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Internet users have quite a selection of tools at hand to download pictures from Internet websites. All modern web browsers come with options to save single pictures and most offer add-ons and plugins to download multiple pictures in batch mode from Internet sites. Open Image is a software program for the Windows operating system that is offering a solution that is independent from installed web browsers.

Open Image is a portable software program that requires barely any configuration. Pictures can be downloaded by creating a new download task in the program’s interface.

Picture downloads can be instantly started by adding a website url in the Page field. It is furthermore possible to change the download folder and set minimum and maximum file sizes as well as allowed file types to only download pictures that are not filtered out by the rules.

A few additional options are available in the Settings menu like renaming images with sequence numbers, emptying the download folder before starting the picture download or opening the download page in the default web browser

Open Image is a good alternative for downloading pictures from single web pages that contain many pictures. A good alternative for download pictures from multiple pages is the website ripper HTTrack.

Desktop search engines come in all sizes and shapes. One can download and install one of the desktop search engines provided by big companies like Microsoft’s Windows Search or Google Desktop Search or a third party software like Everything or Locate which usually prove to be more lightweight.

TheSearchMan definitely falls in the second category with its tiny size of 19 Kilobytes. The portable desktop search software program can be executed from any location of the Windows operating system. It provides a very basic search interface that allows users to select a folder and search term. The program will then display the search results in its interface with the possibility to open the containing folder or files directly from the search results.

One of the most important features of TheSearchMan is the ability to perform a second search that only searches within the search results to refine the search results again.

It is possible to use wildcards to replace one character (?) or multiple characters (*). The search is performed fast, probably not as fast as in search engines that make use of a database or other means of storing file information to increase search speed. It does usually take a few seconds to display the results which is perfectly acceptable for most uses.

TheSearchMan will not search within files. Users who do need that functionality might take a look at Locate32 which offers that. TheSearchMan on the other hand is a lightweight – most likely one of the smallest if not the smallest – desktop search application (50 KB unpacked) that can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger stores contact information in a database file called contacts.edb. The file is locked by Windows Live Messenger if it is running and contains all the contact information that are accessible in Windows Live Messenger including the contact’s name, first name, last name, mobile phone number and every other possible information.

There might be a situation where the contact information need to be accessed although Windows Live Messenger is not available or cannot be opened. The Live Contacts View program has been created for this purpose as it allows users to view the contact information if Windows Live Messenger is installed and close and even if Windows Live Messenger is not installed on the computer system at all but the contacts.edb file is available (this does require the esent.dll (Server Database Storage Engine) to be installed on the computer system though).

Live Contacts View is a portable software program that can be executed right after the download. It is compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and will display the contents of the contacts database immediately if the file is available and not locked.

Contact information can be exported in txt, csv or html files to be processed or imported into other applications. It is also possible to copy the information to the Windows clipboard and paste it from there into another software program. Live Contacts View is another quality Nirsoft release.

Log Viewer Pro is a portable software program for the Microsoft Windows operating system that is able to load and display log files. Its main benefits are the low memory usage and support for log files with a size of over 4 Gigabytes. There are obviously other features and options which will be discussed in the following article. Log Viewer Pro will work best with log files that store each entry in their own line. It can load pretty much any document however but loses most of its functionality when doing so.

It is possible to load multiple log files into the log viewer which can then be looked at and switched to in the tabbed interface on top of the application. Log Viewer Pro will automatically highlight lines that contain warnings, information or errors to make the identification easier for the user. It is possible to define additional lines that get highlighted automatically using regular expressions.

The application can switch to different encodings like ANSI, OEM, Unicode LE, Unicode BE, supports line numbers, text wrapping and a search that supports basic search phrases but also regular expressions. The log files can be automatically reloaded if that is required. Another interesting feature are bookmarks which can be created to jump to specific locations in a log file.

Log Viewer Pro is a free for non commercial use log analyzer for the Windows operating system.

The first step to recover a computer system after a malware infection is the malware removal. This is usually done by the security software that is installed on the system. Some security software programs do a great job of removing malware but fail to remove traces that the malware has left behind. That’s where IClean comes into play, a program designed to remove the traces left by malware that has already been removed from the system.

IClean is a portable application that can be run from anywhere including a portable drive or device. The computer program will then display information about the computer system in six tabs that are accessible on top of the interface.

* Processes: Displays all running processes with the option to check processes and kill them or kill and delete them.
* Services: A list of all running services with the option to delete multiple services at once.
* Registry: Several security sensitive Registry settings are displayed here including programs that bypass firewall rules, toolbars and browser helper objects with the option to repair, backup and restore settings.
* Startup Folders: Displays a list of startup items that are loaded during system start with the option to enable, disable or clear them.
* Hosts: The Windows hosts file that is used by malware to redirect Internet traffic.
* Advanced: Option to terminate a known process ID.

