User Interface – iTunes with more… much more

First thing we see upon start: the ability to import music from both Windows Media Player and iTunes. Kudos here, although I don’t use either of them (I’m a loyal foobar2000 user since 2002). Initial scanning of some 20GB of MP3/FLAC/WAV music (2347 songs) took no more than 80 seconds. The main window that’s presented afterwards looks iTunesy, but a little more crowded. But that’s something that only makes me more interested. So what’s in all these panes? Left column, all the sources for your music: library, playlists, web sources and just a file explorer. Then the quick finder. At first it didn’t really make sense to me: there’s a quick search box at the top already, there’s a three-column track browser just below, and when you type in the Quick Finder on the left, the main panel adjusts the songs displayed instantly, just like the quick search box does. So what more is there? Well, apart from the fact that you might want to turn off the track browser at the top, the alternative tree view of the quick finder makes way more sense: it presents you with a folder tree starting from either artist, album, composer or genre. Now that did make sense to me. The middle (main) column is tabbed, so you can have multiple views, with multiple search results or playlists loaded. Apart from the obvious track list with some detailed info, the main view supports showing album covers only, or a per-album view. Just looks perfectly fine to me, and customizable to the right degree: just select whatever fields you want to display as a column. The only minor downside is that the view you pick is applied to all the tabs you have opened, might be nice to have this setting be applied only to the currently viewed tab.

On the right we see the queued files (“Now Playing”) and some additional info panes. Best thing of all: MusicBee (MB) automatically crawls the net for the active song’s lyrics and shows them in a non-obtrusive panel. I like to know what the weirdos I listen to have to say once in a while, with this panel it’s just one click away. Lovely.

At the bottom we have the necessary playback controls (can be put in the right column as well). Furthermore, there’s access to detailed shuffle functionality, last.fm scrobbling, song rating (with optionally last.fm’s ‘love track’ button)  and a 10-band equalizer. Equalizer presets can be saved, and what’s more, you can apply an equalizer preset to every individual song (see the Edit Track window/panel). Somehow, though, it is impossible to select multiple tracks at once and apply an equalizer preset to all of them (the ‘Settings’ tab simply disappears). Unfortunately these changes are saved directly to the file, instead of them being saved in the library only. From the Edit window (or panel at will) the tagging, artwork an lyrics of a file can also be manually changed. More automated tagging tools can be found under the Tools button, which include auto-tagging, auto-numbering, capitalizing and even search & replace operations.

Windows 7 taskbar support includes album art preview with playback buttons and some specific jump list features. Just the things you need. Furthermore, the Windows 7 libraries are shown in the UI’s Navigator panel.

Native Features Valhalla

As we see in many music players, any Winamp DSP plugin can be imported. That should settle for the audio tweaking freaks. ReplayGain support is implemented to the fullest extent: MusicBee can scan for track/album ReplayGain values, add them to the files’ tags and use them on playback, but also permanently apply the volume adjustment without degrading the quality (MP3 only), the same thing MP3Gain does for us (and foobar2000 for a short while now). Perfect for (portable) MP3 players that don’t support ReplayGain, and MB provides a feature to undo this volume adjustment (see Tools – Restore Original Volume), although that certainly doesn’t seem to guarantee bit-perfect recovery of the original, as I discovered. Minor issue, though, it seems like you’re unable to set a target value, which suggests only the default of 89dB can be applied. In most cases this is extremely irritating: not-yet-replaygained music will be way off and playback on somewhat lower quality portable devices will introduce extra noise due to the higher playback volume setting.

Furthermore, you’ll be spoiled with last.fm scrobbling and play count synchronization, format conversion and auto tagging (even using musicbrainz), “now playing” popups, ASIO playback support. Sending current song information to your IM client is a feature that I normally can’t use, but MusicBee does support Digsby (next to Live Messenger), very impressive!

