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/

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

When you think of .PDF files the first thing that comes to mind is Adobe Acrobat Reader. the typical reader that most computers use to read these files. In an effort to always find faster, slimmer, better programs I discovered a program called GSView.

GSView is a free frontend to the GhostScript application that it’s original intention was reading Postscript files, but has evolved GhostScript into a full featured PDF viewer that is incredibly fast. The typical load times for the application ar a second or 2, and even loading a large – graphically rich – file loaded in a third the time Adobe Acrobat Reader took to load. It even beat Foxit Reader, which is another free PDF reader that is designed to be a more lightweight alternative to Adobe.

To install the reader, you must first install the Ghostscript application (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe for MS Windows) and then install the GSView application (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/ghostgum/gsv49w32.exe also for MS Windows).

A great (and fast) program to get the best out of your netbook!