Four little utilities to add to your startup queue immediately

I rarely find myself needing to use more than three or four applications at a time, so I have a little bit of RAM to spare on a few small programs that run in the background and provide extra functionality to some aspect of my computer living. The following are my four favorite ones.

1) Zoomit

RAM usage - 1,104 K

Zoomit is more fun than it is functional (I am really really sorry for typing that, but i just cannot delete it now that its there). with various keyboard shortcuts, it allows you to set a 10 minutes work break timer, scribble all over your computer screen in a bunch of different colors, and zoom in so far that you can see the colored pixels surrounding your text (courtesy of ClearType Tuning). It's incredibly fun to use but only in small doses, so its perfect for wasting just a few minutes of time and seeing exactly what your desktop icons look like close up. (In case you were wondering, it looks like this):


2) Xneat Windows Manager

RAM usage - 1,500 K

Installing Xneat is like adding a bunch of capabilities that everyone always thought should be included in XP to begin with. It adds a bunch of options to your right click menu. Among its myriad uses are the ability to change the order of taskbar buttons via drag and drop, assign a window a percentage of transparency, set a window to always be on top, set a window to be transparent to the mouse (i.e. you can click through it), and even the ability to completely hide a window. It's staggering in its functionality yet is very light on resources. It's kinda what's know as a "must have" you know?

3) Unlocker Assistant

RAM usage - 3,496 K

Ever tried to delete, or move, or rename, or generally try to do anything helpful only to have windows give you a nice "F you" in the form of an error message? Well here's a little tool that lets you kick windows back, and it's called unlocker assistant. Anytime you get that irritating error message saying "this file is in use by another blah blah blah haha you suck" unlocker pops up and gives you the option of unlocking the file and then doing whatever you want with it. It is, one might put it, immensely satisfying.

4) Sizer

RAM usage - 3,312 K

Sizer is a utility that adds options to your right click menu to allow you to resize almost any window. This is very helpful for those windows popups that can't be resized and, for some reason or another, keep coming back over and over again because for some reason it didn't get the message the first ten times. Well sizer, because it lets you resize a window to specific pixel width an height, can make these windows virtually disappear. Set one of your presets to 1x1 pixel and the window becomes so small it is completely gone.

Here's a screenshot of the menu showing the Xneat and Sizer additions:

For any of you wondering what the Dexpot option is, it's from a fantastic application that will get its own article soon.