Posts Categorised: Misc Software

32Windows Icons: Full list with details, locations & images

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Good qual­ity icons and images, espe­cially ones with an alpha trans­par­ency can be time con­sum­ing to make, and are often also hard to find.  One source of lots of high qual­ity icons in a range of sizes is Win­dows.  Win­dows 7 includes lots of icons which can be use­ful as the major­ity are avail­able in sizes from 16×16 up to 256×256, and come with alpha trans­par­ency.  You may have noticed that we use some on our down­loads page — they’re handy to quickly indic­ate file type. Win­dows stores most of its icons inside exe and dll files which makes them inac­cess­ible to stand­ard image manip­u­la­tion applic­a­tions like Pho­toshop.  How­ever, once they have been loc­ated they can eas­ily be extrac­ted with the free­ware util­ity IcoFX. Track­ing some of them down seems to be the trick­i­er part. Below is a quick ref­er­ence for the loc­a­tions of many of the icons avail­able on Win­dows 7. I will peri­od­ic­ally add more details and any extra icon lib­rar­ies I dis­cov­er to this list.
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0dosboxRunning 16bit Windows apps on Windows 7

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Whilst set­ting up a new laptop with Win­dows 7 x64 recently, I was asked if I could get some old 16bit pro­grams run­ning.  One of these was an edu­ca­tion­al piece of soft­ware called “Mul­ti­me­dia Motion II” by Cam­bridge Sci­ence Media.  This is a win­dows pro­gram that has worked on all pre­vi­ous ver­sions of win­dows up to win­dows XP.  How­ever, Win­dows 7 x64 no longer sup­ports 16bit Win­dows pro­grams, and instead throws the error about being an “Unsup­por­ted 16-bit applic­a­tion”… Read Full Article

0adobe acrobat pdf logoAdding searching of PDF file contents from Windows search

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Win­dows 7 (and Vista) include a search sys­tem that can search not just file names, but the con­tents of files.  Microsoft Office doc­u­ments are all sup­por­ted by default, how­ever PDF files are not.  Adobe provide a plu­gin which is included with Adobe Read­er 9 (and new­er) which enables this func­tion­al­ity.  How­ever a 64bit plu­gin is not included.  Adobe now provide ver­sion 9 of their iFil­ter for x64 64bit sys­tems which is freely downloadable

0Customise Windows 7 install disk

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

This is just a quick post to draw atten­tion to the “RT Se7en Lite” tool which can be used to update, slip­stream, tweak and modi­fy a Win­dows 7 install disk.  A full guide to using the tool for vari­ous dif­fer­ent PC’s is upcom­ing in the next few weeks.  In the mean­time, if you are inter­ested in cus­tom­ising a disk for a HTPC, take a look at this guide on thehtpc.net.

0IcoFX LogoExcellent free icon utility

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Just a very quick post to recom­mend the util­ity IcoFX.  In a nut­shell IcoFX is a free icon extract­or and edit­or.  I was impressed with it because the oth­er free icon edit­ors I tried were unable to sup­port full alpha trans­par­ency, Win­dows 7 x64, or 256 x 256 icons.  IcoFX worked flaw­lessly in all respects.

5Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree anti-virus / anti-malware for Windows Server 2008

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Microsoft are offer­ing a down­load­able Beta of ver­sion 2 of their free secur­ity app Secur­ity Essen­tials.  This works on Win­dows Serv­er.  For any­one (like me) who is using Serv­er 2008 at home (e.g. on a file serv­er) and needs anti-vir­us, I highly recom­mend this.

Update: [int­link id=“96” type=“post”]Version 2 final[/intlink] is now available.