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DiffView Shows Changes In Registry & Any Folder During Defined Time

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Just like your car requires several components to be actively working for seamless operation, similarly the Windows operating system in your PC needs to have various services and processes running in the background to keep it running steadily. Some of these processes and services also continuously alter files and registry items here and there. That means the Windows you're using right now might not have the same number or location of files or registry items after installation or uninstallation of a certain program. If you’re wondering what has changed during the past few minutes on your PC after a change such as, let’s say, removing a program in order to diagnose some issue, give DiffView a shot. It lets you know about the recent activities in your computer, and any changes made to files and/or registry items. Read More

Use The Touchpad For Quick Handwriting Input Anywhere In Windows

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Touchpad-Handwriting Windows
Don’t you sometimes get this itch to write on your notebook computer by hand instead of typing? Call me old-hat, but a keyboard can sometimes just feel so, well, “synthetic," for lack of a better word. Well, I was in for a treat today. After a quick surf through the web, I found the charming little TouchPad Handwriting app that lets you convert your laptop’s touchpad into a handwriting recognition device. Read More

Photos+ Is A Unified Local, Facebook & Google+ Image Gallery And Editor For Windows 8

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Photos+ is an image aggregator for Windows 8 and RT that lets you bring together your pictures from your social media accounts and local drive, allowing you to view or manage them under one roof. Although the social media support is fairly limited at this time – the app only supports Facebook and Google+ as of now – it does boast an elegant interface which will make photo management a breeze  and leave you impressed with its awesome photo editing and photo management features. The app makes use of the integrated photo editor by Aviary to provide you with a powerful set of editing tools for effectively fine-tuning your favorite images before uploading them to social media. Read More

Hipsterize Photos With Retro Effects, Lighting & Frames Using XnRetro

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Photography imperfections were a common occurrence back in the old days when camera equipment was far from being advanced by today’s standards. Light bleeding, inconsistent flash, blurs etc. were all fairly common. While such quirks seemed quite annoying at that time, vintage photography with precisely those effects has become quite popular among smartphone users these days – Instagram being the first app that comes to the mind in this genre. People love to upload and share such photos on social media sites. If you want to turn your favorite images into vintage masterpieces, try XnRetro. This powerful desktop app gives your snaps a quick retro makeover. The application sports a host of vignette effects and even allows you to put virtual frames around your images. Read More

Postimage Offers Screen Capture With Quick Sharing & Annotation Tools

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Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 ship with a Snipping Tool out of the box to facilitate users in taking screenshots of any on-screen activity. This tool allows you to capture and store images in full screen, windowed, rectangular and free-form modes. Although the native solution suffices for the job, if you’re looking for an alternative tool with more flexibility and options like screenshot annotation, and social media integration, try Postimage. This lightweight tool quietly sits in the system tray and can be brought into action using its context menu or predefined hotkeys. Read More

Win Toolbox Is A Unified Dashboard For Several Handy, Frequently Used Utilities

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Win Toolbox is a multi-purpose Windows utility that acts as a Swiss Army Knife for launching and controlling system utilities as well as user-installed applications from a single place. It contains an umpteen number of features that might leave you fairly impressed. Although the program looks very simple from the UI, it provides useful tools like a screen capturer, color picker, fonts explorer, system shutdown timer and more. It’s fairly feature-rich with a truckload of settings and options, so lets take a closer look at the most salient ones after the jump. Read More

CryptoPAD Offers A File Encryptor, Text Editor & Cipher In One Package

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A substantial number of people use Notepad or other similar text editors for quickly taking notes in Windows. It all sounds okay to rely on these as far as it’s about saving notes that are not sensitive in nature, but when it comes to storing something a little more confidential and private, plain text editors don’t quite cut it for the job. CryptoPAD is a Windows application that allows you to take and save notes protected with advanced encryption algorithms. Along with a feature-rich text editor, it houses a file encryption tool, a checksum calculator, and a unique Vingenere Cipher, all in a single package. Read More

