The Realm of the Verbal Processor

Two Cool Utilities

I don’t do a lot of exploring of new computer utilities. I am pretty content with whatever I am currently using unless I get to a point of true frustration in trying to do something. My co-worker (Philip) does do a bit of exploring…and I have asked him to let me know when he finds something that I might be interested in. He did so recently.

Frustration #1 that I have had recently is a photo manipulation program. Something that goes beyond basic cropping and red-eye reduction. I had used GIMP for a while. It is very powerful…but “user friendly” is not on it’s feature set. Philip recently told me about Paint.net (www.getpaint.net). WOW. This program has a LOT of power and features…but is very easy to use. I won’t go into the feature set, but it is very good and best of all….FREE.

Frustration #2…desktop search. I have been using Google Desktop search for a while, but was frustrated that when I wanted to look for some random file (.exe, .bat, .vbs) I couldn’t use Google Desktop…it didn’t index those files…or it had to be set up special to do something like that. Enter Philip’s latest find…Windows Desktop Search (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/default.mspx). Plain and simple…this thing rocks. It is customizable for a typical user to only search My Documents and E-mail, or for a more advanced user like myself to search the entire hard drive plus e-mail/etc. Once it is done indexing, it is really fast. Really, really fast. Personally…I’m sold.

August 29, 2006 - Posted by Jarvis | tech