Vista - Free Software List for Vista

I did a small utility that launches a main program with up to 4 sub programs. When you close the main program, it offers to kill the sub programs. It was done for a request on DonationCoder.com but it's free and seems to work on Vista64 and W7 32 bit.

I call it RunGroup. You can see more details here:

The New Freebie Thread - Page 3 - Digital Video Forums

It can be downloaded from my download page. The link is near the bottom of the page:

Faves Downloads

edit: I added a few tweaks. Latest verson 1.05 has About, Show Readme, and Donate commands in Tray Menu. Also it runs the "tray dead icon clean" routine twice with a short pause inbetween to do a better job of getting rid of the orphaned icons if one or more sub programs happen to have tray icons.

Thank you Brink for this list, I have already downloaded a couple of these!

Sean

thaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks

I found a script on AutoHotKey forum useful for those of us who have the PC under the desk or table and can't see the HD LED easily. The OP is Sean but in his script he forgot to get the keyboard LED status inside the loop where he toggles the Scroll Lock LED. The LED status was only saved at program startup. I posted a fix where I just copy the line where he gets the keyboard LED status inside the loop. You would want to download his .zip file, then substitute my fix, and compile it to .exe using the AHK compiler. Here is the link:

HDD Activity Monitoring LED

As noted in the comment in the script, in XP you may have to manually enable the monitoring, but on my Vista64 and Win7 32 bit machines, it displays the fact that monitoring is available on demand.

Note the line where the timer is set, the value of 500 milliseconds is used. It polls the status and sets the Scroll Lock LED twice per second. I experimented with changing the polling value via command line param, but on my PCs polling more than twice a second caused caps lock state to get confused. Twice per second seems to work well.

There are other HD LED emulators that show an icon in the tray but this is the first free one I've found that works with the keyboard LED. Note it's a do it yourself at your own risk script. I use HP PS/2 old fashioned keyboards. I can't say how it will work with USB or wireless keyboards.

Like anything that tweaks hardware, I'd make sure all was saved and your system is backed up before the initial trial. Just to be cautious.

edit: I added code so that only the state of Scroll Lock is saved and restored, since the user may change Caps Lock or Num Lock while the program is running.
Here's a link to the zip file so you won't have to fix the word wrap from the forum:
http://www.autohotkey.net/~MilesAhea...nitorMAmod.zip

I updated my Tray utility to v. 2.5. It's a simple program to open and close the optical drive tray. It now supports up to 4 optical drives. Unfortunately at present my web server isn't letting me upload anything, but you can get the latest from Softpedia using this link:

Download Tray 2.5 - Simple utility to open and close optical drive tray. - Softpedia

edit: they just got my server back to normal. The page on my site is:

http://www.favessoft.com/downloads.html


just scroll down until you see the Tray screen shot.