I came across this very interesting piece of software recently called Tune Up Utilities 2008.

It is a computer tweaking application that can help you improve almost any aspect of your system. The software comes with One-Click optimization software that I feel is really its core. Just by running it, you clean up your registry, delete temporary files and even eliminate junk data. Apart from that it includes a powerful disk defragmenter, permanent file shredding, file recovery, system optimization and can even help you tweak all aspects of your Windows UI, including the boot and logon screens It is shareware and a free trial can be downloaded. The software costs $49.95 at the time of writing, but I’m sure that after using the trial, you will find that it is well worth the cost.

At work, we recently began using Ninite.com to automate the install of many popular programs, browsers, and plugins.

Ninite allows you to choose from a variety of categories as many different installs as you’d like. Their software automatically chooses the version most appropriate to your installed operating system and silently installs the programs without any accompanying toolbars. It skips any already installed software that is up to date which is a nice time saving feature. There is a pro version but we’ve not investigated what further options it offers as the free versions has more than met our needs.

Are you tired of mousing through your Windows Start menu, looking for the right program to run, frustrated because there are so many folders and items appearing?

Then here’s something that may help you! Launchy is a nifty utility for Windows that lets you launch a program with just a few keystrokes, without having to use the Start menu. Just hit a special key (which you can define) and a small window appears where you type the program’s name. As you type, the program’s icon appears. If it’s correct, just hit Enter and Launchy will start the program.

Launchy even works by typing just a few letters of the name (eg ‘power’ for PowerPoint) so you can be up and running in no time! It even learns from your past requests, displaying your most frequent programs first.

Now that’s a time-saver!

Miranda IM is an open-source instant messenger.

It’s a multi protocol messenger meaning you can login to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Jabber, IRC, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu and many more networks from this single software. It has a very robust and dedicated development team with a wide user base and a very active forum. I have used other multi-protocol IMs in the past like GAIM (now pidgin) but this one is the best in terms of expandability and customizability.

It has a HUGE range of plugins including skins, themes and functional plugins for upcoming protocols, chat history management etc. In addition to chat, it also supports file transfer and web page sharing. The Miranda IM setup file is pretty small, around 1.4MB, and can easily fit on a floppy disk. Miranda stores all its profiles, settings, history in a single encrypted database file which makes it portable and can be easily copied into and used from a USB thumb drive and the like.

Miranda also has extensive support for skinning and themes which is a good thing for people who like to make their IMs unique looking. Their addons page is a good place to start for plugins and customizations like sounds, skins, themes etc. All in all, it’s the best free multi-protocol messenger I have used.

OK, not everybody is a data geek like I am. But chances are, if you are truly a power user, then a real difficult database problem comes along once in a while. A spreadsheet program like Excel won’t cut it on everything, and sometimes screws up importing a file more than it helps, or doesn’t have enough rows to handle the entire file. And sorting that big file sends your computer into a deep sleep. You need a good way to convert one type of database file to another. Simply and easily. That program is DBMS copy.

You wont find it at your local COMPUSA, it’s really an industrial-strength database converter and copier. It is dead-on simple to use: the interface is not flashy, but extremely efficient. Load a file, and it creates the database in its own format. You can select or delete records, create new fields, control output, even print out some data analysis statistics. But it is magical in two ways. 1) You can save the resulting file in almost any reasonable file format, from Quattro Pro to FoxPro. ASCII Files with any delimiter and spacing. Convert your Lotus 1-2-3 files to an Oracle database. 2) It sorts files. Very, very well. Millions of records aren’t a problem for DBMS Copy (although they might take a long time – in the old days we had to wait a few days for the old 66Mhz machine to crank it all out) and it is stable under Windows.

It has a simple batch language, one that makes some particularly hairy database projects much easier, like taking a database, and splitting it to individual client files, so you can distribute individual databases for each client with ease. DBMS Copy is an elegant piece of software to convert databases from one type to another. It has only the best features to manipulate, sort, and augment a database, without any other so-called ‘functionality’. It is a swiss-army-knife piece of software that every database geek should have in their pocket.

For those with years of web design experience, HTML coding is a breeze. These people don’t even have to check HTML cheat sheets or resort to web page editors such as Frontpage to do the job. However, for people who are just beginning to explore their web design talents, writing HTML might seem torture — the code in the final HTML file seems convoluted and readable only to you. While the site itself may look nice, anyone who views the web page source — be it your client or a web design colleague — will make fun of your efforts.

Fortunately, there is a tool called HTML Tidy that fixes invalid HTML code and makes the file appear more organized. It adds indentation to your code and transforms it to the stricter XHTML standard.