Exploring your PC System with Ease
Written on by Kay
Kay here with a look on how to get organized for the year and
explore your system with ease.
It’s engrained in us: the first thing one does when an app
freezes dead in its tracks is fire up the Windows Task Manager,
hitting End Task, misbehaving program no more. And if you want
to get an obscure idea of memory consumption for any given
process or its CPU usage, the Process tab can provide a cryptic
overview of this. Windows Task Manager does what it’s intended
to do and nothing more, a very vanilla and boring utility that
comes stock with Windows.
If you’re a Windows power user you’ll certainly crave more than
what the basic Task Manager features. Enter SystemExplorer, a
Task Manager utility on a caffeine spree. Windows’ stock Task
Manager does its intended job—Ctrl+Shift+ESC to pull it up—but
it doesn’t really give you much in the way of information
pertaining to your running applications, processes, and the
resources they consume. SystemExplorer goes a step farther in
extending Task Manager by offering more in-depth detail.
For instance, pinpointing the file location for any given
application or process is easy with SystemExplorer, and if this
weren’t enough, it’ll even throw in its publisher and a short
description of its purpose. If you’re tired of the sparseness
of Task Manager, give SystemExplorer a whirl.
Beyond Hyperlinks
It’s all too easy to infect your PC with a Trojan horse or a
slimy piece of spyware when downloading files from the web.
And I can’t count the number of times when I accidentally
selected a link pointing to a PDF file and having to wait for
the snail-paced PDF reader to load up, wasting my time and
wearing my patience threadbare. Firefox already has an
extension that allows you to get a thumbnail preview of a web
page without even having to tap on its link, but wouldn’t it be
fantastic if you could also do this with file downloads?
Link Alert, one of the many wonderful Firefox extensions, allows
you to mouse over any link that claims to point to a file
download. Link Alert supports 12 of the most popular file
extensions—exe, zip, doc, PDF, et al—allowing you to get a
preview of the file without even having to pull it to your hard
drive first. Mousing over a link that leads to a typical
webpage won’t produce anything, but hovering your mouse over a
link that points to a file that Link Alert recognizes will
materialize an icon, signifying what lurks on the other side of
that hyperlink; for example, a musical note will chime for
sound files, a film icon for videos, a machine cog for
programs, etc. Keep your PC clear from unwanted downloads with
Firefox’s Link Alert extension.
A Fresh Desktop Calendar
With the dizzying selection of desktop calendars to choose from,
organizing your daily life exactly the way you want can become
a cumbersome endeavor. A vast array of choices doesn’t
necessarily make for a happier user. If you need a desktop
calendar that offers all the essentials—alarm alerts, priority
scheduling, searching, etc.—then Rainlendar Lite might be just
what you’ve been searching for.
Not only does Rainlender Lite provide you everything a veritable
calendar app should, but it’s also amazingly customizable.
Everyone loves to customize their programs’ appearance;
Rainlendar Lite allows you to skin its GUI with hundreds of
skins to choose from. It even goes so far as to allow you to
skin the little tool tips that pop up with useful information!
Customizing your desktop calendar has not been this much fun or
easy until now.
