Let's play information sharing game! (or, what are your top tricky Windows pieces of software/hacks/tricks to make everyday computing easier?)
PostPosted:Sat Dec 04, 2004 4:19 pm
<div style='font: ; text-align: left; '>I have been accumulating some really handy Windows tricks over the last year of frenzied data recovery attempts, new software development job, and lack of broadband internet. I want to share them because they're all useful and can be ridiculously powerful. I also want all of your best tricks because I'm exceedingly greedy.
So...
1. AutoHotKey (www.autohotkey.com) - This is a...well, I don't know what you'd call it, kind of a mutant hybrid of an automation language (AutoIt 2), a miniature GUI creator, and a macro utility on elephant steroids. This fucker has probably saved me 20-30 minutes per workday over the last several months. I have to deal with a horribly diverse yet still repetitive lot of build processes at work (stuff you do to get software from code to application) that used to involve endless "run this command line then delete this file then copy this directory unless you're doing this project in which case you copy this other one first" type of shit over and over again each time I built the app. But I wrote a small toolbar application with this that handles nearly all of it automatically. Also you can capture any keystroke in any application, remap it to whatever Windows command you want, send simulated keystrokes or WM_ messages to open windows, run complicated strings of time-delayed macros, on and on and so forth. It is really ridiculously powerful, also probably VERY useful to someone playing a lot of complex PC games which I don't really anymore. But check it out and you'll know what I mean. You probably also could implement a keystroke logger if you're into stealing other people's passwords and/or getting arrested for doing so - just pointing out possibilities.
2. Agent Ransack (I forget but Google it...) - Apparently someone at work told me that not only is Windows search very slow but in addition just doesn't work some of the time. Also I hate that little dog. This is a much faster search utility that does some wildcards, shows the line number of the instance on which the phrase was found (if you're searching for something in a file), and ignores the weird-shit directory structure Windows gets into when you look at, for example, your Temporary Internet Files.
(As an aside, For those of you who may not know, Windows 2000 and XP and possibly other versions of windows keep several back months of your internet browsing efforts in a hidden directory called Content.IE5 in your Temporary Internet Files directory which you can't get to unless you type it in manually or use a program that doesn't go through the Windows UI to access it. It also keeps even more of your history in another similar directory structure somewhere else in your user folder in Documents and Settings that I don't remember offhand. Useful if you want to get back something you downloaded a while ago but deleted. Though a side effect, at least from what I've seen, is that actually trying to protect your browing history privacy is like trying to clean up gravel that's been spilled in tar. Even if you get all of whatever it is you're trying to protect out of this horrid mess, you'll find URLs you went to hidden all over your registry. Sort of frightening actually.)
3. Directory Snoop (I forget the URL but you can Google it, Briggs Softworks) - A wonderful file recovery/disk search utility. It's a very good undeleter which I have used many times when I realized I recycled something days or weeks ago that I could have used - if something else hasn't written over the memory you can get your file(s) back in perfect condition. You can also do hex-level searches on files or directories which I have used on occasion when Agent Ransack didn't find something I was looking for - you can even do what seems to me to be a complete surface scan of your HD for a certain string of data. I used this a few weeks ago at work when I had recycled an important piece of code and Windows had written over the beginning of the cluster the file used to be on and got back almost all of it. In addition, it is a ridiculously fast indexing and file viewing/searching utility that gets the ENTIRE directory structure of your computer and all filenames in it, deleted or not, really really quickly. I seem to have had anywhere from 100000-1000000 files on the hard drives I've used this on and it loads the index in under a minute and does reordering by name, date, size, etc. in seconds. (!)
