the Contact Me form and I’ll see if I have any insights.  Good luck, and make sure you always document.

• Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
  • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
• Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
  • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
  • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
• Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
  • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
• Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
  • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
• FireFTP – FTP client.
  • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
• IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
  • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
• SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
  • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
• User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
  • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.

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!

First, let’s explore the options of accessing usenet.  There are usenet providers such as Giganews (which is a very large access provider) which offer different packages per month of download size ranging from a few GB to Unlimited downloads, as well as large retention rates of posts (up to 240 days!).  Retention rates are good so that if you are looking for something, you have a better chance of finding it if the access provider you have has higher retention.  Another thing to look for is whether they offer SSL connections.  Secure connections means that not everyone can look to see what you’re downloading (if someone was filtering your internet traffic). 

Secondly, we need to take a look at a newsreader.  There are many types, some free, some you pay for, which means there are different features.  Get one that suits your needs as you see fit.  I really like Newsleecher, but it is not free.  The benefit is that you can use their supersearch feature which will mean you do not have to update groups (this take awhile as some of them have over a million posts – each file is a post) in order to find something you are looking for.  An alternative to using their supersearch feature is a site I HIGHLY recommend called Newzbin.

Newzbin is great for several reasons.  First, it is very cheap to be a member of (I believe like a dollar a month), and having excellent filters for searching as well as easy organization of all files needed (many movies, etc. are broken into several files so you don’t have to download one LARGE file, but several small files – normally Winrar’s .rar compressed format).  These include the par2 files (use QuickPar to check to see if all the files you downloaded are not corrupt or if they are, to repair them).  Also, being a member there allows you to have access to their “Adult Material” site as I like to call it.  That would be NewzXXX which has the same features as their other site.

With that being said, read the comments on newzbin.com, if there are any, and download all the files into one .nzb (this will open with most newsreaders).  Then unpackage the files (many are .rar which you will use Winrar as previously mentioned) and enjoy!  If you download something and are not sure what program you will need to unpackage it or join it, either google it, check on filext.com (the file extension site), or go ahead and contact me.  Good luck hunting!