Recently in Software Category

I love all-in-one utilities that do a bunch of things in as little space as possible.  Aside from allSnap, I recently bumped into another tool that I use as a regular adjunct to my Vista installs: PowerMenu.

PowerMenu adds four things to every single control menu for a window: a priority control, a transparency control, an "Always On Top" function, and a "Minimize to Tray" tool.  That's three or four separate utilities packed into one, and even though PowerMenu was originally written back in 1998 (!), it still runs extremely well with Vista.  Obviously I'd like to see it brought up to date whenever possible, but it works well enough right now that I can recommend it with little hesitation.

For the last month or so, I've been trying to track down a problem I've been having with Apple QuickTime on Vista, and I suspect the whole thing may simply be a fool's errand.

At first, I thought the problem was related to something I've seen reported in a number of circles: QuickTime has not played well on systems that use Intel SATA RAID controllers as the medium from which the content is played back.  Most of the symptoms revolve around playing back HD content: on my end, if I try to play back full 1080 HD content on my system, it drops frames and skips like crazy, and the CPU utilization tops out.  This, by the way, is on a dual-socket Opteron with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB AGP 8X video card.

On a whim, I browsed Apple's QuickTime support forum and encountered a couple of other people having the same issues.  Most of the folks polled were running NVIDIA graphics or disk controllers (my video's ATI), and the one generic suggestion was to switch QuickTime back into "safe mode" (i.e., no DirectX or Direct3D acceleration).  Not one of the changes to that setting made the slightest difference.  Another workaround was to copy the playback media to a non-SATA drive, but this isn't always a possible option.  If you play back QT content in the browser, for instance, it's copied to your local QT cache -- which is by default in your user profile and as far as I know cannot be moved somewhere else.

The problem was reported most egregiously on certain Intel disk controllers (and there's even been a fix supplied for it), but I'm starting to wonder if the same thing goes for other manufacturers as well.  My own system uses a Silicon Image brand controller and has the most recent drivers provided by the manufacturer, so barring a fix from Apple or Microsoft, nothing's going to change.  Actually, Microsoft has already rolled out a pre-SP1 patch for Vista that addresses a problem vaguely related to this.  I requested the patch and applied it, but it made no discernible difference.  I tried QuickTime Alternative to see if that made any difference, and as far as I can tell it didn't accomplish a thing.

Then my suspicions started to really ramp up.  Maybe the whole disk issue was a red herring.  I downloaded a number of HD clips in other formats--MPEG-2, VC-1--and guess what, they played back perfectly in Nero ShowTime, in full-screen, with barely 30% CPU usage and no frame drops.  And when I saved the QuickTime file to disc and played it in Nero, it worked perfectly there as well (albeit with higher CPU consumption).  Copying the file to an external IDE drive and playing it back that way didn't make it work any better in QuickTime, either -- but it STILL worked perfectly in Nero.

The only other thing I can think of is that somehow QuickTime is having trouble detecting how to work properly with DirectDraw (despite there being free video players that have absolutely no trouble figuring this out), which would sure explain why changing from DirectX to GDI ("safe") mode didn't accomplish a thing.  Maybe it's stuck in GDI mode for keeps.

For now, my solution is simple: anything I need to play in QuickTime, I just dump out to disk and play through Nero -- at least until Apple bothers to write something for the PC that's halfway viable.

Man!  How could I get this far and not mention Mozy?

Mozy's an online backup service that I profiled for InformationWeek earlier in the year.  I dubbed it the pick of the pack, not just because it works well and has a generous storage policy (2GB for free, and only $5 a month for essentially unlimited storage), but because it's invisible.  You install it, you point out what you want to back up, it runs silently in the background at designated times, and that's it.

I still use Vista's own backup tool to make local offline backups of a lot of stuff, but I use Mozy for the most crucial things: email, documents, etc.  And so far it's saved my bacon at least once.

[Full disclosure: The link I listed above is an affiliate link.  If you sign up with it, I get a little more storage added to my own account.  Everyone who signs up can create such a link to spread the love a little.]

Windows doesn't seem to have (at least not anymore) the native ability to allow windows to snap to the edges of the screen, or to snap-align windows to the edges of other windows.  I like having this feature; I'm a bit of a neatnik when it comes to window edges.  Windows used to have a function that enabled a snapping grid on the desktop, but it no longer does anything.  (It's possible to align desktop icons to that grid, but not window edges.)

Now, the solution: allSnap.  When run, it does exactly what I want: it snaps windows to the edges of other windows, to a predefined grid, and to the edges of the screen.  I love being able to grab a window and stick it somewhere off in a corner and not worry about accidentally having it hang partway out of sight.

The bad news is that allSnap doesn't seem to know how to hook into all applications.  For instance, if I move a Word 2007 window by grabbing and dragging it by the top edge, allSnap doesn't kick in -- in fact, when I use allSnap's handy debug window, it doesn't even have any messages in there, so I can only assume Word's hooking into a different window-management function call than the one allSnap is assaying.  But if I grab Word's window edges and drag them around to resize, it works fine.  Ditto for resizing a Firefox window instance from the grab bar at its bottom right corner, but if I just resize from the window edges it works correctly.

I'm currently running the most recent beta of allSnap, and barring this feature it works wonderfully.  I've also looked at a couple of other programs that do roughly the same thing and will talk about them separately, but this is one of the best simply because it does the one thing I've needed the most, does it unobtrusively, and doesn't cost a dime.

After my last screed about applet junk I received an email from reader Dean Adams, who has created a batch script that performs cleanup on a QuickTime installation by removing everything that doesn't absolutely have to be there.  It's interesting enough that I thought I would share it here, although be warned that it is supplied AS-IS with no warranty.