(As another aside, it also performs Department of Defense/Guttman disk wipes of sensitive info for those truly paranoid people out there, or at least it claims to. Out of interest when I noticed the messy trail of Internet info Windows shits all over your hard drive I did a little more privacy research. Deleting files and even reformatting your hard drive does relatively little about the physical state of your hard drive's magnetic media, and someone with the right equipment can physically read your drive's magnetic surface and extract a disk image. Even writing it over with random data doesn't protect your data against this, because drives actually contain sort of like magnetic "echoes" of earlier data written. I didn't really read too much of the whitepaper I looked at, but it seemed to me like writing to your hard drive is like writing in pencil on a piece of paper - you can erase the marks but the indentation of your pencil presses is still there. Though since I have no business whatsoever trying to be learned in this subject that may be a bad example. DoD/Guttman disk wipes write multiple passes of data in particular patterns that are specifically designed to make it as hard as possible to extract anything from those echoes. Seemed to me kind of like scribbling hard all over the pencil indentations from my earlier example, to make it harder to decipher the writing, but if you actually are interested in this stuff please do go read it yourself and don't take my possibly wildly incorrect descriptions as fact. Anyway, doing a full wipe will theoretically protect your former data from anyone short of, say, the CIA, who apparently have stuff that reads infinitesimal bits of magnetism from the palimpsest that once was your hard drive. Since as far as I know none of us are doing international espionage this is rather more fun as kind of an intellectual exercise than a study in practicality, but I still thought it was interesting.)
4. I just stumbled upon this software today so I don't know if it's really actually good or not, but it's called Internet Download Manager, which replaces the shitty Internet Explorer download functionality with something that has a high-90's-percent chance of resuming your connection-dropped download instead of the roughly 30% that I seem to enjoy (/sarcasm) with IE. Looks like it keeps a well-maintained download directory structure too though I haven't used it and can't vouch for it. I didn't even know download managers existed prior to today, so there may be a better one than this out there. But I'm mentioning this particularly because of a trick I found, which is that if you DO have a dropped large-file download that IE develops amnesia about (in other words, it makes you start over at the beginning instead of resuming where you left off) you can do something really clever to get it back. All temporary downloads from IE get stored in that Temporary Internet Files directory structure I was talking about earlier and with a good file-search utility (like Agent Ransack) you can find where the partial file was if you can remember the filename. Then if you start downloading the file again from the beginning using Internet Download Manager, IDM will create a temporary directory that it stores the download file in. Cancel the download, overwrite the file in this directory with the one from Temporary Internet Files, and resume the download, and IDM will actually pick up just where you left off. This just now recovered about four hours' worth of data I would have had to get over again (I'm downloading a mammoth file using a dialup connection that IE crapped out on.)
Anyway, I kind of wanted to start a thread for tricksy Windows stuff. If anyone else knows any good utilities/tricks we could really get a good information base going. I will make Windows my bitch.</div>
So...
1. AutoHotKey (www.autohotkey.com) - This is a...well, I don't know what you'd call it, kind of a mutant hybrid of an automation language (AutoIt 2), a miniature GUI creator, and a macro utility on elephant steroids. This fucker has probably saved me 20-30 minutes per workday over the last several months. I have to deal with a horribly diverse yet still repetitive lot of build processes at work (stuff you do to get software from code to application) that used to involve endless "run this command line then delete this file then copy this directory unless you're doing this project in which case you copy this other one first" type of shit over and over again each time I built the app. But I wrote a small toolbar application with this that handles nearly all of it automatically. Also you can capture any keystroke in any application, remap it to whatever Windows command you want, send simulated keystrokes or WM_ messages to open windows, run complicated strings of time-delayed macros, on and on and so forth. It is really ridiculously powerful, also probably VERY useful to someone playing a lot of complex PC games which I don't really anymore. But check it out and you'll know what I mean. You probably also could implement a keystroke logger if you're into stealing other people's passwords and/or getting arrested for doing so - just pointing out possibilities.
2. Agent Ransack (I forget but Google it...) - Apparently someone at work told me that not only is Windows search very slow but in addition just doesn't work some of the time. Also I hate that little dog. This is a much faster search utility that does some wildcards, shows the line number of the instance on which the phrase was found (if you're searching for something in a file), and ignores the weird-shit directory structure Windows gets into when you look at, for example, your Temporary Internet Files.
(As an aside, For those of you who may not know, Windows 2000 and XP and possibly other versions of windows keep several back months of your internet browsing efforts in a hidden directory called Content.IE5 in your Temporary Internet Files directory which you can't get to unless you type it in manually or use a program that doesn't go through the Windows UI to access it. It also keeps even more of your history in another similar directory structure somewhere else in your user folder in Documents and Settings that I don't remember offhand. Useful if you want to get back something you downloaded a while ago but deleted. Though a side effect, at least from what I've seen, is that actually trying to protect your browing history privacy is like trying to clean up gravel that's been spilled in tar. Even if you get all of whatever it is you're trying to protect out of this horrid mess, you'll find URLs you went to hidden all over your registry. Sort of frightening actually.)
