After moving to Vista, I was having a hard time finding a good program I could use to burn data disks and images.  Nero is a great program but it’s gotten so expensive.

After searching around and a lot of testing, I settled on a program called InfraRecorder. As you might expect, if you read my blog, this program is completely free and spyware and adware free.

It’s not going to blow you away with features or a revolutionary interface but it’s fast, and easy to use. So far, I haven’t had a single burn go bad out of 10 or so CD and DVD burns.

You can download it here.

Over time, files on your hard drive become more and more fragmented as the physical locations of the data gets moved around. Over time, this can have a negative impact on the performance of your computer. That’s why it’s a good idea to ‘defrag’ your hard drives on a regular basis.

Defragging rearranges your files so your hard drive spends less time looking for files. That can make your programs and files open faster. Not to mention, it reduces the wear and tear on your hard disks. Hard Drives have lots of moving parts. When the hard drive dies, so does your data! (continue reading…)

PHOTOSHOP DISCLAIMER:
There’s no replacement for Photoshop! Photoshop does it all and does it better than everything else!

I find myself recommending this to more and more people every day so I thought it would make a good blog entry. As always, the programs I recommend are free… just as all software should be.

With that said, if you work with photos a lot, Faststone Image Viewer is an absolute MUST HAVE! The list of things this program can do is staggering!

It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).

It does batch conversion, batch renaming, watermarking, resizing, red-eye removal, cropping, lossless rotation, bluring, sharpening, color enhancement, color reduction, gray scaling… I could go on for a good while here but I think you get this point. If you’ve ever wanted to do it to a photo, Faststone Image Viewer can do it!

If your looking for a free program for doing things like resizing and tweaking photos or making simple layer based graphics, it’s hard to beat Paint.net! It’s not a replacement for Photoshop but it does have many of the same features.

Hey, Photoshop is expensive! If you don’t have the $700 to put down on a professional piece of software, this is the next best thing.

Screenshots of the interface
Download Paint.net

I frequently get asked about how you can take a picture of your desktop that can be used in documents and emails. Windows has the functionality to do this built right in but it’s not exactly easy to use. If you want to do it with Windows built in screen capture, you have to hit your “Print Screen” key then paste the image into a graphics program like Paint and save it to your hard drive.

There’s a better way.

Good ole Faststone Imageviewer has a built in screen capture utility. Full details in this post.