Then the Auto-DJ, which is a blast. With this you can enqueue your own files, but never run out of music, as it will automatically add new songs to the Now Playing list when approaching the end of the list. You can set up filtering features, make it use MusicIP mixer, or include last.fm streams in order to discover new songs you’ll probably like.

Beta

Memory usage was a tad too much to my standards. 70-85MB is quite a bit for a program that you’ll probably start and then forget about at times; once it plays, it’ll do its job for hours without looking at it. foobar2000, with the same library and *some* extensions and a pack of DSPs running uses 26-30MB, quite some difference here. But as you might know, measuring the private working set memory usage is a quite arbitrary. MusicBee is no exception in this, but I think I can safely conclude that you’ll probably have to count on 60+ MB of memory usage on average. Perhaps this might change a bit for the better over the development of the program. CPU usage on my T8300 2.4GHz was 0-3% in the Windows 7 x64 Task Manager, but these are also quite arbitrary numbers. The only thing one can read off of that is that it doesn’t do strange things with sudden peaks or other strange behavior. No need to worry in this area, then.

April 7: With the newer builds I did not have these extreme numbers anymore. I could not push it any further than MB usibcusing 39MB, when just opening up the program (by now with a larger library than at initial testing) and playing back some songs, the average memory consumption was about 29MB.

I did find a couple UI glitches, especially in the panels, such as the Quick Finder, where switching between tree view and list view sorta broke things. I had to reset the skin. Previous encounters with this program have given me some non-informative error messages, but the program continued to work afterwards (no restart necessary). One strange thing though is that when you first choose ‘Queue Last’ from a song’s context menu (adding it to the bottom of the Now Playing list) and then ‘Queue Next’ on any other song, MB puts the file below the last song, not below the currently playing song (the intended behavior). The equalizer had some issues with a FLAC file as well: disabling and enabling the EQ proved to solve the issue, but it is certainly a marker that there are some stability issues yet to be fixed (but then again, we are talking about a beta version here).

What struck me by surprise was the choice to – by default – output in 32-bit (see Preferences – Player). The reason for this would be that it improves performance in Vista/7 and that it “can produce better sound quality”. I’m skeptic about this to say the least, as most source material will be 16-bit. Bit-perfect playback is impossible either way with this player, as kernel streaming (XP) or WASAPI output (Vista/7) is not implemented. Most, if not all, won’t notice, but the author might just have a look at it.

For more information about the issues I came across, check this forum post.

Portability

Even though you’ll have to install this little gem, it does have the ability to run as a portable application (see Settings). A big plus, as the introduction to saving relative paths to your songs in the library allows you to take your music anywhere on a portable device while running MusicBee from the device.

Conclusion

Overall, this program made me think of Opera as compared to the other competitors on the browser market. Some music managers only have the proper amount of features after you yourself had an intense battle with tens of potential candidate plugins that are all supposed to do something similar, but in the end are just not the right thing, whereas this program just has those things you want built-in, right from the start. It’s a truly worthy music manager, there’s no doubt about that.

Pros

• Just the right amount of customizability
• Advanced Auto-DJ function
• Lyrics panel
• Full-scale ReplayGain support
• Comprehensive (online) Help function

Cons

• Encountered minor playback issue (equalizer-related)
• Some UI glitches
• Memory usage (testing this is arbitrary, less in newer 3748 build)

Download MusicBee [tested version: v1.2.3705 beta]

For more information about the issues I came across, check this forum post.

Read MusicBee – Full-Featured Free Music Manager by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

With exactly this in mind, Matthias Withopf created a tool called SecurStick, an encryption program that uses an intuitive work-around that still offers you tight encryption, the ease of use by offering a virtual drive for all these encrypted files just like the programs above, but with the advantage of being able to use it on any machine (Windows, Linux or Mac) without having administrator privileges. The trick is extremely simple, yet all the more brilliant: instead of using a driver to set up a virtual drive, the program acts as a WebDAV server and maps its WebDAV location to a drive letter (which is an integrated feature of Windows and does not require administrator privileges). Well there you have it, simply perfect.

