| - Dial-Up Networking Monitor - Simple Statistics for Windows 95/98 and NT Dial-Up Networking connections.
- Disk Space Monitor - Simple System Tray applet for Windows 95/98 and NT showing total and free disk space.
- CPU Monitor - Another Simple System Tray applet for Windows 95/98 showing processor utilization.
- ICQ - ICQ is a revolutionary, user-friendly Internet tool that informs you
who's on-line at any time and enables you to contact them at will. No longer will you search in vain for friends or associates on the Net. ICQ does the searching for you, alerting you in real time when they log on. The need to conduct a directory search each time you want to communicate with a specific person is eliminated. With ICQ, you can chat, send messages, files and URL's, play games, or just hang out with your fellow 'Netters' while still surfing the Net
- QTalka - QTalka has been developed specifically to enhance ICQ users with the power of speech. You can actually TALK live with your ICQ friends. You pay no long distance telephone charges.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 - Internet Explorer 5 not only displays Web pages faster, it's designed to save you time on the things you do most often. It's never been easier to get online, find the information you need, and just do stuff faster.
- ClockWise is a 32-bit, Win95/98 shareware application
that should have been included as standard issue with every copy of Windows. ClockWise is a time management utility with many useful features, including a clock, calendar, timer, stopwatch, Internet timer, alarm/reminder system, and a full-featured event scheduler so the user can run any software on the system, completely unattended, at any time. Up to 100 events and alarms can be scheduled. ClockWise can also set the system clock to the exact time via any Internet NTP server or to the atomic
clock at NIST in Boulder, Colorado. The main dialog constantly shows the current time with a sharp LED-style digital clock display, as well as the current date, this month's calendar, local times of sunrise and sunset, time zone information, Universal Coordinated Time (GMT), and US legal holidays. It even maintains an activity log of everything it does.
- VuePrint - VuePrint is the most widely used Windows program for viewing images, with more copies downloaded from America Online and CompuServe than any other viewer.
- GrabIt Pro - Since 1990 GrabIt Pro has been the #1 Windows Screen Capture Program for one simple reason ,
"It Works". Whether you're writing a technical manual or creating a complex graphic, you need a screen capture program you can depend on. We needed GrabIt to document our own manuals, and in the early days of windows programming the only tools you had were the ones you wrote yourself. Since then GrabIt Pro has grown to be one of the most popular screen capture programs available.
- FinePrint - Print large, unwieldy documents in convenient booklets, or at 2, 4 or 8 up thumbnail size. Great for manuals, legal briefs, transcripts, presentations, Acrobat (PDF) files, manuals, source code, web pages and email. Mark documents with an attractive light gray watermark such as "draft" or "confidential". Control printing by previewing documents and deleting unwanted pages from any application, even those that do not have print preview, such as IE and Notepad. Create compound documents easily by combining the printed output from a number of applications. Great for web printing and email records. Create custom electronic letterhead and forms. No more buying, storing and manually loading preprinted letterhead! Save time. It takes the same amount of time to print 2 or 4 pages on a sheet as it does to print one page. Save money. Paper and toner costs are surprisingly high. By using FinePrint you can immediately save money on your printing costs.
- Real Player Plus G2 - Millions of people daily enjoy live and on-demand audio and video with RealPlayer and the premium RealPlayer Plus and Now the Real Player Plus G2
- TwinExployer - If you'd like to increase your productivity when organizing the files and folders on your hard drive, try doubling up with TWinExplorer." (SHAREWARE.COM Review)
- ThumbsPlus - It's only the most effective, elegant and inexpensive way to locate, view, edit, print and organize your images, metafiles, fonts and movies. It will even build web pages for you! ThumbsPlus version 4.02 is available to try or buy for Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000.
- WinRAR - WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of the RAR archiver - a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage and control archive files. There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating environments, currently available: RAR for DOS, OS/2, Windows (32-bit) and UNIX (Linux, BSD and SCO)
- WinZip - WinZip brings the convenience of Windows to the use of Zip files and other archive and compression formats. The optional wizard interface makes unzipping easier than ever. WinZip features built-in support CAB files and for popular Internet file formats such as TAR, gzip, UUencode, BinHex, and MIME. ARJ, LZH, and ARC files are supported via external programs. WinZip interfaces to most virus scanners
- Popup Monitor is a useful software utility that provides you with an audible warning when an AOL logoff popup appears. This software will automatically dismiss AOL logoff popups as well as WWW Cookie popups.Popup Monitor will monitor your unattended file downloads while dismissing logoff popups, signoff at a preset time interval, and run a screen saver when signoff is complete.
- WebFerret - The fastest, most powerful search utility for finding web pages on the Net. WebFerretPRO queries popular Web-based search engines, quickly and efficiently finding web pages the user is looking for on the World Wide Web - Other fine programs too.
- Internet Copilot - the 10-in-1 Internet client software suite. Copilot is designed to work alongside your favorite Windows 95 browser. It combines the 10 most popular and essential browser add-ons and utilities in one small and convenient to use program. Internet Copilot features bookmark management, FTP upload and download, Internet address book, Web searching, Zip file management, and many other functions.
Registry Cleaning Utilities
This so-called miracle is a combination of several things. The first step in this process is a system directory cleaner called ~Clean System Directory (~direct download). The way this program determines if a
DLL is used is by scanning all of the programs on the computer and look for references to the DLLs. Because this is not a surefire way to make sure a DLL isn't used, the program simply moves the files to a subdirectory within the system directory, and recommends that the user wait several months before deleting them from the system entirely.
The second step entails moving or removing other useless files to speed up your system's boot time. Did you know that having extra files in the
root directory slows down your boot time? Well, it does - and we're going to fix that problem.
The third step is a set of three - yes, I said three - registry cleaners. Why three? Well, each of these programs search the registry differently to determine which keys can be safely removed - and in some instances, they even remove different types of unnecessary keys.
The first, and most notable of the programs, is the new version of Microsoft's very own RegClean (direct download). This is probably one of the best little pieces of software that is in the "shoulda but didn't make it into Windows 98" department. It is a totally automated registry cleaner that allows the user to undo the changes if the removal of a key causes a problem with a program. As the (only) totally automated
registry cleaner in this guide, it is also the least customizable. There is no way to choose which keys are and aren't removed. However, RegClean does such a good job of determining unused keys, that this shouldn't be a problem.
The next program in the guide is called EasyCleaner (direct download). This program is moderately automated; you have to select which keys you
wish to delete, but you can use the shift and ctrl keys to select many at once, a feature that the next program doesn't have. However, there are a few bugs in the EasyCleaner interface, as the user may need to run the program repeatedly before it will clear out all the unused keys. Generally, it should be run consecutively until it no longer detects any unused keys.
The last program in the registry cleaning section is called Cleanreg (direct download with libraries direct download without libraries direct download program files only). The least automated of the three programs, it is also the most comprehensive. It appears to catch 95% of the
unused keys of the other two programs combined, and normally I would recommend to most users to only use this program; however, it has no automation at all, so each key has to be deleted separately. This takes a LONG, LONG time, so running the two other programs is definitely to the benefit of the user.
The fourth, and last step, in my miracle speeder-upper program, is compressing the registry. It removes duplicate keys from the system.dat, user.dat, system.da0, and user.da0 registry
files. This can shave up to 2 MBs off of a computer's registry, which decreases startup time and generally makes the computer more responsive. It is during this step that the process for cleaning up the system differs between Windows versions. For the original release of Windows 95 and Service Pack 1 (denoted by an "a" in the version number) will need to go through one extra step to patch a bug in Regedit that does not exist in OSR 2.1 and above, or in Windows 98.
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