Cool Tools

I've been tweeking my laptop a lot lately, given that it's the best laptop ever created by mankind (still, three years after I bought it). When I started MIT I decided to buy a Lenovo X60 tablet and installed OneNote on it. This combination is extremely powerful, especially if you want to hand-write notes and draw graphs. Among its other cool features, OneNote will convert all hand-written text such that it's searchable; it does the same with speech, btw.

I added more RAM and increased the HD capacity which meant that I had to move all my content to the new 320G drive. This was absolutely painless with Acronis' True Image software. With the trial download, I simply backed-up my entire HD an external HD, swapped HD's, and restored to the new drive. Very simple.

Since I run Vista (because of the tablet functionality) I've been modding my environment to be more *nix like. I found WinRoll which compresses most terminals, eg



Taskbar Shuffle is another cool little tool. It allows you to drag-and-drop taskbar icons and minimized windows:



Here’s a full feature list:

* Reorder your taskbar buttons by dragging and dropping them
* Reorder your tray icons in the same way
* Reorder tasks in a grouped button's popup menu in the same way
* Middle-click to close programs on your taskbar
* Works with UltraMon taskbars
* Tweak taskbar button grouping

If you run more than a few applications at a time, you'll definitely find Taskbar Shuffle useful.

I have a few other suggestions for cool tools but I'll leave that for the next post (hint: checkout Rainmeter).