Or is it? The first thing that came to this extremely educated mind was that my WebDAV experiences weren’t that brilliant because of its speed issues. Unfortunately there’s no exception here. If it would take you about 4 seconds to copy a file to a USB stick unencrypted, then this might take you as long as 14 seconds, or more… That’s extremely slow, and one will never find such a performance decrease when using any of the encryption solutions mentioned earlier. For most types of documents this will not be a problem, but running programs that contain sensitive data via this system will probably be extremely irritating for most people. There is a known problem with WebDAV support in Windows 7, though, which is the platform I tested SecurStick on. For more information, see this forum topic.

The installation is straight-forward, just extract the program to your USB drive and run it. The fact that it has a web interface does feel a bit strange at first, but one can get easily accustomed to that. After you have set up a password (for which you have to meet some extreme requirements, I think), a safe zone is created in the folder encrdata on the drive (having both “hidden” and “system” attributes). Inside, a folder called data will contain all the encrypted files; the filenames will be scrambled, if one chooses to. However, there is still some transparency from the outside as to what’s in your safe zone. The files, their sizes (when encrypted slightly bigger than the originals) and the folder structure remains visible to those who peek a bit further than most. This might not be much of a problem, and it most certainly will not let them have access to the actual data, but some degree of transparency is certainly there. What’s more, individual files can be removed by any other person in this way. Of course you have a similar risk with USB drives being formatted or encrypted container files being removed.

Then another potential problem popped up. “Didn’t WebDAV cache its files locally, unencrypted?” Well, the answer to my question was presented once I logged in: an HTML page with some info on the safe zone provided me with a link to flush the OS’s WebDAV cache. An extra step not to be forgotten, or you’ll leave traces of your precious files on the system. You might even have to do it several times, as some files are cached in memory as well (usually no more than about 30 seconds, according to Withopf). Again, not a problem when merely considering the possibility of your USB stick being stolen, but it does allow for an unfortunate situation in which someone finds some of your files on a computer you’ve been working on before, unencrypted… (The path for this cache in Windows Vista/7 is C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Temp\TfsStore\Tfs_DAV)

Whereas the concept of SecurStick is simply terrific, the method comes with quite a few downsides. But even though speed, a lack of total masking and a far-from-optimal user interface seem like a pain in the ass at first, I can seriously imagine that to lots of people this might just be the solution they were looking for.

Pros

• Finally no need for administrator privileges or pre-installed software!
• Easy to set up
• Support for Windows (x86/x64), Linux and Mac

Cons

• Transfer speed is extremely low
• File system structure transparent to outside users (to some extent)
• Possibility for outsiders to delete files
• Don’t forget to clean the WebDAV cache afterwards or you’ll leave traces of your files on the system!

Download SecurStick [via Caschy's blog]

Read SecurStick – Encrypt USB stick data without administrator privileges by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Plans

It appears as if SugarSync is really focused on keeping as close to its competitors as possible. For starters, the free plan is – as with Dropbox – 2GB by default. One can invite someone or be invited, which will give you both an extra – as with Dropbox – 250MB, up to – as with Dropbox – a 5GB max (you might get 5GB extra instead of max. 5GB in total, but that wasn’t at all clear). However, when we have a look at the (individual) payed plans, SugarSync does a lot better than Dropbox: for $119.88 a year one can get 50GB for Dropbox, while you get 60GB for $99.99 at SugarSync. A year of Dropbox’s Pro 100GB plan will cost you $239.88, but no more than $149.99 for SugarSync’s services. In short, when you need lots of space, it’s quite expensive for both services, especially compared to Google’s current rates (which does NOT include such a backup client, though), but between the two SugarSync is significantly cheaper.

