Here is the story. A few weeks ago, my brother asked me to re-partition his new laptop’s hard disk. It is a Dell Studio laptop. At the beginning, I tried to use the popular EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition since it received a lot of positive reviews, but unfortunately the laptop is running on the 64 bit version Windows 7 Home Premium and EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition works only on 32 bit Windows. Then, I tried GParted Live USB, a Linux based partition editor. Again, it was not a success because GParted gives me error whenever I tried to re-partition the hard disk. I don’t exactly know what caused the problem but I can see there is a Dell Backup Utility partition and maybe it had caused the error.

After searching for the alternative, I found Partition Wizard Home Edition. Partition Wizard Home Edition is a free partition manager software for Windows. It is free for personal/home use and the best thing is, it supports the 64 bit version of Windows. Basically, Partition Wizard will let you perform partitioning actions such as create, format, convert, explore, resize, move and copy a partition, like any other partition managers. Partition Wizard is very simple and easy to use.

Because it is free, it is not as powerful as other paid partition manager such as Partition Magic. For example, Partition Wizard only supports FAT, FAT32 and NTFS partitions. This means you cannot use Partition Wizard to create, resize or move Linux EXT2 or EXT3 partitions. As you can see from the image below, the partition (1) is actually a EXT2 partition, and it is shown as other in Partition Wizard.

You probably using post-it notes attached to your monitor or desk to make reminders or short notes. If your post-it notes seem very disorganized and messed up your desk, maybe it’s time for you to use a virtual one.

PNotes is a small and light-weight sticky virtual notes program for Windows. It is skinnable and very flexible. Each individual notes can have their own settings, reminders, skins, fonts, colors, etc.. Some features of PNotes:

This tips is only for Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit) and Vista (32 bit only, using this trick on Windows Vista 64 bit will cause Windows to crash). Well, this god mode is not going to make your Windows installation immune to virus or something like that, but instead it provides you with shortcuts to useful system settings.

Enabling GodMode on Windows 7 / Vista

1. Right click on any blank area on your desktop and choose ‘New’ > ‘Folder’.

2. Rename the folder to:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

3. Magically the folder transformed into GodMode!

4. You can actually change the ‘GodMode’ text to something else, for example, if you want to name it ‘System Settings’ just name the new folder to this:

System Settings.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

[via Web Talk]

Quick tip for Windows Vista and 7 only. You can make your Windows installation a little bit different from others by putting a custom text (your name for example) next to the clock on your taskbar.

1. To put a custom text next to the clock on your taskbar, go to Start Menu > ‘Control Panel’ > ‘Region and Language’ options. Click ‘Additional settings…’ (1) and then click the ‘Time’ (2) tab.

2. Change the AM and PM field (3) to the text that you wish to be displayed next to the clock on your taskbar (maximum of 12 characters). Press ‘OK’ (4) to save the options.

3. Make sure ‘Short’ and ‘Long’ time format field have ‘tt’ at the end of it (5) (‘h:mm tt’ for ‘Short time’ and ‘h:mm:ss tt’ for ‘Long time’ format).

4.

Have you been wondering how to choose the web browser that you want to use to open links? Normally, you can open links from non-web browser application using your system’s default web browser, and Windows only let you set 1 default web browser. Browser Chooser is a program that allows you to choose what web browser to open a link that you’ve clicked. However, Browser Chooser can only be lunched if the links that you’ve clicked are not from a web browser.

Browser Chooser will present you with the list of web browsers installed on your system when you click a link from a non-web browser program such as Yahoo Messenger or mIRC. It also works when you are opening a web page shortcut that was created by software installers on your start menu. Browser Chooser is able to detect 6 web browsers installed on your system; Firefox, Flock, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, if they are installed in their default directories.

After you’ve installed Browser Chooser, you must first set Browser Chooser as the ‘default’ web browser. Click the small ‘Options’ (1) button and go to ‘Miscellaneous’ tab. Then click ‘Activate Browser Chooser (Make default browser)’ (2). You can also enable the ‘Show URL’ (3) option to make Browser Chooser display the URL that you tried to open. In the Options dialog, you can choose what web browser that will be displayed by Browser Chooser. Browser Chooser can display up to 5 web browser.

