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DonationCoder's 35 Free New Year Apps

After browsing through all of the apps I have to say that there are a few that could actually prove to be useful. Here are the ones that we really like, and I'll tell you my favorite at the end of the article.. And I'll save what I consider to be the best for last. It's called JustCloseSomeTasks, and it's designed to monitor how often you're using the programs you currently have open. With a quick press of a hotkey you can see all applications that have been inactive for a specified period of time, and in a few clicks you can close them all. This is a great tool for anyone who finds themselves overwhelmed with the number of windows they have open. Congrats to DonationCoder for another successful NANY challenge, and a big thanks to all of the developers who took the time out of their busy lives to make contributions! You can checkout all 35 of the entries here.

New Apps for the New Year Challenge

We have officially plowed our way into the New Year, and it's time that we all should focus on working even more efficiently. To help us get that done Donation Coder has started the N.A.N.Y. (New Apps for the New Year) Challenge to present new applications to save you time. All of the available programs (totaling 24 right now) have simple concepts but for some of us they will conquer big tasks.. I'm sure you'll find one or more of those programs to be useful. I think my favorite is TPClock just because it confuses so many people...including myself from time to time (literally).

It was driving me mad

It was driving me mad. My laptop would sporadically run at 100% CPU utilization and lock up. It defied all attempts at analysis as the PC was seized and I couldn't do anything. Only a hard reboot was possible, but on rebooting the problem was gone.

Eventually I solved it with a superb little utility called Process Tamer, written by "Mouser" over at Donation Coder. Process Tamer is a monitor that watches the CPU utilization of all running processes. Once the usage of a single process gets above a certain level (by default 70%) Process Tamer reduces the usage by lowering the process priority.

It's a simple idea and Process Tamer implements it immaculately. With Process Tamer installed, the next time the problem occurred on my laptop it didn't totally lock up but rather just ran very slowly. This allowed me to do a quick diagnosis. The problem turned out to be simple but non-obvious. Two programs, Diskeeper and X1, had been accidentally scheduled to start at the same time and were getting into an embrace of death. It was unexpected, as these two normally peacefully co-exist. Simply re-scheduling the programs to start at different times solved the problem.

I couldn't have solved the problem as easily without Process Tamer. However Process Tamer has much broader application than just this kind of problem.

It's a great tool for preventing any one program from hogging your processor. Every user has experienced the situation where their PC has been slowed down to the point of being unusable, by a background program such as a desktop search program, that starts and takes all the resources. Process Tamer will stop that from ever happening again.

I was so impressed with Process Tamer that I've permanently installed it on my laptop. It takes only around 6MB of memory space and its own CPU usage is so low I could barely measure it.

Process Tamer is available for free from the Donation Coder site. They use a novel licensing system: you have to register to get a free license key which allows you to download any number of programs on the site. This key lasts six months after which you must return to the site to download another free license key. After a year you are given a permanent license. Alternatively, you can make a once-up donation of any size and get a permanent key straight away. It's a clever and ethical way to encourage users to recognize the work done by freeware authors and I support it fully. I donated generously and I hope you do too.

Lots of clever free utilities

The Donation Coder site is offering hundreds of free utilities all full-featured with no nag screens. They use a novel licensing system: you have to register to get a free license key which allows you to download any number of programs on the site. This key lasts six months after which you must return to the site to download another free license key. After a year you are given a permanent license. Alternatively, you can make a once-up donation of any size and get a permanent key straight away. It's a clever and ethical way to encourage users to recognize the work done by freeware authors and I support it fully. The quality of the utility programs offered is very high and a number are unique in what they do. Highly recommended.

Screenshot Captor: Does Everything I Need and More

That's when I found the freeware Screenshot Captor which does everything I need, and more. With Screenshot Captor it is possible to grab the complete screen, part of the screen, a fixed size or the active window using hotkeys. If you simply press the print key it grabs the current screen for instance. Whenever you've done that you see a little default box with some options in it, for instance save the image, create thumbnail, discard image and so on.. This is definately the best screenshot tool for my purposes, it is fast and has everything that I need to speed up the process and still have great screenshots for my blogs.

Create your own Flipbooks: Another Great Idea

Flipbook Printer is another great idea especially for birthdays, holiday season or other occurrences where kids are around. It makes it possible to create flipbooks from avi files and is easy to manage.. Flipbook Printer offers a great (and cheap) way of creating a special gift for someone that you like. I would say that not only kids but also women would love this kind of present.

Grid Move divides your desktop into grids

Grid Move is a nice windows management tool which makes working with windows easier.

Drag and Drop Robot

Drag and Drop Robot can be described as a program that interacts with command line tools to add batch processing and drag and drop functionality to them. This might sound complex at first but in reality it is not.. The most interesting aspect of this software is probably that it is possible to add configuration files. This is excellent for users who work with audio or video encoders for instance. If you want to encode 1000 mp3 files you could simply use lame, add the command line options that you want to use and drag and drop the folder(s) that contain the mp3 files into the window.