Process Hacker (and other cool utilities)

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fooziex
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Joined: 2011 Jul 07, 19:37

Process Hacker (and other cool utilities)

Post by fooziex »

I did a search and couldn't find a mention of this program. I've seen Nikos recommend SysInternals Process Explorer before on his blog, and the open source clone Process Hacker is an improvement in pretty much every direction as far as I can tell. It's really impressive, especially with the plugins it comes with. I'd try to iterate over the features it has that Process Explorer lacks but I haven't used Process Explorer for at least a year now.

One app that Process Hacker has a plugin to integrate with is Sandboxie, which is like an extended UAC, but really goes beyond that. It allows you to isolate any program you want to run but don't entirely trust.

ResophNotes is a nice, simple Windows note list app that will sync with SimpleNote. I ended up buying CintaNotes but ResophNotes is pretty close and is free.

Boom is a really stripped down music player by the author of the awesome foobar2000. I tend to use foobar2000 for complicated playlists (podcasts and audiobooks especially) and use Boom for playing music. I kind of shudder when I see people using VLC or Windows Media Player to listen to music and I think Boom fills the niche below foobar2000 (or iTunes, or MediaMonkey) quite well.

MacType is a pretty incredible service/utility. That is, incredible in how it works: it hooks into any program running and replaces the text-drawing routines with one of your choice, including using FreeType for a more Linux/Mac looking display. It offers a lot of settings though, so it's not just limited to just the soft Mac font look.

Grafx2 is a drawing application designed specifically for drawing pixel art. I haven't used it much but I thought it was a really neat idea and it appears to be regularly updated.

For burning CDs, I use ImgBurn while if I need a quick and easy disc authoring tool I use InfraRecorder. I haven't had to resort to a commercial disk burning program for years now.

Let me know what you think of these or if they filled anyone's need. Anyone else have any programs they want to recommend? I kind of have a compulsion to find cool new programs, so hopefully I haven't just bored / spammed everyone.

Edit to add more:

Calibre
I have a Sony e-ink electronic book reader and Calibre is indispensable for managing and maintaining an e-book library.
Classic Shell
I use Classic Shell even on Windows 7 not only because I prefer the older style of Start Menu, but because it allows you to customize the Start Menu to a much greater extent than Windows normally allows.
Greenshot
I never thought I would use a program to take screenshots, but Greenshot does pretty much everything right: captures regions down to sub-window elements, region re-capture, and automatic upload to many sites.
HexChat
Finally a free, libre, readily available, X-Chat type of IRC client for Windows. I guess a lot of people probably still like to use mIRC, but if you like to try to use open source tools I don't think you could do much better than this for IRC on Windows.
HTTrack
Website spider/copier. Nice to have in your toolkit for when the need arises and this one has been developed for a long while now and is very reliable.
SumatraPDF
I've totally replaced Adobe Reader with SumatraPDF and haven't looked back. SumatraPDF even offers its own Windows search filter for PDFs. You can find x64 builds of SumatraPDF at xhmikosr's build host.
UltraDefrag
An open source disk defrag utility that has more options than the one built into Windows. I haven't used it extensively, though.



I'm neglecting things like 7-Zip, Irfanview, Filezilla, Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, Notepad++, Synergy and VirtualDub because I figure everyone knows about them.
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