Computer Wiz Guy DotCom

Folder Size for Windows adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer. The new column shows not only the size of files, but also the size of folders. It keeps track of which folders you view, and scans them in the background so you can see complete size of all files within the folder. It's very useful for cleaning up your disk. Once you get used to having that information available, a directory listing simply looks incomplete without it!

More information on the project and download information can be found at http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/

Here is a very nice free product that gives administrators the ability to compare files and folders for differences.

This can be very useful if you are not using replication, but would like to have the ability to check folders for inconsistencies this can be very helpful. As an added plus this also has a command line interface so you can script this if needed.

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ComponentSoftware Diff (CSDiff) is a free advanced file difference analysis tool for Windows. Use it to analyze what changes have been made between two revisions of the same file, folder or archived folder. CSDiff is commonly used to analyze program source files, HTML documents and MS-Word documents.

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Here is a nice video that shows what it was like to be the first IT guy.

Netstat displays active TCP connections, ports on which the computer is listening, Ethernet statistics, the IP routing table, IPv4 statistics (for the IP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP protocols), and IPv6 statistics (for the IPv6, ICMPv6, TCP over IPv6, and UDP over IPv6 protocols). This tool is very useful when you are trying to diagnose open connections to other computers.

A good use for this tool is to run this on a computer when you think that the computer may be talking to an unauthorized computer without your knowledge (example : spyware).

If you suspect your computer is making connections to another computer and passing information without your knowledge, you can use this to see which connections/post are currently in use and use this information to try and diagnose the issue at hand.

Occasionally you will need to use FTP and you will not have any software.  I have found these 2 links very useful in diagnosing many problems.

List of FTP commands for the Microsoft command-line FTP client

List of raw FTP commands

I am an avid photoshop user, but you can't afford to have photoshop on every computer you own.  I have started to make the change to GIMP, an open-source alternative. 

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely
distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching,
image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating
systems, in many languages.

This is the official GIMP web site. It contains information about
downloading, installing, using, and enhancing it. This site also
serves as a distribution point for the latest releases. They try to
provide as much information about the GIMP community and related
projects as possible. Hopefully you will find what you need here.
Grab a properly chilled beverage and enjoy.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C# on the Microsoft .Net platform. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site.

The files are saved straight to a folder of your choice in the format you specify or to the clipboard or printer. No more 'Print Screen'... open image editor... paste from clipboard... crop... export. Just double-click the form or press enter, and whatever is visible below the form is captured.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using it's built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

This software can capture Video, Audio, and has a built in editor to allow for captions to the video (if you so choose).

You can download and use it completely free for your personal and commercial projects as CamStudio and the Codec are released under the GPL.

More information and download locations can be found at CamStudio.org