10 logiciels gratuits a tester #windows via @pierreyvesrevaz #FB

Monitor Energy Saver

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

In 1991 I was working at Microsoft as a programmer, writing programming utilities for use by other programmers, such as a dialog editor used in the development of Word and Excel. I programmed mostly in C for OS/2 (back then that was a Microsoft product, and supposedly the wave of the future). Deciding it was time to learn Windows programming (Windows 3.0 had just come out) I jumped right in and did a graphical version of my old VAX/VMS skiing game for VT100 terminals.

The Master List of New Windows 7 Shortcuts #windows7 #windows

Windows: Looking for a text editor that helps you write text or code and doesn't get in your way? Sublime Text lives up to its name. It's a white-on-black, keyboard-friendly editor chock full of powerful, but unobtrusive, features.
Without digging into the menus, you'll notice from the get-go that Sublime Text is fairly familiar, at least if you're a programmer—white text on a black background, with line numbers and row/column counting in the lower left corner. Jump up to the menus, though, and you'll find a whole lot of power user features if you want them. Macro recording, code helpers and context highlighting, savable text snippets, project organization, extensive layout tools, and more than we've had the time to really dig into this morning.
You could just use Sublime Text for when you need to get writing done and nothing else—it comes with distraction-free full-screen views, and only the "Mini-map" on the far left is showing when you're typing, and that's a fairly handy tool for skimming around your text. Realistically, though, you'll want to take a deep dive into Sublime Text, learn its keyboard shortcuts, and dig into the features that save you time and automate the grunt work of writing.
Sublime text is free to download for trial use; a license for a single user on infinite machines, with free upgrades, is $59. There's seemingly no limit set on the trial, but when you peek around this program, you'll hopefully feel that the designers have earned their keep.
Sublime Text [via Daring Fireball]

Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor's reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed

Use this application to create a Virtual Machine for VMware's VMPlayer.

Moon Secure AV is an opensource antivirus currently using the clamav engine due to fast response time and huge AV database, however we are implementing another engine that is heuristic and will allow users to customize the engine on the fly.

after using the repair option from an XP CD-ROM, Windows Update now downloads and installs the new 7.0.600.381 executable files. Some WU executables aren't registered with the operating system, preventing Windows Update from working as intended. This, in

Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history.

After four years of providing safe, reliable access to publicly available Windows updates, AutoPatcher has been shut down.

The first beta release of XP SP3 will reach testers mid-September, with final availability scheduled for the first half of 2008.

You've just reinstalled Windows from scratch—again—but this time you want to preserve your sparkling clean setup for instant restoration down the road. Instead of dropping cash on Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image, burn yourself a free, bootable Linux-based System Rescue CD. The System Rescue CD includes open source tools GParted and Partimage, which can create a new partition and save your fresh Windows installation as a restorable image for the price of zero dollars. Never stare at those creeping Windows installation progress bars again: With the System Rescue CD, you can have that fresh new Windows feeling any time you need it. Here's how.
What's a partition?A partition separates a section of a physical disk into another virtual drive. When you split a hard drive into two partitions, you're creating a separate disk that your operating system (like Windows), treats as a different drive letter—even though it's the same physical disk. There are several handy uses for creating a separate partition on your computer:
Run multiple operating systems. Want your XP and Vista too? How about diving into Linux? With separate drive partitions, you can install several operating systems and make your choice of what to work in on startup.
Separate data and applications. Keep all your documents, music library, photos and videos on one partition and your operating system and programs on another. The separation makes data backup as well as a fresh operating system reinstall much easier.
Speed up your computer. Most new computers these days come with monstrous-sized hard drives. Separating it into partitions will reduce drive fragmentation and speed up disk reads as you work.
Back up the state of your operating system for easy restoration. Create a mirror image of your operating system and save it on a separate partition so you can restore your computer back to a past state any time in the future.
The last use is what we're setting up today.

What's a disk image?A disk image is a giant file that saves the state of an entire disk. Disk images can re-create an entire disk drive—like the C: drive where you've got Windows installed.

At the end of this tutorial, you'll split your C: drive into 2 partitions, and the second one will contain a disk image of the first. This way, next time you want to wipe your hard drive clean and start fresh with Windows, you can restore your backup image instead of suffering through Windows' tedious installation again.