3. Directory Snoop (I forget the URL but you can Google it, Briggs Softworks) - A wonderful file recovery/disk search utility. It's a very good undeleter which I have used many times when I realized I recycled something days or weeks ago that I could have used - if something else hasn't written over the memory you can get your file(s) back in perfect condition. You can also do hex-level searches on files or directories which I have used on occasion when Agent Ransack didn't find something I was looking for - you can even do what seems to me to be a complete surface scan of your HD for a certain string of data. I used this a few weeks ago at work when I had recycled an important piece of code and Windows had written over the beginning of the cluster the file used to be on and got back almost all of it. In addition, it is a ridiculously fast indexing and file viewing/searching utility that gets the ENTIRE directory structure of your computer and all filenames in it, deleted or not, really really quickly. I seem to have had anywhere from 100000-1000000 files on the hard drives I've used this on and it loads the index in under a minute and does reordering by name, date, size, etc. in seconds. (!)
(As another aside, it also performs Department of Defense/Guttman disk wipes of sensitive info for those truly paranoid people out there, or at least it claims to. Out of interest when I noticed the messy trail of Internet info Windows shits all over your hard drive I did a little more privacy research. Deleting files and even reformatting your hard drive does relatively little about the physical state of your hard drive's magnetic media, and someone with the right equipment can physically read your drive's magnetic surface and extract a disk image. Even writing it over with random data doesn't protect your data against this, because drives actually contain sort of like magnetic "echoes" of earlier data written. I didn't really read too much of the whitepaper I looked at, but it seemed to me like writing to your hard drive is like writing in pencil on a piece of paper - you can erase the marks but the indentation of your pencil presses is still there. Though since I have no business whatsoever trying to be learned in this subject that may be a bad example. DoD/Guttman disk wipes write multiple passes of data in particular patterns that are specifically designed to make it as hard as possible to extract anything from those echoes. Seemed to me kind of like scribbling hard all over the pencil indentations from my earlier example, to make it harder to decipher the writing, but if you actually are interested in this stuff please do go read it yourself and don't take my possibly wildly incorrect descriptions as fact. Anyway, doing a full wipe will theoretically protect your former data from anyone short of, say, the CIA, who apparently have stuff that reads infinitesimal bits of magnetism from the palimpsest that once was your hard drive. Since as far as I know none of us are doing international espionage this is rather more fun as kind of an intellectual exercise than a study in practicality, but I still thought it was interesting.)
4. I just stumbled upon this software today so I don't know if it's really actually good or not, but it's called Internet Download Manager, which replaces the shitty Internet Explorer download functionality with something that has a high-90's-percent chance of resuming your connection-dropped download instead of the roughly 30% that I seem to enjoy (/sarcasm) with IE. Looks like it keeps a well-maintained download directory structure too though I haven't used it and can't vouch for it. I didn't even know download managers existed prior to today, so there may be a better one than this out there. But I'm mentioning this particularly because of a trick I found, which is that if you DO have a dropped large-file download that IE develops amnesia about (in other words, it makes you start over at the beginning instead of resuming where you left off) you can do something really clever to get it back. All temporary downloads from IE get stored in that Temporary Internet Files directory structure I was talking about earlier and with a good file-search utility (like Agent Ransack) you can find where the partial file was if you can remember the filename. Then if you start downloading the file again from the beginning using Internet Download Manager, IDM will create a temporary directory that it stores the download file in. Cancel the download, overwrite the file in this directory with the one from Temporary Internet Files, and resume the download, and IDM will actually pick up just where you left off. This just now recovered about four hours' worth of data I would have had to get over again (I'm downloading a mammoth file using a dialup connection that IE crapped out on.)
Anyway, I kind of wanted to start a thread for tricksy Windows stuff. If anyone else knows any good utilities/tricks we could really get a good information base going. I will make Windows my bitch.</div>