Quickly Enable ‘Always On Top’ Behaviour For Any App Or Window

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Although some Windows apps have the built-in option to enable ‘always on top’ behavior, you can’t get this option for every window unless it’s designed that way. As soon as you click away to the desktop or another window, the current one loses focus and moves to the background. Window On Top is a minuscule Windows application that lets users set any window to stay on top of others at all times. The application doesn’t have a GUI and quietly resides on the system tray without intervening with your workflow. It can prove to be useful if you want to keep a certain folder or application - such as a media player, document editor, photo viewer, etc. - constantly in view as you complete other tasks throughout the OS. Read on for further details. Read More

Easily Join Multiple MP3 Files Together & Save With Custom ID3 Tags

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There’s no shortage of MP3 joiners on the internet, and chances are you will easily find one as web, desktop or mobile app. We've also covered plenty of file joiners, audio editors and audio suites that let you stitch your media files in a convenient and user-friendly way, but if you’re looking for a tool dedicated for joining MP3 files only, Meda MP3 Joiner is worth a shot. Even though it looks quite simple on the surface, the program is fairly powerful at what it does, and does it really well. It basically lets you turn a number of MP3 files in to one large track for continuous playback, which can also prove to be handy should you require joining various audio sequences during post production. What’s more, the built-in tag editor lets you enter custom ID3 tags information before saving the output. Details to follow after the break. Read More

[Giveaway] Kestrel GX: Elegant, Feature-Rich Photo Manager & Editor For Windows

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Back in 2010, we covered a feature-rich photo manager for Windows called Kestrel GX. It was unarguably one the most elegant image management applications that we had come across, not only because of its sophisticated design but also because of its slew of handy features. Unfortunately, since last year, the application is no longer available for free and has been replaced by a paid variant that carries hefty price tags of $59 and $89 for home and commercial licenses respectively. Here's where you being a regular reader at AddictiveTips pays off. Details past the break. Read More

Easily Identify Fake Facebook Profiles & Photos With FB Checker

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Word around the web is that Facebook has over 85 million fake profiles, and counting. Some of them can be quite benign, like the infamous “girlfriends for hire” society. Others can be of a decidedly sinister motivation. Either way, you sometimes really need to know how much of a person there is in their profile. You could, of course, take a day off to put hundreds of photos through Google Images to ponderously dig out the fake ones. Or, you could use FB Checker in a quick smoke break instead. Read More

Auto-Hide Taskbar On Surface & Other Windows 8 Tablets Based On Screen Orientation

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Microsoft seems pretty confident regarding Windows 8, despite the rather mixed reception the OS has received so far. With a lot of Windows 8 tablets like Surface Pro and many third-party ones out there already, the tablet-optimized interface of the OS has started to see wider adoption on devices it was built for. Those who have used Surface Pro would be aware that the tablet can be used both in portrait and landscape modes, with the built-in sensor changing the screen orientation accordingly. If you’re one of those users who keep the Taskbar to the left side of the screen for thumb access – which basically makes navigation a tad bit easier – you must have noticed that when you switch the tablet to portrait orientation for a task like browsing the web or reading eBooks, the Taskbar can nag your experience and waste precious screen real estate. Although Windows 8 allows auto hiding the Taskbar, this option hides it in landscape mode as well. If you want to auto-hide the Taskbar in portrait mode only, we've got an awesome app for you called Surface Taskbar Helper. Read More

Create Customizable System Tray Shortcuts For Any Windows App With Tray Tools

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Your possessions often end up defining you just as much as you define them, be it your couch, your car, your cat, or even your computer. Especially your computer, since it is essentially a digital extension of you. Most of us prefer to keep our possessions clean and tidy, yet miss out on applying the principal to the contents of our computer. Simply keeping your digital content neat and clean can go a long way in enhancing your productivity. Tray Tools 2000 aims to help you with that by letting you add shortcuts for your programs as small icons in the Taskbar's system tray area, thus reducing desktop clutter. Read More

DirRplacer Replaces Entire Backup Folders With Their Updated Copies

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Back in March, I reviewed an incredibly useful Windows application called FileRplacer – a portable tool designed to replace old files with their fresh copies whenever manually triggered by the user. To elaborate, the application can prove to be very handy should you need to keep an up-to-date backup of any files that you frequently need to edit (such as TXT, RAR, DOCX and other such items) at a separate location. The only caveat I faced with FileRplacer, however, was that it worked with files only and wasn't compatible with folders, which would've cut the time it takes to individually select multiple files. The folks behind FileRplacer are offering another tool called DirRplacer that takes care of this shortcoming. Read More

