PDF995 is a freeware that can create pdf files from any file that can be printed. It gets installed as a printer driver in your system. To create a pdf, just print the file using PDF995 printer driver by pressing “ctrl P” and choosing PDF995 from the drop-down list.
Ever wanted to merge two pdf files into one without paying a dollar !! Pdftk is a free command based toolkit that can do that and much more with pdf files. Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris. It can Merge, Split, Decrypt, Encrypt, Apply a Background Watermark, Update PDF Metadata, Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages and much more.
Utilities
I often make video clips with my Canon S2 IS. The quality is awesome but at the same time the size of the video file created is enormous. These videos were eating up all my hard disk space until I found these tools to compress those files. I won’t say that there is no loss in quality at all but I played with the settings to achieve the best possible results which I am sharing with you here.
The best video compressing software that I came across till date is Super. It is a Freeware that gives you complete control over the conversion process. I played with the settings and the following screenshot shows the settings that worked best for me.
My clips were shot at 30 fps so I selected that. Choose the same frame rate and the resolution as that of the original clip.
Stoik Video Converter is another free video conversion tool that is pretty simple to use with very decent output. There are few options when you convert the video but the output format “WMV for LAN (1 Mbps)” works best for me considering the quality vs size ratio.
Multimedia, Utilities
Digital cameras brought a revolution in Photography. I don’t think about the processing cost of a photo anymore so there is no stopping when I start clicking. But it is a pain when I have to share hundreds of photos with my friends online because of the huge size of the JPG files.
I experimented with a few JPG compression softwares and found Visualizer Photo Resize to work the best. It can handle JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF, PSD and PSP files. You can specify the resolution you want and it can process a complete folder at a time.
Visualizer Photo Resize
Another good image resizer is FastStone Photo Resizer. It is an image converter/resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. It supports JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and JPEG2000 file formats.
FastStone Photo Resizer
These will help you save a lot of space with very little or no loss of image quality.
Multimedia, Utilities
Problem: You turned your laptop on and connected the network cable but the system is not connecting to the network. The network card (NIC) is not there in the device manager either as if it is not installed.
Cause: When turned on with Power cable unplugged (running on battery), the Quickset utility in the newer Dell notebooks disables the network card by default thinking that you are on the go and won’t be connecting to a network cable.
Solution: Open the Quickset utility and select “Internal Network Card Power Management”. The “Internal Network Card Power Management” dialogue box will appear. Select the option “always activate on battery” and then click “Apply” and Restart your laptop.
Hardware, Internet, Utilities
I heard many people don’t like the new U3 technology that comes with the USB drives these days (including myself). You can uninstall this U3 software from your USB drive.. its very simple..
Click on the link below.. it will take you to U3 Launchpad Removal page… and follow the instructions.
Remove U3 Launchpad !!
It will also free up some space that was being used up by the U3 software.. yayyyy !!!
Utilities
