Anusha's Blog

Link -> Five free Windows utilities you should download by Rick Broida
In the article linked above, Rick Broida mentioned 5 free software he found useful. Here is my take on them.

All these 5 softwares are free.

1. Advanced Uninstaller  (Portable)
•  Awesome uninstaller. It is portable, so no need to install it. I currently use Revo Uninstaller, which I always thought is a little slow but effective. This unistaller is fast; however, I don't think it is as effective as Revo. I tried uninstalling some of the software on my computer. After uninstall, it cleaned up some leftover files, but it didn't mention the deletion of any registry files. On the other hand, Revo asks us to clear up reg files as well. This software is worth a try, as one might end up liking it immensly.
2. Dual Display Mouse Manager
•  I didn't try this out as I don't have external display.
3. Dexpot
•  I don't know how I lived all these years without this software. Can have up to 20 virtual desktops, which is amazing. One might not need so many, but they are there. You can choose the hot keys to switch between desktops. I have been using this software for the past 4 hours and there is not much change in the computer performance, which is really good. You can customize each desktop. The notification icons and quick links on the taskbar are the same for every desktop. There a lot of simple, yet complex, settings for users to customize. I have my music playing on the one desktop and I'm coding on the other. I like it that multiple windows are not open at one desktop. It feels like switching between computers, except you have all your settings here. I haven't yet tried how this would work it connected to an external display. As of now, this is a must have software.
4. Universal Viewer
• Wonderful software. You can't create a file, but can open, edit and save a document. Once you open a document you can edit it; but edit options are minimal. Audio, Video and Image files are on a different scale; it works as a media player/image viewer for these files, so there isn't much to edit.
• There is a huge list of files they claim the software can open. here is a list of files I tried opening and if they worked or not.
• Audio
• mp3 - yes
• Video - don't think subtitles work
• wmv - yes
• flv - played audio, but blank video
• mp4 - yes
• m4v - no
• avi - yes
• mkv - no
• Images
• jpg - yes
• gif - yes
• png - yes
• MS Office and other text files
• txt - yes
• rtf - yes
• doc - yes
• xls - yes and editable too
• Other
• pdf -yes
• xml - yes
• java - yes
5. Wizmouse
• According to my understanding, this software is not really for laptops unless you have an external mouse with scroll.

Of all these, I'm definitely keeping Dexpot. Advanced Unintaller and Universal Viewer are something to think about. Might have some user for Dual Display Mouse Manager and Wizmouse, but as of now I don't need them.