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| Written By Bryan Page, .NET Developer at Rockton Software |
What is in my toolbox?
Input Director
At my desk, I run my laptop and my server each with 2 monitors, jumping between them all used to be a pain. I would either have to run 2 sets of Keyboard/Mice to jump between the two, or install a physical KVM switch to move between the monitors on each machine, which was always a clunky solution. Now thanks to the help of Input Director, I can move between the 2 different environments just as simply as moving the mouse to where I need it to be. It allows the clipboard to move between machines and also allows locking & unlocking all machines at the same time. There are several other similar items out on the market, but I found this to have the easiest setup and also the most reliable from the ones that I have tested.
RDCMan
If you have to manage multiple remote servers at any time, this tool is really hard to beat. It allows you store, group, and organize all of the connection information for each of the servers that you would connect to. You can also provide a friendly name, so that you can easily relate to the server if you don’t like to remember IP addresses.
One Note
I haven’t really been considering Microsoft Office products as part of my toolbox items, as they are part of business machine standards. But I feel that OneNote deserves a special shout out because it is completely overlooked by most. This is really a do everything tool. It allows you to drop notes anyplace in the file page you want, move them, add URL links, links to files, or include the whole file itself and copy in pictures like you would do with a regular notebook, but this is portable and searchable. You can save files up to a Sky Drive or cloud account and then synchronize them with your devices . . . and yes, there is a OneNote app for iPhone/iPad and Android devices, so you can truly take it anywhere and share notebooks with anyone you trust.
One of my favorite features is the screen clipping tool that is included. On Windows machines, if you press the “Windows+S” key, it will gray out the screen and will allow you to highlight the area of the screen that you want to capture, and it will copy an image of just the selected area, automatically. Ultimately, saving a copy in OneNote and placing it on the clipboard if you choose to set it up to do so. I use this feature at least 2-3 times a day since it is so simple to use.
Norton Ghost
Ghost allows you to create a snapshot in time image of your hard drive to a backup device. Not just the operating system, but all of your personal files, settings, and installed programs. The worst feeling in the world is turning on your computer and not having it boot up to the desktop that you stare at each and every day. With Ghost, you can replace the computer or hard drive, or whatever is failing and bring you back to a full working condition in about an hour or two. With how fast things change these days, we can’t afford to be down for an entire day or more while trying to get back to a working state. This is a great tool to relieve a lot of the concern for machine failure, thus, let you focus on getting your job done. Now, we hope that they have the update to Ghost for Windows 8 coming soon.
Bitlocker To Go
For those that travel and carry portable drives with them, this offers a secure way to protect those devices, or more appropriately the data that is on it. With machines that have Windows 7 or later software, Microsoft provided an easy way to protect and encrypt your machines hard drive, but also portable devices in case they are ever lost or stolen. Once enabled, the drive will recognized paired machines so there is not a noticeable difference to the user, but if you try to use it on different machine, you will be required to enter a password, and if it senses unauthorized use attempts, will lock down to a point where it can only be unlocked by an encryption key, which was created when you initially enabled the protection. This is a great way to make sure your portable data is safe.
Notepad ++
This isn’t anything fancy, but there are quite a few times where you get a large text file, and you need to find a specific line, or need to look at an XML or HTML file. Windows built in notepad editor just doesn’t have the power it needs to handle those files properly. This is a lightweight text editor that also has support for many of the coding languages, which gives you inline color representation of different coding tags as well as the ability to expand and collapse sections if applicable.
Pandora
This is one of the many streaming music service that allows you to tailor the music to suit your taste. I’d go stir crazy in my office without having some background noise, so this is great for me. I don’t have to browse through the endless songs in my collection to put together playlists, I just give it a song and it finds similar tunes. I either like it or not, then Pandora refines itself to what I have told it. After a few months of active voting, I don’t have to hardly touch it anymore; it just plays good music all the time. Not to mention the price is right, free!
I hope that you can find something in my toolbox that may make your job just a little easier.
Additionally, I am always up for a hot tip on a different tool that I am missing out on, or if you have something better than what I am using, let me hear it in the comments below because I am constantly looking for tools that would help make my day Simpler and Easier.
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