One of the coolest things ever developed for the use of online music files is the concept of Ogg Vorbis tags.  These are tags attached to audio files that allow you to give information to other people that might be using the same file later on to listen.  For example, if you’ve ever seen a file pop up in your Windows Media Player with information regarding the name of the artist, the title of the song, the year of publishing, the CD cover or anything else, what you were looking at was very likely a Vorbis tag!

Well, now you can create and maintain your Vorbis tags through the use of the WinVorbis 1.60 editor.  It is a multi-file editor that really makes the process of encoding and entering tags for a whole CD’s worth of songs as easy as possible.   Not only does it allow you easy editing of the typical artist and title tags, but it also allows you define up to a maximum of six other tags specifically for use with your CD files.   It is about as user friendly as can be and the reason that so many people like it is specifically because it tags music tagging and makes it extremely easy.

Oh and by the way it’s free as well; more information on it can be found at http://winvorbis.stationplaylist.com/

jv16 powertools is an all in one program containing various tools and utilities for your computer. It contains a registry cleaner, file wiper, duplicate file finder and lots more.

The main reason I was trying it out was because the registry cleaner seems to be different from any I’ve ever tried in the past. Apparently it has “Stateful registry cleaning” which is different from most registry cleaners and you can read more on that on this page here.

The numerous other utilities may be useful at times but the interface can be a little confusing, so i wouldn’t recommend this software for those who aren’t too knowledgeable about the inner workings of their pc. But if you’re computer savvy and looking for an all in one solution to some common computer tasks,it’s definitely worth checking out, as long as you know what you’re doing.

Click here for the homepage with the full list of features and detailed info on each one.

kruptos 2 is a powerful freeware application that enables you to encrypt your sensitive data. It uses 128 bit blowfish encryption to encrypt your files or folders which then can only be accessed with the correct password, so that only you can have access to them. You can even select to disguise the newly encrypted files name for further privacy.

One thing it could be used for is USB flash drives and portable storage devices, ensuring that no one can access your private or sensitive data if the drive is lost or stolen. It can also create self decrypting files and includes a file shredding utility.

Check it out at the website here.

One of the things that you need to think about when it comes to maintaining your computer is the software that you are going to use to actually maintain your files. It is important because while a lot of people simply use the Windows Explorer software to do so, Windows Explorer can actually be resource intensive as well as break down at the same time that windows itself does. There are a lot of bugs in Windows Explorer that can make life difficult from time to time and that is why the need for third party software is needed; software like the free to use A43.

A43 is the freeware file manager that many people use instead of Windows Explorer, including all of the people that are lined up to say wonderful things about it. The one real bug it had, which was the cursor problem from version 2.51, has been completely fixed in version 2.52 and now there are really no downsides to using this program. The upsides are of course lack of resources needed to use it as well as no installer necessary.  It is simply a great piece of software and one that you should check out!

More information about it can be found here: http://www.primitus.us/a43/

One of the things that can drive people crazy when they are working in Windows is having to scroll through dozens of different programs before they are able to find the one they want on their taskbar.   There really for the longest time was no good solution to this problem and of course because Microsoft is brilliant at coming up with ways to make problems worse more than they can make them better, they came up with the idea of actually grouping together similar icons on the taskbar to save space.   Of course, while this did save space on the taskbar, the thing that ended up getting worse was the fact that if a person was switching between MSN conversations or browser windows, things just became terrible for them in terms of being able to find the specific window they were looking for.

If this sounds like you and the stress of taskbar space conservation has just become too much, then take a look at TrayIt!   This is an innovative program that has been around for awhile, but has recently gotten a whole lot better.  It allows you to save all of that taskbar space by using a small icon on the system tray for each application instead of the regular rectangular indication of the minimized window that you commonly see.   It is great to use, free and even works with Windows Vista!

More information can be found at http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm

If you’re like, chances are you download a lot of stuff and save a lot of stuff from Microsoft Office programs onto your hard drive. In some cases, you might even have remnants of old folders that were part of an earlier attempt to organize files on your hard drive. I know that at one point I have up to three or four different generations worth of organizational folders on my hard drive and in some cases had the same file saved once in all of them! Redundancy is a bad thing because it can really hamper your ability to save new files onto your hard drive, but if you download Folder Size 1.3, you can figure out where the redundancies might be and cut them down.

With Folder Size 1.3 installed, what you are going to find is that when you highlight a folder, a bar graph will appear with the sizes of all of the folders contained in that folder clearly highlighted for you to see. You don’t have to go to the properties of each folder any more to figure out what is where and ultimately this will make the process of cleaning up your hard drive much easier to do. In addition to that, there are a number of different tasks that are easier now because you can see the size of each folder right away.

More information can be found at the developer’s home page at http://www.rotebetasoftware.com/foldersize.html