Installation

After registration – in which you get a nice username.sugarsync.com subdomain – we see the first difference between Dropbox and SugarSync: Dropbox supports Windows, MacOS as well as Linux where SugarSync lacks the latter. However, SugarSync is well-represented in the mobile segment: Dropbox has an iPhone application, but SugarSync tops that with support for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile. This gives SugarSync a significant advantage.

During the installation, I found it quite elegant that SugarSync gives a warning before it momentarily closes Explorer in order to load SugarSync’s Explorer extension. This extension will point out per file and folder whether it is synchronized (similar to Dropbox’s Explorer extension). Last time I checked, Dropbox doesn’t give this message on installation, something that’ll lead to a loss of all opened Explorer windows without any warning. With SugarSync, you can even choose to skip loading its extension for the moment.

The sign-in screen with a nice hummingbird or robin gives a Twitter-like appearance, and the icons/avatars you can choose for registering and identifying your computer are quite childish, but sufficient.

Configuration

SugarSync allows you to sync more than one folder between a number of computers. You can set up per system which folders need to be synchronized. In addition, the Magic Briefcase sort of works like the Dropbox folder: whatever you put in there will be synchronized between all your computers. This gives SugarSync a whole lot of extra versatility compared to Dropbox, something I consider to be a significant reason to choose for this service.

Most of the Manager software is worked out into more detail in the web interface: the selection of the folders to be synchronized is the spearhead of the whole, apart from a slider to select the bandwidth usage (low, medium, high). Overall the upload speed was quite low. On specification of the folders, it would have been even better if one could group the selected folders under virtual folders/groups, instead of the current presentation of all folders in one flattened structure.

Resources

While uploading for the first time I was quite shocked by SugarSync’s resource usage: on average over 280MB of memory was used and my C2D 2.4GHz was used for 30-50% by the Manager process. Luckily this was only due to the initial indexing of all files in the selected folders. CPU usage on upload dropped to less than 2%, memory usage however stayed the same. Upon a restart, this dropped to 25MB, though, but it it did rise again over time (up to about 60MB during testing). Dropbox uses – primarily due to its Python framework – about 56MB of RAM on start-up/while indexing (on an x64 version of Windows 7), increasing slightly on syncing, but over time it can drop to about 27MB. Dropbox’s CPU usage is somewhat more than SugarSync, that might be because of its differential file synchronization and compression method.

Versioning

Versioning is implemented nicely in both services, although significantly different. Quoting the Support page: “SugarSync automatically backs up the last 5 versions of a synced file. Only the current version of a file counts against your storage quota.” This, however, is only the case for a paid plan. Free plans allow for 2 versions per file. Dropbox takes another approach, saving an infinite amount of versions for all your files, but only for 30 days. If you want to extend this indefinitely, you have to add the Pack-Rat extension to your paid plan. What’s best of course entirely depends on your own behavior: if you save your files after every little change, SugarSync’s version management might not be enough, whereas if you’re saving sparingly and like to have an older version  around for longer than 30 days to fall back on, it might turn out to be better. In addition, you can put a particular version of a file inside SugarSync’s Web Archive.

As with Dropbox, you’ll get a nice overview of the latest changes (additions, removals and updates of files and folders), although Dropbox’s grouping of events and full history logs is a significantly better implementation.

Extras

In addition to folder synchronization, SugarSync has quite a few interesting other features. For one it has a Web Archive: “A place to put copies of files that you do not want to automatically sync when you edit or delete the original version. You can use it to free up disk space on your computer by securely backing up your files remotely.”

Furthermore, there’s support for real-time streaming of music and videos to Android phones, you can create multiple photo galleries, you can directly view and share photos from your mobile, publish photos directly to Facebook and share several folders with customized privileges and then there’s that magic briefcase thingy. From the web interface you can – as in Dropbox’s – download multiple files in zip-files, send multiple files by email and access previous versions. In addition, SugarSync will send you an email message as soon as someone accessed the files you sent them, simply brilliant. With WebSync, a Java applet allows you to edit any file directly from the web interface on any computer and sync the updated file to the web and your other computers.

