Revisiting Some Windows PowerToys

After doing some research on my AutoPlay and autorun.inf questions earlier I was reminded about some of the features that are available for tweaking your Windows XP install with the PowerToys applications like TweakUI.

Here’s a quick reminder about some of the other tools that are available:

• Color Control Panel Applet: Professional-level photographers and designers know that getting consistent, accurate color from file to screen to print and beyond is a requirement for great results. This new tool helps you manage Windows color settings in one place.
• SyncToy: With new sources of files coming from every direction (such as digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops), SyncToy can help you copy, move, and synchronize different directories.
• RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer: Are you a serious photographer? Now you can organize and work with digital RAW files in Windows Explorer (much as you can with JPEG images). This tool provides thumbnails, previews, printing, and metadata display for RAW images.
• ClearType Tuner: This PowerToy lets you use ClearType technology to make it easier to read text on your screen, and installs in the Control Panel for easy access.
• HTML Slide Show Wizard: This wizard helps you create an HTML slide show of your digital pictures, ready to place on your Web site.
• Open Command Window Here: This PowerToy adds an "Open Command Window Here" context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.
• Alt-Tab Replacement: With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.
• Tweak UI: This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.
• Power Calculator: With this PowerToy you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions.
• Image Resizer: This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
• CD Slide Show Generator: With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show. The Generator works downlevel on Windows 9x machines as well.
• Virtual Desktop Manager: Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.
• Taskbar Magnifier: Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.
• Webcam Timershot: This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate.

Some of the ones that I’ve already enjoyed and played with before are the TweakUI and ALT-TAB Replacement, SyncToy, Power Calculator. The Virtual Desktop Manager seems cool and looks like it might be part of what we were looking for when managing virtual workspaces while working on different client locations or projects.

What are you favorite Windows tweaks and toys. Have you used PowerToys before?

Image: Windows PowerToys icon from the PowerToys website