Quick tip (Windows only). I’m sure most of us sometimes are unable to cancel a printing job and the print job is stuck on your printer print job list. This is sure a frustrating problem especially if you need to print something urgently. The method below will delete the entire print job queue and cancel all print jobs by stopping the print spooler service and delete its print job files. It should work on most versions of Windows.

1. Run Notepad (Start Menu > Run, type notepad and press ‘Enter’).

2. Copy the command below to Notepad (click the view source icon):

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler
pause

3. Save it as a .bat file. Make sure you select ‘All files (*.*)’ (1). Give it a meaningful name, for example, ‘cancelprint.bat’ (2) (without the quotes ‘’) and save it to a location where you can easily find the file, maybe on your desktop. The .bat extension is important! For example, if you want to name it as ‘stopprint’, make sure you put ‘stopprint.bat’. Press ‘Save’ (3) to save it.

4.

If you are looking for a powerful Task Manager alternative/replacement, or simply a tool to manage the processes and services that running on your system, then Process Hacker might be the right system utility application for you. I’ve been using Process Hacker since version 1.3.x, so far Process Hacker is indeed an ultimate task manager and I can see the developers have put great efforts to improve and make Process Hacker a powerful system tool.

Process Hacker functionality and interface quite similar to Process Explorer’s. However, Process Hacker offers you 2 additional functionalities that Process Explorer don’t have; the ability to manage services and network connections information.

On ‘Processes’ tab, you can do the basic Task Manager actions such as terminating process, changing process priority, etc.. You can also easily search the process file name on Google, upload a process file to VirusTotal, and if you know what you’re doing, Process Hacker offers you advanced features such as terminating process using different methods, inject DLL into a process, inspect process threads, protect a process, write directly to process memory and many more. The processes are highlighted according Own, System, Service, Debugged, Elevated, Job, .NET, POSIX, Packed/Dangerous, Suspended Threads, GUI Threads, Relocated DLLs, Protected Handles and Inherit Handles.

If you are using Windows, you probably ever encounter error message saying that a file is being used by other person or program when you are trying to delete, move or rename a file, or ejecting a USB drive. For example, if Windows Explorer is viewing the thumbnail of a video, then the video file is likely being locked by Explorer.exe. Before this, I use Unlocker to force the delete and move operation of these locked files, or when trying to eject a USB drive with opened files. Unfortunately, I can’t get Unlocker to work on Windows 7, even on the 32 bit version of Windows 7.

LockHunter is a similar tool to Unlocker. LockHunter allows you to release a file or directory that being opened by other application. LockHunter integrates itself to the right-click menu just like Unlocker. LockHunter also allows you to kill or even delete the process that is opening the file that you want to delete.

Keeping software installed on your Windows system up-to-date with the latest version is important. One of the main reasons to keep software updated with the latest version is because the latest version usually come with bug and security fixes. Security fix is very important because unfixed security flaws in the software installed on your system may lead your system to be compromised by hackers. Keeping software with latest version will also allow you to use new features that came with the latest version of the software. Checking each software that installed on your system manually for latest the version is a tiresome thing to do.

While Linux operating system have their own package manager that connects to software repository that allows users to keep the installed software on their system up-to-date with the latest version easily, Windows users don’t have this. Update Notifier is a small utility that checks if there are updates available for the software installed on your system and display the updates to you in a simple way. If update is available, you can click the download button and you will be directed to the download page for the software. Then, you can download the latest version of the software using your web browser.

Update Notifier is easy to use and straight forward. Update Notifier can be installed as portable application.

CHKDSK is a tool on Windows operating system that displays the file system integrity status of a hard disk and CHKDSK can fix logical file system errors. CHKDSK can fix file system errors without the need to restart your system if it can get an exclusive lock on the drive. If CHKDSK cannot lock a drive (usually the C: drive), the check will resume the next time the computer starts. By default, when CHKDSK starts automatically when your system starts, there is a 10 seconds countdown that allows you to press any key to cancel the CHKDSK process during the 10 seconds period. The 10 seconds countdown value can be easily changed.

WARNING! This method involves editing the registry. Make sure you backed up your registry and system before proceeding with caution.

1. Open Registry Editor. Go to Start > Run and type regedit.

2. In Registry Editor, navigates to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager (1).

3. If AutoChkTimeOut value does not exists, you need to create it. To create AutoChkTimeOut value, right click in an empty area on the right panel of Registry Editor, choose New > DWORD value (2).