Dropbox allows you to run a simple website from within the /public folder, I couldn’t find such a feature in SugarSync, although that doesn’t mean the feature’s not there.

The SymLink/Junctions story

As with Dropbox, changes of files and folders inside directory junctions or symbolic links are not recognized instantly by SugarSync’s client. I suppose this is an issue linked to Microsoft’s implementation of symlinks, but either way it makes it impossible to create your own virtual folder structure inside a sync-folder: files and folders will only be updated upon a restart of the client. For Dropbox, this meant that you should put anything in the Dropbox folder and then make symlinks on the locations you originally wanted the files to be. Not a good thing. At least with SugarSync you’re allowed to choose multiple folders, but it won’t allow you to subsequently create a virtual folder structure. For some extra customizability, though, SugarSync does allow you to exclude subfolders of a synced folder.

Conclusion

Use SugarSync. It’s that simple. Dropbox lacks flexibility when it comes to folder specification (this might change in the future) and on top of that SugarSync comes with extensive mobile platform support, better sharing functionality and for more “professional” use a nicer pricing. The only BIG “but” here is that SugarSync still does not offer a Linux client.

Pros

• Does everything that Dropbox does
• Extensive support for all popular mobile platforms
• Multiple folders sync (set up individually per computer)
• Offers more attractive payed plans

Cons

• No Linux client
• Maximum of 2 computers to be linked to a free account
• Only 2 previous versions of a file saved for free accounts (5 for paid plans)
• Unpredictable memory use (can be important for those 1GB RAM netbooks)

Update: thanks to some comments below, I got some more information about the restrictions of the free plan. First, as already mentioned by caschy below, you can only backup & sync from max. 2 computers per account – with a paid plan the number of computers is unlimited.

Furthermore, I checked both versioning systems to some more detail. For that, see the ‘Versioning’ header.

Download SugarSync

Download Dropbox

Read Shoot-out: Dropbox vs. SugarSync by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

On paper, Partition Master is a full-featured partition product, but frankly so are all other commercial alternatives. Not all have a decent backup or 1-on-1 copy feature on-board, though. Copying of (system) partitions can be done to smaller and larger destination partitions without a hassle.

Merging, splitting and converting partitions aren’t special features for commercial products either, nor is previewing partitioning tasks before completing them. But we’re talking about a free product now (for limited time only), fully up-to-date and Windows 7 x86/x64 compatible.

As this is the professional edition, one is able to create a bootable disc in order to do all these operations in an ‘offline mode’, which remains a big plus: partition managers are not the kind of programs you always (want to) have installed, so having a bootable CD/DVD around to make those changes you only do once in a while is a big plus.

For a full feature list, you can just check out the EASEUS website.

EASEUS’ product is extremely clean when it comes to the installation. Other than a single key for the settings and some uninstallation info, the registry stays clean. Installation does include two services though (well, rather drivers). Apart from 5 files (BootMan.exe, epmntdrv.sys, EuEpmGdi.dll, EuGdiDrv.sys, setupempdrv03.exe) in the Windows System32 folder (and for x64 systems, also in SysWOW64) concerning these drivers, everything is just put in its own program folder. Although there’s almost no information about what these drivers actually do, I’d say all is rather nice ‘n clean.

The interface of both the ‘offline’ bootable CD and the Windows version are extremely intuitive, but no more different from a Paragon, O&O or Symantec product. Then again, uniformity is a good thing in this, especially concerning operations that (can) have a major consequences  for your system. Although EASEUS tried to mimic the Windows XP interface with blue sidebar, it is obvious that the native Windows interface facets aren’t used (in fact, it uses the GTK interface framework). This free version has a small banner saying “Tell your friends” which links to the EASEUS website. A small price to pay.