View A Real-Time Log Of TCP Connections On Windows With TcpLogView

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Nirsoft is known for creating single-purpose Windows utilities that boast minimalism and simplicity as their defining characteristics. Nir Sofer, the founder of the company, is seemingly smitten by simple user interface, which we think is a great strategy as it makes the programs very light on system resources and at the same time fairly easy to use by anyone. The developer has released many network-related tools in the past including NetBScanner, WirelessKeyView and NetworkInterfacesView, all of which help users extract key information from various network-related sections of Windows. TcpLogView is yet another industrious effort by the developer. It’s a Windows program that monitors all TCP connections on your computer. The application monitors everything in real-time and displays a new log entry the moment a new connection is opened or closed. This feature makes it stand out from other similar tools that usually display just a history log of the connections. Read More

Batch Compress PDF Files, Set Custom DPI & Remove Select Elements

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Saving document files in PDF does make sense, because it is generally more secure against unintended modifications compared to other formats such as TXT, RTF, DOCX and more. Therefore, many of us rely on PDF these days when it comes to sharing files that contain sensitive information. One drawback of this is that PDF files are often larger in size compared to many other document formats. If you require to send a document through a channel that has certain file size limitations, you probably want to keep your files as compact as possible. Previously, we've covered some really useful PDF compression tools such as PDF Compressor, PocoDoc or Nice PDF Compressor. If you've already tried those and are looking for something more effective at compression, ORPALIS PDF Reducer Free is yet another option with a decent output quality and batch processing mode. Read More

Comparing Power Saver, Balanced & High Performance Plans In Windows

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Windows comes with three built-in power modes: Power Saver, Balanced, and High Performance. 'Balanced' is selected by default, and most people never even bother to change it (they don’t even have to, either). Those who do like getting the best out of their system are usually not sure about the exact difference between the three modes. In this post, we’ll clarify the differences between these three power modes so that you actually know what effect they have on your system, and what happens when you switch between them. Read More

Create App Mockups Or Get A Resizable Dummy Window With FrameDummy

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FrameDummy is a Windows application that lets you overlay a dummy desktop window frame over different objects such as photos, wallpapers, webpage screenshots, application UI etc. If you are wondering why anyone might want to do this, it can be useful in a lot of scenarios where you need to present something in a window frame. Its possible applications include software development where programmers often require to showcase early prototype of projects to their clients, or simply showcasing a part of a window in a presentation or blog post, while still giving it a full window look. You can also create fake window frames around your photos and upload the images on social media network such as Facebook or Twitter etc. just for fun. Not only is the application fairly easy to use, but it also presents everything in a simple fashion. Details to follow. Read More

Moo0 System Monitor: Light, Customizable Stats Panel For PC Resources

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System monitoring tools come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some offer a feature-rich design and show very in-depth information regarding your PC, while others boast an interface that’s fairly easy to work with and understand. If you have been looking for one that features both of these traits, try Moo0 System Monitor for Windows. It’s an advanced system monitoring tool that gives detailed information regarding your computer's CPU, RAM, Wi-Fi, HDD and Network, while offering a wide-array of customization options. It can display real-time information regarding 36 different components that are driving your PC. The good news is that it’s very lightweight and sits on your desktop similar to desktop gadgets in Windows Vista and 7. Read More

How To Fix Adobe Photoshop CS6 Background Flickering In Windows 8

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Microsoft took a leap of faith with Windows 8, and for the first couple of weeks after its release, it seemed the dramatic change of direction wouldn't pay off the way the Redmond giant hoped it would. The new OS and its Modern UI seem to be catching on, but at a snail's pace. Apart from the fact that quite a majority of users find themselves out of their confort zone when using the new interface, Windows 8 currently has quite a few compatibility issues as well; some with drivers and others with apps. One of the latter happens to be with the (currently) latest version of Adobe Photoshop, namely CS6. Read More