Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in Madagascar for the last few years, you undoubtedly already know about the All-Star open-source applications for Windows. I’m talking about applications such as Firefox , Thunderbird , GIMP , OpenOffice , and VLC . However, there are hundreds of lesser-known but highly-useful open-source applications available for Windows. A few of my favorites are below. These applications range from moderately popular to downright obscure, but all of them are open-source and FREE. All of them are worth the install time if you have never tried them. As a side bonus, many of them are cross-platform as well. Here they are, in random order: 1. ZScreen ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program that quietly resides in your system tray until needed. It can take screenshots of a selected region, the active window, or the entire screen. It can even send screen captures via FTP and copy the URL to your clipboard, all with just a single keystroke. Oh yeah, ...

1. Eliminate programs that run at start-up 2. Speed up shutdown times 3. Disable services that run at start-up Eliminate programs that run at start-up Stopping programs from running at start-up is especially daunting because there is no single place you can go to halt them all. Some run because they're in the Startup folder, others because they're part of logon scripts, others because of Registry settings, and so on. But with a little bit of perseverance, you should be able to keep them from running. * Start by cleaning out your Startup folder. Find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, where username is your Windows logon name. Delete the shortcuts of any programs you don't want to run on start-up. As with any shortcuts, when you delete them, you're deleting only the shortcut, not the program itself. (You can also clear out the start-up items by going to Start > Programs > Startup, then right-clicking items you want to remove.)...