After trying out some operations it’s evident that Partition Master isn’t completely stupid, but planning your operations is still a necessity: doing two operations on the same partition sequentially will combine the two operations into one, but doing one operation on the first partition, then one on the other, and then changing something to the first one again, will not combine the first and third operation even if it wouldn’t intervene with the second in any way.

EASEUS’ product seems to be purely geared to Windows users: one cannot format a partition in any other format than FAT, FAT32 or NTFS. That made me wonder what the program might do with any existing Linux partitions. Furthermore, using GTK for the interface and a Linux boot disk for its offline solution would make it a strange phenomenon not to support Linux file systems. But indeed, any other operation than delete or format is unavailable for Linux partitions; my ext4 and swap partitions were ‘recognized’ only as ‘Other’.

Nevertheless, when focusing on online and offline partition management for Windows users, EASEUS Partition Manager is a full-featured product, just as much as any other commercial product. And best of all, if you’re quick, it’s completely free.

Download EASEUS Partition Master Professional

Read EASEUS Partition Master Professional – Limited Free Giveaway by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

The player is based on Mirillis’ own codecs, which prove to perform quite well, at times outperforming the well-known FFDShow filter. Unique are the real-time conversion from 1080i (interlaced) HD material to 1080p (progressive) and some further interesting image post-processing techniques (unfortunately only in paid versions), like Motion² (the conversion of cinema material with the default 24 frames per second to 60 frames per second) the and SD2HD Superscaling.

Where other more feature-rich players overwhelm with cluttered menus and too much post-processing options that don’t quite cut it, Splash keeps it refreshingly simple – possibly making it easier to allow for a smooth playback – but without overlooking those essential features like Lipsync Adjustment and Aspect Ratio settings (new in the current version).  An extra is the support for DVB-T (digital television) for those with a TV card (with v1.1 this proved to be unusable with some cards – Splash would crash at the DVB-T settings tab – but the current version worked fine here).

As expected from a decent HD media player, hardware acceleration (if your video card supports it) is implemented, which allows for a smooth H264 HD video playback. For people with dual monitor setups, a function to force video overlay is present. An EcoMode should allow for somewhat more advanced power management, but as of yet I’m in the dark as to what it exactly does.

All this is packed in only 1 executable and 2 support files (a Direct3D v9 extension file and a zlib compression library). The configuration and playlist files are put into the Local Settings folder, in all making this a very clean application (almost portable even, provided that the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable is present on your system).

Splash proves to be a pretty much full-featured media player for daily use with lots of potential. Still, I would like to see a decent sharpening filter implemented (proves to be useful for both SD and HD every time), but otherwise the feature set, packed in such a clean interface, is nothing less than highly impressive. One might even set it to open up video files by default… oh wait, file associations setup, that’s not really implemented…

The Good

• Extremely nice and clean interface
• Clean semi-portable program structure
• Finally a player with smooth playback (unlike many other well-known players)
• Real-time 1080i to 1080p conversion
• Forum support very decent

The Bad

• No support for HD Audio Codecs in free version
• No Motion² in free version (24p to 60p conversion)
• Lack of file association setup

Download Splash Lite

Read Splash Lite – Refreshing HD Video Player by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

UBitMenu is free for personal use, and is not exactly expensive for use at work. Having the ability to add the classic menus and toolbars gives you that delicate mixture of knowing exactly where to find all the original features again while being able to enjoy the new functionality as well. If you’re planning on eventually do the transition to the Ribbon interface, this is a nice intermediate solution. No functionality is changed; the only thing it does is add another tab to the Ribbon that has the classic menus and toolbars you’re used to.