Several of these options could come in handy after a sucessful malware removal on the computer system. IClean is available at the developer’s website and compatible with all Windows operating systems from Windows 98 to Windows Vista (and probably Windows 7 as well).

It is not only web designers who need to create image thumbnails regularly. There are many situations where image thumbnails come in handy starting from blogging and publishing websites to PowerPoint presentations or preview images of a photo collection. Some programs and online scripts – like WordPress for instance – create image thumbnails automatically whenever the user uploads an image to the web server. Some however do not have that option which means that the user has to create the thumbnails manually.

One interesting application for that purpose is RightThumb for the Windows operating system. It is a portable application that can be integrated into the Windows Explorer context menu to offer the option to create a thumbnail from selected images.

Several parameters of the thumbnail creation can be configured upon startup including the output format for the thumbnail image, the maximum dimension for the image, the quality of jpg images, compression of png images, the resample filter and if desired a prefix identifier for the image. The image will be automatically sharpened after resizing and it is possible to select a different output folder for the thumbnail image.

The program can be closed after the initial configuration and is from then on accessible from the Windows context menu if that option has been selected. Right Thumb (via Barry’s Computer Tips) is a free download for the windows operating system.

If you are sharing a desktop computer with several users you might be interested in knowing the login and logout time of each user on the system. It could also be interesting to know even if you are using the computer alone but have it accessible in a room where others could access it. Parents could for example check on their children’s computer usage and roommates if there have been any unauthorized access to the computer system lately.

Marxio Login Logger is a software program for the Windows operating system that can create the access log file and reports that detail the logins and logouts of every user on the system including login attempts over a computer network and in an Active Directory environment .

The program is completely portable and no signs of it appear on the user’s desktop other than its process in the Windows task manager. It will automatically create a log file based on the initial configuration. Each log file includes information about the data and time of the login, the username, computer name, network IP and operating system. It is possible to adjust these parameters and use them in the log file creation as well.

Drive Manager is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that helps users managing and identifying connected drives. Drives in this regard is every hardware device with its own drive letter which includes hard drives, dvd drives, removable storage devices such as USB sticks or network drives.

The software program displays a list of all devices that are currently connected to the local computer system. The display is very informative and it is possible to get an overview of all the connected drives in a few seconds. Information like the drive letter, label, type, size, vendor or format are displayed. It is furthermore possible to filter the list to hide certain types of drives like those that are not mounted at the moment or network drives.

The header of the application contains links to several functions and options that can be used to manage the drives. It is for example possible to explore the drives, look at their properties and smart values (for hard drives), run check disk, hide them from the system or use the subst command to substitute drive letters.

Additional options are provided in the main menu that include benchmarking a drive, defragmenting it, ejecting CD or DVD drives or mapping network drives.

Drive Manager is a free and portable computer program for the Windows operating system.

windows softwareThere probably are not a lot of users of the Windows operating system who need to create thousands of folders in short time. If you are one of them you can automate the process with the program New Folder Wizard which is capable of creating up to 20000 folders in one run. While my imagination is not able to come up with a scenario for that many folders there might be others who exactly need a software program like this to save lots of time.

New Folder Wizard is a portable software program for the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0, runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the operating system and can be downloaded directly from the developer’s homepage. The software itself comes with a set of interesting features to aid the user in the folder creation process.

The configuration of the software is handled in the main interface. The user needs to select a target folder which becomes the root folder for the folders that are created. It is furthermore possible to add folder prefixes and suffixes, starting and ending numbers and steps for those numbers.

Another option is to load a text file containing names into the program to create folders based on these names. The process can be previewed so that the user knows how the folders will be named. The generated folder names can be copied to the clipboard for external processing.

New Folder Wizard is an interesting lightweight application for the Windows operating system.

The long awaited new version of the Firefox web browser has been released in the last days. Users who have been using version 3.0x of the web browser are now facing the decision if they should upgrade to that new version or wait until they are sure that all their add-ons, websites and settings are working under Firefox 3.5 as well. Probably the easiest way of finding out if they can upgrade to Firefox 3.5 is by testing the Firefox 3.5 portable release.

Portable in this case means that it will not interfere with the Firefox installation on the computer system. It is possible to migrate add-ons and settings to the portable version by using Firefox add-ons like the Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE).

This turns the portable version of Firefox into a 1:1 copy of the installed version; Ideal for testing and analyzing the new web browser. Firefox 3.5 portable has been published at the portable apps website from where it can be downloaded. The portable version is only compatible with the Windows operating system although it has been reported that it will work in Wine on the Linux operating system as well.

The portable version can simply be extracted to a folder on the local computer system from where it can be started afterwards. Everything else in the portable version of Firefox works like in the installed version including the installation of add-ons.