Tiny Utilities : Small is Good – VI

Time for another edition of Tiny Utilities : Small is Good. In each edition I review 3 tiny but extremely useful freeware. Do check out the previous editions if you missed them.

For a software that’s smaller than 400kB, XNeat Windows Manager is incredibly feature packed. Here are some of the things it does –

Allows you to re-arrange the taskbar buttons (ala Taskbar Shuffle).
Allows you to pin a window i.e. make it always appear on top.
Allows you to send any taskbar button to the system tray. This is a very handy feature, if you do a lot of multitasking, as this prevents the taskbar from getting crowded.
Allows you to make any window transparent (opacity can be set to any value between 0 and 100).
Allows you to hide a window. A hidden window can be restored via the taskbar context menu or Hot Menu.
Replaces the default Task Switcher (Alt+Tab) in Windows XP and Vista (Flip3D) with something similar to Expose (found in OSX) which is much more intuitive and productive.
Adds a hot menu (accessible via Win+Space hotkey) to quickly launch and switch between programs.
Modifies the “Save As Dialogue”. Adds a Date button which appends the date to the file name. Additionally when you try to save a file with same name as an existing file you get a clone option. This appends a number to the file and saves it.

The extensive feature list along with it’s incredibly small memory footprint makes XNeat Windows Manager a must have software.

Download XNeat WIndows Manager (373 KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows XP , Vista 32 bit
Version Reviewed : 2.5.0.85

Startup Delayer attempts to prevent the customary slowdown experienced immediately after login into your account. When Windows loads its startup files, it attempts to load every application at the same time. This creates a resource crunch and make your system lag. Startup Delayer allows you to load applications sequentially. You can specify how many seconds after login should an application be loaded. Since applications are launched sequentially (one after the other), the resource crunch is avoided and your system becomes responsive as soon as your login.

Download Startup Delayer (996 KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
Version Reviewed : 2.3.130

I had reviewed QT Addressbar in the previous edition of Tiny Utilities. It allowed you to replicate the breadcrumbs navigation found in Windows Vista in XP. With Xentient Thumbnails you can replicate another handy feature found in Windows Vista. Instead of displaying generic icons Xentient Thumbnails displays the content of the image file as icon. Most popular image types including JPG, JPE, JPEG, JP2, J2K, GIF, PNG, BMP, WBMP, EMF, WMF, PCX, PBM, PGM, PNM, PPM, RAS, TIF, TIFF, and TGA are supported.

Download Xentient Thumbnails (729 KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP.
Version Reviewed : 1.0.2