What you'll needA DVD or CD burner.
The System Rescue CD ISO file. Download it here.
A PC with a good amount of free hard drive space.
A sense of adventure.
Note: Before we begin, know that 1.) there is command line work ahead, and 2.) partitioning an existing hard drive is a risky undertaking that could go all kinds of wrong. Make sure your hard drive is well backed up before you begin.

Let's get started.

1. Burn the System Restore CD. If your CD burner didn't come with Nero or another disk burning utility, grab previously mentioned ISO Recorder to burn your boot CD.

2. Boot from the System Rescue CD. Put the CD in your drive and try booting up your PC. It may automatically start from the CD, but if not, restart again and watch for a message like "Press F2 to enter Setup"—and do so. Once you're in setup mode (your BIOS) you can set the CD as the first drive in the boot sequence. If you haven't done this before, see step 2 here for more info.

3. Start up the System Rescue CD. Once you've booted onto the CD, type the following command to start the graphical user interface:

rescuecd doxdetect dostartx

That command tells the CD to detect your video adapter type and start the X window system. Note: The System Rescue CD supposedly auto-detects your video setup, but when I ran the boot command without doxdetect, my screen was all flickery and didn't render windows correctly. Your mileage may vary.

The CD will load your computer's hardware information. When it prompts you to "Load keymap" press Enter for the default. Once X is loaded, your X window desktop will look like this (apologies for the crappy screenshot):

4. Create a new partition with GParted. The Gnome Partition Editor (GParted) application is the third button down on the right-hand-side menu just above the Terminal. Double-click to launch it. GParted is a powerful partition editor that lets you shrink, expand, split, create and format partitions without disturbing the operating system already installed on a disk. We've already covered how to use GParted before if you're interested in more partitioning goodness.

At first you'll see a single partition within GParted—this is Windows' C: Drive. Right-click on it and choose "Move/Resize." From there, use the slider to shrink the main partition, making room for your new, secondary partition.

Words of warning: When I entered the exact number of MB for a 10GB partition, GParted moved the current partition to the right a bit on the drive. You can drag and drop it back to start at the beginning of the physical drive so you wind up with only 2 partitions, not 3.

In the end I freed up about 12GB of space for my secondary partition (12.07 to be exact), but you can make yours any size that works. You want to have enough space for your Windows drive images, and Windows took up about 12GB for me. (Your disk images will be compressed, but better safe than sorry.) Hit the Apply button to start the partition-resizing. Depending on how large your drive is, this can take awhile—and by awhile, I mean possibly all night and/or day.

When you're done, you'll see an area denoting "unallocated space" on the disk. Click on that and from the Partition menu choose "New." Set the new partition file system to NTFS. Then, right-click on the new partition, and choose Format To>ntfs in order to make the secondary partition usable. Hit Apply to execute the action. Finally, you'll have 2 partitions displayed on your disk map in GParted.

5. Mount the secondary partition. Now it's time to put your new partition to work. Switch to the Terminal and type the following to make the secondary partition available:
ntfs-3g /dev/hda2 /mnt/windows

Now you can read and write to the disk. Let's make a folder to save our disk images, with:

mkdir /mnt/windows/winrestore

That will create a folder on your second partition called "winrestore." We'll use that space in the next step.

6. Image your Windows drive to the new partition. Now we can move into the second tool in this process, Partimage. Start it by simply typing partimage in the Terminal. Partimage's interface is old-school blue background with white text but it works the way you'd expect. First you'll see your two partitions listed. Select /dev/hda1 (your C: drive) to image, and enter a name for the image files, like windowsxp-clean.partimg. Make sure the option for "Save partition into a new image file" is selected (it is by default).

Hit the F5 key to continue to the next screen. Here you can select all the defaults (Gzip image files, enter descriptions, split files into 2GB's each, etc.)

Hit F5 to continue. Partimage will ask you to enter an image description (like "Windows XP Clean Installation" and then it will warn you that its NTFS support is experimental. We're adventurers, so we're OK with that. Hit the OK button to start the imaging process, which can take a good amount of time, depending on how big your C: partition is.

