Show Workweek in Windows System Tray

T-Clock is a utility that provides a more flexible date and time display in the system tray. It also includes the ability to show the work week.

Download (https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock/releases)

Measure USB card speed

It is sometimes necessary to confirm the read and write speed of an USB card. h2testw is such an utility. The author's page is written in German, but you can also read about the tool in English.

Author's page in German (website)
English page (download)

Nonintrusive and customizable screen capture tools

The following are two opensource screen capture tools for Windows. They are very customizable and can be configured to generate captures without any notifications.

Greenshot (website)
ShareX (website)

Remap Caps Lock key in Windows

It may be sometimes useful to remap certain keys on your keyboard. The Caps Lock key on the keyboard is not useful to me, and I prefer to remap it as a Ctrl key. This makes Emacs a little easier to use on standard keyboards. It is certain possible to do this in Windows using a free tool from Microsoft. You can find it below.

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, requires installation (website)
Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools, unpacked for standalone download (website)

Unobtrusive ISO mounting in Windows

There are many programs available to mount ISO files. Portable WinCDEmu is one that is least obtrusive. There is no setup program. The fist time you run it, it will install the necessary drivers. These drivers can be uninstalled at any time.

Portable WinCDEmu (http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/portable/)

TweakUI for Windows 7

If you have used TweakUI in the past, you know how valuable a tool it is. The Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a similar tool targeted for Windows 7. You will be able tweak and optimize various features of Windows 7.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker (website)

Network tunneling tools

If you are working behind a restrictive firewall, the following tools can be used to tunnel network connections to the outside world.

netcat

• Create network connections
• Webpage (http://netcat.sourceforge.net/)

connect

• Like netcat but also supports connecting through SOCKS and HTTPS* proxy servers
• Download (http://www.taiyo.co.jp/~gotoh/ssh/connect.c)

corkscrew

• Tunnel network connections through HTTP* and HTTPS* proxy servers
• Webpage (http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew/)

proxytunnel

• Like corkscrew
• Webpage (http://proxytunnel.sourceforge.net/)

httptunnel

• Tunnel network connections in HTTP requests
• Also supports tunneling through a HTTP proxy server
• Requires remote host to run the hts server and client to run the htc client
• Webpage (http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html)

ssh

• Tunnel network connections through a SSH connection
• Webpage (http://www.openssh.com/)

* For the best chance of success, the remote host should listen on port 443 (HTTPS) or 80 (HTTP) since the connection is tunneled as a HTTP or HTTPS connection

Do you use any other network tunneling tools not listed here?

Firefox "Use system proxy settings" and VPN

I frequently connect to other networks through VPN. It is the case that when I actually connect to another network via VPN, Firefox doesn't pick up the new network settings. Some networks require a proxy and some don't. When Firefox included the option "Use system proxy settings" in Connection Settings, I was excited for this feature but it doesn't appear to work. Unlike Internet Explorer and Chrome, which picks up the correct network settings upon network change without restarting, Firefox requires a restart.

Bug filed at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563169

Ping all IPs on your network

Angry IP Scanner is a program that pings all IPs within a range. This is useful if you don't have access to a DHCP server and you need to determine the IP of a system that is connected to your network.

Angry IP Scanner (download)

Scan and remove malware from your system

Do you suspect your system to be infected with malware? I recommend the following two programs to scan and remove malware from your system. I have used them in the past and they have been extremely effective. These programs were able to detect issues that my antivirus program could not detect.

These programs can be used in addition to your antivirus program such as Microsoft Security Essentials.

SUPERAntiSpyware (download)
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (download)
Microsoft Security Essentials (download)

A more featureful task manager for Windows

Process Explorer from the Windows Sysinternals suite is a powerful task manager. It can perform tasks like identifying the processes which have an open file handles. You can search for open handles and processes by name. You can also view the process tree and the entire command arguments of each process. As an added convenience, Process Explorer can be used as a replacement for the default windows Task Manager. I highly recommend this utility.

Process Explorer (download)

Utility to put your Windows system to sleep

Wizmo (Windows Gizmo) is a very useful program for performing Windows system functions like putting your computer to sleep. It supports an astonding number of features and can be run from the command line.

Wizmo (download)

Batch script to renew your network IP in Windows

Here's a handy batch script for renewing your IP in Windows. Create a file called renewip.bat containing the following lines.

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
ipconfig /flushdns

Store this batch script in a convenient location. Run the batch script to renew your IP address.

What caused a bluescreen or application to crash?

Whenever you encounter a Windows Stop Error (blue screen of death), a crash file is generated automatically by Windows. The crash file contains information about the state of the computer at the time of the crash. It is sometimes possible to extract useful information from this crash file to determine the case of the crash. I have used BlueScreenView to analyze a crash file. Simply run this program after you reboot your computer. It provided some information and was only slightly helpful in my case. Your case may be different and any information you can gather about the cause of the Stop Error can be extremely helpful.

Whenever an application crashes, information on the crash is also saved by Windows. You can use AppCrashView to analyze this information to understand more about the cause of the crash.

BlueScreenView (download)
AppCrashView (download)

Check for unauthorized programs (or Malware) running on your system

If you suspect that you might have unauthorized programs running on your system, you should install HijackThis. Even if your system is running without issues, you should have this program handy in case something unexpected occurs. HijackThis will analyze your system for unauthorized programs. It is typically used to identify malware programs that are launched at boot time. You can download it from the HijackThis website.

Benchmark flash card performance

Why would you want to benchmark the performance of a flash card? If you suspect that the card you have is fraudulent, especially if you didn't buy it from a reputable retailer, these programs will confirm the performance characteristics of the card. Take the result generated from one of the following benchmarking programs below and compare it with the industry standards. For example, for SDHC cards, compare the measured speed of your card with the speed of the class specification of your card. For example, a Class 10 card should achieve somewhere around 10MB/s.

Here are two utilities I have used for benchmarking the speed of a flash card. These utitlies run standalone and does not require an installation on your computer. One utility is called H2testw. The page is written in German and Google Translate is used to translate the page to English. The other utility is called HD_Speed.

H2testw (download)
HD_Speed (download)