Number 287 - April 2007

Fun with Freeware
byCary Quinn (cary.quinn@gmail.com), Pikes Peak Computer Application Society, (http://ppcompas.apcug.org)
Here are a couple of utilities I have been using lately to correct a couple of bumps in the road to a positive Windows experience. OverDisk vO.11 beta (freeware)    http://users.forthnet.gr/pat/efotinis/programs/overdisk.html    Elias Fotinis, a programmer from Greece, is one of those programmers you often find on the net who in their spare time writes little apps and utilities to solve some personal issue they might have getting the operating system, or some other program, to work the way they want it to.    One of the programs he has written is a disk space monitor called Overdisk. It basically scans a drive or folders of your choice and tells you how much space is being taken up by the files therein. One special difference with Overdisk though, is the way it graphs that data to your screen.    Instead of representing the files as a pie chart, or bar graph, Overdisk shows a breakdown of folders and files as a senes of concentric rings, as if you were looking down onto the disk itself and seeing the files laid out below. But it's even better than that.    When you mouse-over a particular section of the chart, a tool tip window will appear to give you more information about that particular folder (size, number of subdirectories, and the number of files); and if you click on a specific point of the chart you can drill down to get the same	information for individual files. Clicking on the center of the chart takes you back up the directory path, or you can click on the tree view on the side of the screen to better select a particular folder to view.    I find this utility most useful when trying to identify what parts of a drive need to have a cleanup, or which folders I need to prioritize for backups. Taskbar Shuffle (free, but accepting donations)    http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm    From the home of the nerd cave, comes a pretty nifty little tool that answers a minor nit I have had with the Windows Taskbar for a while--why you cannot drag and drop the programs listed on the taskbar to better arrange your programs to your preference. With Taskbar Shuffle, you can. That seems pretty simple, and it appears to work quite seamlessly within the OS. The utility leaves an icon running on your system tray that you can use to turn it on or off, or close it down completely. I've been using it for a few months, and haven't noticed any conflicts with other windows or programs that have caused me to want to shut it off.    There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. The Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is a member, brings this article to you.
Number 287 - April 2007