After a bit of work, Partimage will tell you it's out of disk space and ask where to save the image files. Here enter the path to the folder we created in the previous step: /mnt/windows/winrestore.

Once Partimage finishes doing its thing, you'll get the success message we all want at one point or another in our lives:

6. Boot into Windows and admire your new image files. Once you're done you can restart your machine sans the System Rescue CD and boot back into Windows. On my first reboot, Windows sensed its innards had been messed with and it ran a checkdisk which went fine. Back in trusty Windows Explorer, you'll see 2 hard drives instead of one—and your new drive will contain a folder called "winrestore" which is full of 2GB disk image files.

Next time your Windows install gets gummed up and you want to start fresh, boot into the System Rescue CD, start Partimage and choose "Restore partition from an image file" and you'll be golden.

Update: One important thing to know: Partimage's image files are not mountable and browsable the way Norton or Acronis images are. As far as I know, the image has to be completely restored to disk to access files within it. (Thanks to the commenters who brought this up.)

What's your favorite way to image an operating system or manage partitions? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Jim Sheafer for mentioning the System Rescue CD.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, hopes to never have to reinstall Windows on this PC again. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

The popular BitTorrent application uTorrent may be Windows-only at the moment, but weblog Simplehelp has a step-by-step guide for installing uTorrent in OS X using freeware application Darwine (the Mac port of the Wine project). The guide walks through what's actually a very simple process, and when you're finished you should be able to use uTorrent for all of your BitTorrent downloads. This method will also work just as well for some other Windows applications, but it won't do everything. Alternately, if you're already running Windows in Parallels, you can set Windows programs like uTorrent as defaults on your Mac.

How to install uTorrent in OS X [Simplehelp]

How many times have you wished Notepad had tabs, Paint supported layers or Windows Explorer let you bookmark frequently-used folders? Power users need power utilities, and Windows' default system programs barely get the job done. Over time third-party developers have stepped up and built superior replacements to programs like Notepad, Paint, Windows Explorer and the Command Prompt. Get the simple jobs done smarter, faster and more efficiently with some of the best Windows utility power replacements - all of which are free downloads.
Built-in: Notepad
Power replacement: Notepad++
What you get: Tabbed, multiple document windows and support for lots more beyond plain text - like HTML and other programming languages, with code and markup collapsibility and plugins. Free and open source.

Built in: Windows Explorer
Power replacement: Xplorer2
What you get: What don't you get? Three-panel tabbed interface, the folder set bookmarking and full FTP support to name a few features. See more on replacing Windows Explorer with Xplorer 2. Free version available with paid upgrade.

Built in: Paint
Power replacement: Paint.NET
What you get: Open multiple images in one window and edit image layers, remove red eye and Ctrl+Z to your heart's content with a history of undoable actions. Freeware.

Built in: Alt-Tab
Power replacement: Alt-Tab PowerToy
What you get: Dynamic window previews (versus the plain old application icon) for more informative switching. Free download from Microsoft.

Built in: Taskbar date and time
Power replacement: QuickMonth
What you get: A monthly calendar pops up directly from the taskbar just by hovering over it with your mouse, avoiding the "Adjust date and time" click. Freeware.

Built in: Add/Remove Programs (in Control Panel)
Power replacement: Revo Uninstaller or My Uninstaller
What you get: Fast one-click program removal that scrubs all traces of the software from your system. Both are free.

Built in: Start menu and Run box
Power replacement: Launchy
What you get: Start programs, web site URL's, run commands or open documents from the Launchy, er, launcher. See more on how to take Launchy beyond application launching, tweak Launchy to your liking and run terminal commands in Launchy.

Built in: Task manager
Power replacement: Process Explorer
What you get: Get more information about that process that's hanging your PC with Process Explorer, which lists which DLL's tasks use and offers a handy Google search for a process name within its interface. Freeware.

Built in: Wifi network detector
Power replacement: NetStumbler
What you get: When Windows' built-in wireless network detector is slow - or simply not seeing the network everyone sitting around you can - grab NetStumbler, which can even detect networks that don't broadcast their SSID, with signal strength and encryption status.

