You find them anywhere and everywhere, but it’s not always worth the visit. To find a beautiful wallpaper for your computer (even more if it has seevral screens), you need to find reliable sources of nice wallpapers. I wrote down a few of the best ones here:

• The wallpaper section of National Geographic
• Digital Blasphemy (an age-old good source)
• Vlad Studio
• Adolescent Eyes whose work is shown below
• Mandolux, a photographer very attentive to the use of his pictures as dual screen wallpapers
• InterfaceLift has an excellent search engine
• dualscreenwallpaper.com and dualmonitorbackgrounds.com for dual screen personal computers
• MintyWhite
• Social Wallpapering

A simple reminder, if you have multiple screens, your PC will appreciate your using DisplayFusion, the perfect software to handle corectly those large picture files. Like I do it with this photo of a rbown snake eagle taken in Kenya (backlit by the setting sun).

Big thumbnails

Like many people I love the Windows 7 superbar with its ability to keep applications in a single location. But some people want to increase the size of the associated thumbnails. Alt+Tab Tuner is the right tool for this. You can change the size, the borders, everything. But some people will prefer the slightly simpler Taskbar Thumbnail Customizer.

Resource meters

If you are a control freak (at least when it comes to your computer), you like to have a permanent image of the resources used by your activity on Win7. You can always start with the Task Manager and the Resource Monitor (it has been much improved over the past Microsoft offerings). But why not go to a much higher level.

First, I propose a simple solution: GLINT which is offering local and remote monitoring of resources in the simplest of presentations.

Then, if you really want to have a powerful tool, something customizable to a star level, go and fetch RainMeter. It’s a full system to produce a customized desktop including all kinds of meters and some people made it look really great (much better than the usual resource meter, free or not). See an example here:

Mouse gestures

Since I am a great fan of Opera, the free web browser with integrated “mouse gestures” engine (you can control it with mouse moves as much as with clicks in menus), I was interested in getting a good Windows-7-compatible solution to extend this to the full Win7 system.

StrokeIt 0.9.7 Home does exactly this. you install it and you start controlling your PC and many of its applications with just a few mouse strokes or mouse gestures (Click and hold down the right mouse button and then draw the mouse gesture you want performed. Drawing a big C will close the window below the cursor.) Try it! You’ll improve your productivity in ways you did not think possible.

If you feel that you could do the same using your finger on the trackpad of your laptop, just go and grab Scrybe. Really impressive stuff (even if it does not work with mouse yet).

Right-click optimizer

Now that your mouse is operating at full speed you will probably be interested in another performance tool. Let’s look at how you can optimize your right click menu into something really powerful. Right-click Extender 2 will add a few useful options.

Understanding Win7 libraries

Libraries are a very useful feature of Windows 7, but -at first- I thought that it was difficult to grok, probably because it was changing a few of my habits. I appreciated reading a clear explanation in Understanding the Libraries Feature in Windows 7 (from How-to Geek).

Please, feel free to add your own in the comment section.

My preferred Internet browser, Opera, has now reached a new version v10.50. Not only is it still the same nice, friendly and powerful browser, but it packs interesting new features:

• Faster: I did not try the beta versions so I was surprised: It’s fast, very fast. I am not sure if it warrants the “fastest browser on Earth” title that their promoter want to give it, but it is not often that you feel such acceleration from a mere version upgrade.
• Win7-ready, perfectly integrated in Windows 7: Special menus for the integration into the icon bar, a specialized animated icon, optimized window, etc.
• Private, secured navigation windows upon request.
• The widgets can now be dropped onto the desktop.

Since Opera is compatible not only with Windows, but with Apple, Linux and most mobile phones, this is very good news about to spread around.

photo credit: nDevilTV

The Solid State Disk (SSD) is the new tool for computer performance. You no longer can consider yourself a geek if you did not try these Hard Disk Drives without any moving part because they are made of Flash memory. You will earn the semi-god geek achievement only if you trimmed, optimized, finely tuned, measured your SSD.

But, you can trick your way to the near-heavenly award if you go and check the Bit-Tech guide to trimming: “Why You Need TRIM For Your SSD“. This guide will tell you all that is to know about your SSD and Windows 7.

The program will recognize the shortcut, then automatically replace it with the correct text. Type “win“, see “Windows” appear. Type “HTML” and see a full block of selected HTML code appear (I use such shortcuts to create blocks of HTML code on this site, reducing typing time and avoiding typos).

For this, you need to be supported by a small program. I found two interesting ones :

• AutoHotkey (for Windows) allows to write very simple scripts (examples are provided); I use it everyday (it works perfectly on a Windows 7 installation, by the way).
• Some people would prefer to explore Texter and TextExpander, too.
• If you are on Linux, you will prefer to have a look at AutoKey which is freely inspired by AutoHokey (copying is a form of flattery)

New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

It’s worth noticing it if you are using Opera. I had a difficult-to-solve issue recently.

While playing with the idea of starting to use IPv6 on my main PC, I tested the waters by validating this option in the network configuration of my Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera is already fully ready for IPv6 but my router box is not. So, the first effect it had is that Opera decided to enforce the use of IPv6 for all web sites that mentioned IPv6 capacity in their DNS (not many of them, but Google and Free.fr my ISP are already in the list). The immediate effect was that Opera tried to connect to them in IPv6 but failed (because the rest of my home configuration is not 100% IPv6). For 99% of all web sites, there was no difference…

It took me several days (and some Googling – using Safari and Chrome) to understand that this is a known issue and to remove the (still) useless IPv6 Windows configuration.

