Joseph C. Avakoff, M.D., J.D.

Medical Legal Matters

Here are a couple of programs which I have found quite useful.

The URL's where you can get them are below, along with a brief description.

There are a large number of free programs at the PC Magazine site:  http://www.pcmag.com/

Startup Cop is one of my favorites.

Startup Cop

http://www.pcmag.com/

Take Charge of Windows Start-up!

Startup Cop controls which programs Windows launches at start-up.

By Neil J. Rubenking

When Microsoft Windows starts up, before you've launched your first application, there are already quite a few programs running--as many as several dozen! Where do they all come from? You're probably familiar with the StartUp menu, which is under Programs in the Start menu. Any shortcut in the StartUp menu will be launched automatically when Windows starts. Windows also looks in six other locations for programs to be launched at start-up. In case a start-up program from anywhere on your system causes trouble, you can use Startup Cop to disable it temporarily. You can save a list of programs to be disabled or enabled as a "profile", and save these profiles as desktop shortcuts that can optionally restart Windows.

Startup Cop runs under Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0. The Delphi 4 source code for Startup Cop is provided with the utility for those interested in seeing how it works.

Neil J. Rubenking, the author of Startup Cop, is a contributing technical editor of PC Magazine. Sheryl Canter is the editor of the Utilities column, and a contributing editor of PC Magazine.

You can find the program under "Downloads," "Free Utilities."

Another great utility from PC Magazine :::

Tray Magician

http://www.pcmag.com/

By Ignacio Alvarez

Is your system tray so full of icons that there's no room for your taskbar buttons? Tray Magician can hide the system-tray icons so you can more easily read the buttons on your taskbar.

To make the system tray reappear, simply place the mouse cursor at the edge of the taskbar where the system tray is hidden. If you need to, you can use Tray Magician's context menu to disable the program without unloading it.

Tray Magician also adds another useful feature to Windows. It lets you move a window by clicking and dragging anywhere inside it, not just on its title bar.

Tray Magician was written by Ignacio Alvarez, and first appeared in PC Magazine December 14, 1999 (v18n22). Source code is included.