Clerks BLAH!

Figure 1

Launchy is a really cool program that not only saves you valuable time, effort, and screen real estate, it also looks really cool.  it’s design is simply to launch a specified program simply by typing the name of it.

With Launchy, to launch an app, you press the desired keystroke (default -> ALT-SPACE) to launch the main Launchy menu (Figure 1) and simply start typing what you are looking for. as you can see from the image, by just typing the letters “ama” the suggestion to run the Amarok application has come up. Then when you press the enter key the selected application loads and the Launchy app goes back into idle mode.  When it is in idle mode it just hangs out in the background waiting to be launched again.  Out of sight, and saving all that valuable screen real estate that the Windows Start menu takes up!

So now you can hide that Windows bar, with confidence that you don’t have to rely on it so heavily!

Launchy is available from: http://www.launchy.net/

MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD-Rom is an amazing little program that runs in your system tray, uses very little resources, and allows you to take a disk image and turn it into a virtual CD or DVD drive.

This is great because most netbooks don’t have a CD or DVD drive.  This would allow you to creat or download a disk image of an application CD or DVD, and use it like it was a physical disk inserted into the computer. When you mount an image through the tray icon (pictured) it becomes a drive listed in your “My Computer” icon, just like any other drive.  It loads, and works just like a CD would.

There are various free programs available that will allow you to create a disk image out of any CD or DVD.  A great one, that I recommend is called ISO Recorder (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm).  You simply tell it what CD or DVD you want to turn into an .iso file and it does the work for you.  Therefore you could take the newest game you bought, and create an .iso file out of it;s install disk, copy it to a memory card or flash drive, mount it on your netbook and run it just like you had a drive installed onthe machine.

It is compatible with a LARGE number if disk images:

• BIN              (CDRWin)
• IMA/IMG          (Generic disk images)
• CIF              (Easy CD Creator)
• NRG              (Nero – Burning ROM)
• IMG/CCD          (CloneCD)
• MDF/MDS          (Fantom CD)
• VCD              (Farstone Virtual Drive)
• VaporCD          (Noum Vapor CDROM)
• P01/MD1/XA       (Gear)
• VC4/000          (Virtual CD)
• VDI              (Virtuo CD Manager)
• C2D              (WinOnCD)
• BWI/BWT          (BlinkWrite)
• CDI              (DiscJuggler)
• TAO/DAO          (Duplicator)
• PDI              (Instant Copy)

Enjoy this free program!

VideoLAN VLC Media Player is a lightweight movie and music player that supports nearly any file format, and does NOT require the addition of any Codec, or driver files to make it work.

Some of the formats that VLC support are:

3GP,[17] ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid/.midi),[18] QuickTime, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB.
Video formats, Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3,[19] MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo 3&4[20], Sorenson (thus enabling direct playback of the modified Sorenson H.263 encoded videos downloaded from YouTube), Theora, VC-1,[21] VP5,[21] VP6,[21] WMV, AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR,[17] DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC, MACE, Mod, MP3, PLS, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio,[23] Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack,[24] WMA.

the program also works amazingly well on a netbook, because it is so lightweight and it uses minimal system resources.  The full package is just over 17MB, and is distributed as Open Source software, so you can also download and compile your own copy, if you want.

The FREE Windows version can be downloaded from here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html