Tag: SERVICES

When I first glanced at System Nucleus, I thought it might wind up being just another system reporting tool, spilling details about my system to a text file for posterity. In fact, that's barely the tip of the iceberg -- System Nucleus features a number of useful tools for Windows troubleshooting, tweaking, and maintenance. One of my favorite components is the backup & recovery tool, which ...

WhatTheFont is pretty much the established player in the font identification market. The service's claim to fame is its ability to figure out what font is used in a particular image (or try to, at least). A new contender, called IdentifyFonts (original naming there!), recently came into this same space. Since they are so similar, I felt a head-to-head comparison would be the obvious thing to ...

Shortened URLs may be useful for Twitter and IM, but they're also problematic. You can never be sure what's hiding behind the short URL, and some IT departments may opt to block them off entirely for exactly that reason. Untiny is a very versatile service for reverting shortened URLs to their full form. The service supports a myriad of services (99, in fact, including the original tinyurl, goo.gl ...

If you don't know the app, don't let its name fool you. Vista Services Optimizer is capable of more than just tuning your Windows services to squeeze out some extra performance. It also allows you to create different profiles, provides a one-touch gaming mode, can take automatic service state snapshots, and offers painless recovery of Windows default settings. Version 1.2 is also Windows 7 ...

I don't know how they manage to do it, but they do. Every now and then a customer drops off a system for repair and things that a home user should ever need to monkey with - things like TCP/IP settings, registry entries, Windows services - have been mangled beyond recognition. Services in particular can be a big pain to reset, simply because of how many their are. Fortunately, there's an ...

Fans of the ribbon interface who want a full-featured alternative to task manager, check out Yet Another Process Monitor. Apart from showing task manager-esque information about running processes, YAPM also provides details about Windows services and your network activity. The system information panel provides realtime monitoring of processor, memory, and disk activity. Service startup types ...

There are plenty of hardware-free solutions for squeezing a little bit more gaming performance out of your Windows system. Heck, there are even a number of tools built right in to Windows that you can use to cut down on background performance drains before you fire up your favorite game - like services.msc, for example. Still, it's kind of pain to go in there and selectively turn off unwanted ...

I spend quite a bit of time during my day tweaking Windows services on underpowered XP and Vista computers, and the services.msc snap-in just doesn't quite cut it. For the past few days I've been using Turbo Services Manager as an alternative. It's a 123k (311k for the 64-bit version) portable application that performs all of the msc's functions and more. I'm particularly enjoying the hotkeys, ...

The Windows task manager might show you a list of running processes, but it does a pretty poor job of letting you know what some of those processes are actually doing. You don't need a Ph.D, to figure out what will happen if you terminate firefox.exe because it's using up 100% of your CPU cycles, but what about spudsvc.exe? ProcX is a free utility that will show a list of running processes also ...

Do you have something kicking around you don't want but which somebody could still get some use out of? Why not barter? Goods and services have been exchanged for other goods and services since the stone ages. It's a simple way to trade items between parties without cash. Giventake takes the process online. The website lets people trade items for something they have a use for. Users start off by ...

With so many Google services on the internet, it's easy to get lost on what the search giant provides, where each service lives, and how to search for what you need. That's where Cheat Sheets come into play. Adelaider has made up some educational cheat sheets that help users navigate to their appropriate Google service like Google Translate, Google SMS, or Google Trends. The sheets also display ...

Amazon just launched its own questions and answers service in beta called Askville. Yup, just like you've seen elsewhere. You have to have an Amazon sign-in and you can ask questions or answer questions people post. Odd that Amazon sees a future where Google did not. What am I missing here? Yahoo! is doing well with its service in the same vein, so apparently there is some pull to such services. ...

Google has announced what is quite possibly the largest update to Google Reader since its inception, bringing an entirely new UI, more keyboard shortcuts, new bookmarklets and a whole lotta results from user feedback to the table. Overall, as a Google Reader fan for some time, I am pleasantly surprised by this wholly positive and usable update, but it isn't without a few confusing quirks. The ...

I found this really intriguing video via kottke's remaindered links of a photographer who took a pic of himself every day for six years, and then threw all the images together into a movie. But this post isn't about the cool video - it's about Vimeo's Flash player controller. After pressing play, mouseover the video again and note the timeline controller that pops up. Now click anywhere in that ...

If your software or web design project is struggling through the fog, let Porchlight show you and your team the way. This web-based project management and bug tracking service offers user-specific milestone and project tracking, so members of your team only need to see the tasks that matter to them. Email updates and RSS feeds for projects, as well as a subscribe-able calendar for upcoming ...