Built in: Command Prompt
Power replacement: Cygwin (for Unix interface) or PowerShell
What you get: More commands - and more familiar commands, for those of us who work on *nix platforms when we're not on Windows - are available in the Cygwin Unix emulator and Microsoft's own new PowerShell command prompt apps. Wanna get good with Cygwin? Check out our tutorials: part 1, part 2, and part 3. Cygwin users should also check out Poderosa for tabbed terminal fun. Both are free downloads.

Built in: Windows Task Scheduler
Power replacement: Xecutor
What you get: Manage your startup and shutdown as well as scheduled tasks while your PC is on. Free download.

Built in: Windows Explorer archive extractor
Power replacement: 7-Zip or ALZip
What you get: Windows can only handle vanilla .zip files on its own, but 7-Zip and ALZip can extract and bundle any kind of archive file you throw at it. Free.

Built in: Windows Explorer file copy operation
Power replacement: TeraCopy
What you get: Speedier, pausable, practically fail-proof file copying, especially useful when you're transferring huge sets of files between folders. Free.

Built in: Defrag
Power replacement: JkDefrag GUI
What you get: Scheduled defrags, file optimization, and the option to include/exclude directories, plus a screensaver that visualizes your defrag when your PC is idle and hasn't been defragged for a user-defined amount of time. Free.

Built in: Calculator
Power replacement: Power Calculator
What you get: Graph and evaluate functions, and perform conversions in this mathlete's dream calculator.

On a Windows tweaking tear? Check out our previous features, Top 10 free Windows downloads and Top Windows tweaks.

What are your favorite Windows utility power replacements? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, wants all her toys to be power toys. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

The Indie Tribune weblog gives the skinny on how to re-theme Windows XP to look like Ubuntu Linux. Not a whole lot of productivity with this tutorial, but it is thorough. The tutorial demonstrates how to replace practically every aspect of Windows to make it resemble Ubuntu starting with the theme and rolling through the boot screen, logon window, icons, explorer theme, and the Firefox theme. This'll give you the look of Ubuntu without giving up Windows. Thanks, JuventusCadillac!

How To Make Windows look like Ubuntu Linux [The Indie Tribune]

Windows only: Freeware application Jpeg Enhancer attempts to restore low-quality JPEG images mired by artifacts and blotchy pixelization to a better state.

To be perfectly honest, I don't imagine that there are many cameras these days that are creating many real JPEG compression problems (and those who care probably shoot in RAW), but I've actually got a handful of pictures from my first less-than 1 megapixel camera that could potentially find some good use with an app like this. Your results may vary (don't expect to go from blotchy to crystal clear), but it is a very simple tool that anyone could use to try improving low-quality images. Jpeg Enhancer will cost you an email address, Windows only. If you've had luck with a different simple tool, let's hear about it in the comments.

Jpeg Enhancer [via Freeware Genius]

Windows/Mac/Linux: Freeware app TheLastStream saves and parses Last.fm streams into MP3s. But that's not all! It also automatically downloads album art, assigns ID3 tags, creates playlists, and organizes recordings according to artist, album, and track.

TheLastStream requires that you have a Last.fm account (it's free if you don't), and is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The Last Ripper [via Cucirca.com]

Corel WordPerfect Lightning is a new kind of free word processing and note-taking software from Corel that fills a gap between today's existing desktop and Web-based productivity tools.

3. Antivirus Vista does not bundle an antivirus application, and most third party antivirus applications are not yet compatible with Vista.

Go to Start > Run > and type in eudcedit - this will open up a font editor - allowing you to design your own custom fonts and characters to be used in things like MS Word.

CyberDefenderFREE 2.0 - The All-Free Internet Security Suite. Effective against Spyware, Viruses, Malware, Trojan virus, Adware, Phishing scams, Spam, and Backdoors.

Future Licenses: By using Windows Vista, you agree to not only this license, but to any future revisions to this license. You also agree to any future licenses for other products from Microsoft, whether or not you actually purchase them, and to any revisi

Among other things, Samurize displays a constantly-updated text file right on your computer desktop, no text editor or command shell required, for quick and easy visual reference.

Function keys that can be used at command prompt

Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications.

The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information and Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006.

Danger from the deep (aka dangerdeep) is a Free / Open Source World War II german submarine simulation.

windows in general has been like a confused and slow person. vista is like a person who lost their meds and is trying their best to ignore the voices