I’ll have to upgrade my router and try again.

If you want to grab the maximum CPU power for your PC video game (or any other PC application, by the way), there is a free utility that will ensure that the PC CPU does not spend to much time on anything else: Game Booster. It may be bad for a correctly balanced performance, but some games may appreciate the help.

Nota: This is similar to AMD Fusion Tool, but simpler.

photo credit: Ivan Zuber

If you have Windows installed on your PC, you may have noticed one surprising thing: File copying is amazingly slower than what it was in previous editions of Windows or on other kinds of computers. The exact reason is a bit unclear (some say that it is linked to some Digital Rights Management features kicking in any time you copy a file, but this is still unproven to my knowledge) but this became a very annoying issue for people who have to copy either lots of files (backing up your daily work is a good example – by the way, did you make your daily backup yet?) or some very big files (moving video files around your computer is the archetypal example).

This situation led to the appearance of a few optimize file copy utilities (a software category that did not exist a few years ago, but a useful one). Let’s look at 4 of them which have the enormous advantage of being completely free:

• SuperCopier: Its strong advantage is that -after installation- it replaces completely the default Windows copy for drag-and-drop (it works nearly without thinking about it)
• FastCopy is fast but forgets mostly about being beautiful. However, it has a few interesting (and unique) options to configure the way the right-click menu appears.
• RichCopy is the internal Microsoft solution to their own bug/issue. Amazingly configurable, you can setup profiles for different uses (probably too much for most users, though) but I couldn’t find how to insert it in the right-click menu.
• CopyHandler: You can’t get more technical than this one! Options include things as obscure as buffer size depending on the type of file copy you do (disk-to-disk, directory-to-directory, disk-to-CD/DVD, etc.) The best little gems here include the possibility to pause/restart file copying, shutting down the computer at the end of a copy session, or scheduling a copy session for the next login.

All of them get rid of the usual flying folder kind of window and replace it with a more technical-looking window with progress bars and more optional lists of details.

Anyway, even if I can recommend all of them (a little preference for SuperCopier), remember that they are not even useful (in terms of copying speed) in Windows XP or Windows 2000. But, if you are using Windows Vista (mostly) or Windows 7, you should seriously consider them.

you merely change the size of the Windows desktop and all your desktop icons are forcefully moved around against your will. After one or two of these, you’d be ready to cry, while backing up the position of the icons would be enough, before connecting a new screen, or attaching your laptop to a video-projector, etc.

Up to now, you could only cry and reposition the icons. But here comes DesktopOK. What can I say? It does exactly what you want and what you need: a mere backup, a simple restore and your icons come back where you wanted them.

Simple et necessary.

For example, you can put the NotePad program in the tray icon with a single shortcut containing something like:

C:\Path\To\Trayconizer.exe C:\Windows\Notepad.exe

Wine is there to solve the problem. It runs many games and it runs Photoshop CS2 and CS3 from the box (I did not test it myself, though). It was the plain objective of Google when they allocated money and developers to support this project. They reached their goal.

It is probably the right time to try OpenSuse 11.0 (one of the best new Linux distributions) with Wine.

See also: Run Windows Apps in Linux with Wine 1.0.

Here comes Wine, an open source tool supposed to allow you to run native Windows applications in your Linux PC. In beta during years, Wine was incomplete and unable to provide the ultimate dream of OS migration, but things seem to be changing. Google invested a lot of effort, and it is said that version 1.0 of Wine is upcoming.

One of the important things I noticed, of course, is that there are plenty of games now supported (Baldur’s Gate II – Throne of Baal, Call of Duty 2, World of Warcraft, etc.) and I see that both Photoshop CS2 and CS3 are also in the list.

You (and I) should be trying this…

• Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
• Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software
• The Windows Apps You Never Need To Install
• Battle of the Free Windows Software Firewalls; We have to admit that there is no longer any good reason to pay for your computer security under Windows.
• Top 100 of the Best (Useful) OpenSource Applications
• Logiciels gratuits from TutoWeb.
• Now, to look into the future, Sneak peek at OpenOffice.org 3.0
• And, last but not least, for old dinosaurs, let’s remind you that you can still use VAX-VMS on your Linux PC. If you don’t know what I am saying, either you’re too young, or you never received a hacker education. Or both.

In order to correct this, you can/must use a special Windows driver able to recognize correctly those Linux Ext/Ext2 partitions. Ext2 IFS provides full read/write access. It’s is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows. When installed in your Windows computer, it simply becomes able to natively access the Linux disk. After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.

Download from fs-driver.org.

• Dual-Boot Windows and Linux, Step 1: Get Ubuntu
• Dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux

Here are a few solutions to improve the situation:

• Optimize Windows start with the help of Microsoft BootVis (source: LH).
• Optimize Linux start (a previous article on Roumazeilles.net: Linux boot sequence in images).
• Clean up a Linux installation with FSLint which will find -for example- duplicate files (source: DS).
• CCleaner for Windows.
• Slim Down and Speed Up Linux (LH)

I hope it will help you in securing a faster PC whatever your prefered Operating System.