As it is no more than an add-in for the Office suite (so not a hack, not even a program), you will not have to sacrifice performance or security. A full list indicating the clean job the authors did, as provided on the official website (link below):

• Based on standard Microsoft® Office-AddIn technology
• Contains no active code elements (no virus scanner hassle)
• No VSTO or .NET-environment or configuration needed
• No dependencies
• Extremely small file size
• No impact on performance
• 23 languages supported

The classic menu and toolbars are installed in Word 2010/2007, Excel 2010/2007, and PowerPoint 2010/2007 only.

Download UBitMenu

Read Get Classic Menu And Toolbars In Office 2010 & 2007 by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

There’s an easy way to show this function into the default context menu as well. Just download the registry tweak below, double-click on it and accept the User Account Control prompt. Or you can add one yourself that opens a Command Prompt with administrator privileges.

Contents of registry file

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

;Show 'open command window here' on right-click without having to press shift
;Context-menu for folders
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd]
"Extended"=-
;Context-menu for drives
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\cmd]
"Extended"=-
;For context-menu when you right-click in the empty/blank space within a folder
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd]
"Extended"=-

Open as Administrator

If you want to open an elevated Command Prompt window (with administrator privileges), you can use the second link below to add the entry in your context menu.

Download Command Prompt Context Menu Tweak

Download Command Prompt Context Menu (Administrator) Tweak

Credit for the elevated command prompt registry solution goes to BlogsDNA.

Read Windows Vista/7: (Elevated) Command Prompt In Context Menu by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

As seen above, the Device Manager, Event Viewer, Programs and Features and Services have been added to the context menu of the Computer shortcut (both on the desktop and in the Start Menu). All you have to do for this is download the registry tweaks, double-click on registry entry files for whatever entry you would like to add and accept the User Account Control prompt. Tested on XP, Vista and 7.

Similarly, you can make your own shortcuts in this context menu very easily. All you have to do is open up the Registry Editor and create a new key with the following name:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\MyNewContextMenuItem\command

Now paste the full path to the program into the (Default) registry value inside your new key and you have your own item.

Download  Computer Context Menu Entry Tweaks

Read Add Shortcuts In My Computer Context Menu by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

You can link all your accounts permanently, so that next time you use IMO, you’ll only have to log on with one of your existing IM accounts in order to access all of them. Ideal for traveling, and maybe even for permanent use.

It’s not just plain chatting that IMO supports: file transfers, video and voice chat are available through little Flash applets available for all protocols. This however sometimes (for video always) works outside of the chat protocol you currently use to communicate with, so the recipient will have to open up a browser window for the voice/video communication. Nothing really wrong with that, though, as it does allow cross-protocol support, even if the protocol itself doesn’t allow such communication. Additionally, a whiteboard is available on which you and your contact can scratch whatever you want simultaneously.

Imo.im has been around for quite a while now, but with its offered functionality it deserves a lot more attention, even with its apparent alpha status.

Visit imo.im

Read imo.im – Merge Multiple Chat Accounts Online by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Edit: according to user dimar on Tom’s Hardware forums, from R2.41 of the driver, the option to change to a graphic equalizer has returned. Looks like Realtek finally listened to its users.

1. Download the AC’97 Audio Codecs from the Realtek website for Windows 7 (choose the ZIP-file)
2. Extract ONLY rtlcpl.exe from the directory for your system (“Vista” for 32-bit Vista/7, “Vista64″ for 64-bit Vista/7)
   I don’t think it will matter which one you pick actually, both are 32-bit programs, both work, but they’re not the same files

If you want to save the settings for later installations, the Equalizer presets are saved in the registry under the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Avance\AC97 Audio\EQ

I want to remind you that this is not officially supported by Realtek, who state that they dropped multi-band equalizer support since Vista altogether. Hence, even though it seems to work perfectly fine for some, you might expect some unforeseen problems.

