I’m clearly not a very good blogger: when I see a new program, or some interesting news, instead of writing up a story for my web-page, I switch over to the #geoShell channel on irc.freenode.net and tell everyone in there. Sad thing is, half the time they don’t care, and if I wrote it up on my page, chances are someone would.

So, anyway, here’s a list of some freeware applications that I’ve either just discovered, or that I’ve had to recommend to people as part of a tech-support question in the last couple of weeks. Many of these were mentioned on IRC, but a couple are new discoveries I saved just for my webpage

• Windows XP User Display Settings allows custom display settings for each user: that is, if you have multiple users on one computer, with this simple little application you can each have your own desktop resolution and refresh rate.
• Replace in Files is a small simple application for doing search-and-replace in multiple files (just in case your text editor doesn’t have this feature). I’ve set this up as a “tool” in my current text-editor of choice: SciTE
• AutoRuns goes way beyond MSConfig to not only give you control over everything that runs when you start your computer, but even has the ability to look at the AutoRuns of other user accounts. It can output a list as a comma-separated file, show services, hide official Microsoft applications (so you know you’re not disabling something important) and more. There was an article in Windows IT Pro about this app a while back.
• Junction is a tool for managing “hard links” in Windows XP. It allows you to cause a file or even a folder to show up in more than one place on your hard drive. Basically, it’s like creating a copy, except all the copies are really the same file, so they are completely synchronized.

I want to elaborate on that Junction tool, because it’s so cool and powerful … and confusing. Junctions are a feature of the NT File System that is used in Windows 2000 and XP and later. Because they are a file system function, they only work within the same hard drive, so their main purpose is just allowing you to access the same file (or set of files) from multiple locations.
A great example is some of these new applications that store their settings as XML files. Because they store the settings in their local folder, it’s virtually impossible to easily back up all your settings: they’re not in the registry, they’re spread all over your hard drive. Without getting into a debate on the up and down-sides of this practice, lets just say, hard-links and junctions allow you to work around that by creating one folder in your personal profile that has hard-links or junctions to all the necessary setting files/folders. Then you can back up all your settings by just backing up that one folder (now if only applications would do that by default).