Download Realtek AC’97 Audio Codecs

Tom’s Hardware forum topic

Read Get The Realtek Equalizer Back In Windows 7/Vista by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

This little gimmick allows one to do exactly what online backup services like Mozy or Dropbox do: synchronize a local folder with a server in order to automatically backup whatever you add or update. Only this time, you’ll get to manage the backup server yourself, including the maximum storage size. All you need to do is have your ‘server’ computer online, running Opera with the Document Courier application. Below you can see that all you have to configure is the backup folder, the folder size and a password. Document Courier already enables you to upload documents to the backup folder via the Opera Unite web interface.

Then use Opera with Unite on your other computers with the Document Sync application and set it to synchronize a local folder with the server, optionally automatically at a 5 minute interval.

And there you have it, a backup server you manage yourself in a couple of steps. And while you’re at it, it’s a great opportunity to explore Opera’s browsing, RSS, mail, widget, bookmark&notes sync features if you’re not already familiar with them.

Tip: in order to backup multiple folders on your local PC, try using symbolic links as we discussed earlier for Dropbox users.

Download latest Opera Unite builds

Download Opera Document Courier application (for server)

Download Opera Document Sync application (for client)

Read An Online Backup System To Manage Yourself? Use Opera by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Move everything into the Dropbox folder? Nay!

Now there’s a little problem with Dropbox: it creates a folder (My Dropbox) and only synchronizes whatever is in that one folder. This means that you would have to move all the documents, photos, application data, and maybe even programs into that single folder. Apart from having problems with the programs having their location changed (or needing to reinstall them), you’ve probably already got yourself a nicely organized folder structure of your own.

No need to mingle with that then, use symbolic links to point Dropbox to the folders! Symbolic links are, simply put, transparent shortcuts to a file or folder somewhere else (locally or via a (SMB) network path). This means that the files can be accessed from such a symbolic link just as if they were physically there. The only difference is that if you remove the symbolic link, the actual (source) file or folder will not be removed.

This does have a downside, though, as Dropbox will not monitor for file changes in the symlink folders and will update them only at startup.

How to make it work

First of all, you have to make sure that your Dropbox folder is not inside a folder you want to backup (a folder of which you want to create a symbolic link in the Dropbox folder). That would – for Dropbox – create an infinite loop My Dropbox\Folder containing ‘My Dropbox’\My Dropbox\Folder containing ‘My Dropbox’\ etc. You can change your Dropbox folder path in the Preferences dialog.

Windows Vista and 7 have a nice command-line utility mklink to do the magic. In order to use this, open up an elevated Command Prompt window by right-clicking on the Start Menu entry and choosing Run as administrator.

For creating a symbolic link to a folder, type:

mklink /d

Now drag your My Dropbox folder from an Explorer window into the Command Prompt window and type the desired pathname directly behind it (don’t forget the backslash ‘\’ in between and make sure you put the whole path in between double quotes if it contains spaces. Now it should look like this:

mklink /d "C:\Path\To\My Dropbox Folder\NameForMyNewSymbolicLinkToADirectory"

Now drag the folder you want to link to into the Command Prompt window from an Explorer window. This will add the target folder’s name to the command line. Now press Enter.

Want a little more help? Try the little program called Link Shell Extension (download below), which adds some context menu items for files and folders to copy a file/folder and paste it somewhere else as a symbolic link.

OSX and Linux

These two operating systems have the same sort of command-line tools available:

ln -s /the/full/path/to/target/folder ~/Dropbox/NameForMyNewSymbolicLinkToAFolder

A Caveat

Like most solutions of pure elegance, there’s always a downside. As said before (to spare you from a disappointment after reading this all, Dropbox seems not to be able to directly pick up on changes made in a folder it only has a symbolic link to. How this exactly happens is a question I herewith pose to you. In most cases, it will suffice that Dropbox checks for changes every time it starts, but for folders that require immediate backup, such as you Documents folder, you can also turn all this around: put the real files in the My Dropbox folder, then create a symbolic link to the folder, now in My Dropbox, in the original location.

Download Link Shell Extension

Read Backup Any Folder to Dropbox, Without Moving It by Willem Nuijen on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter