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Sometimes you just have to know where a particular file is. Whether you're looking for a document or trying to tell somebody else where to find an image, the path to a file uniquely identifies an item on your machine. You can use Windows Explorer to drill down through the directory structure of your hard drive and find that file, but then it's tricky to tell anybody else where you found it. And heaven help you if you need to access that location via a Command window. There's got to be an easier way to take that information and use it.

ClipboardPath is a tool of one use, but it fulfills that requirement well. Once it's installed on your machine, all you need to do to capture a file's full path is to browse to that file, right click on it, and select "Copy Path to Clipboard." Once it's there, it behaves like any other clipboard entry. Paste it into Notepad; stick it in a Command window; paste it into a document; just go nuts. And for a real thrill, hold down the [Ctrl] key while you're grabbing a mapped network path, and it will convert that mapped address into a UNC path (the kind that looks like \\server\share\file….) instead.

You can grab a copy of ClipboardPath for free. It's a Windows application.

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Backups. What can you say: you've gotta' do 'em. If you're just archiving your personal stuff, it's pretty easy. Make a copy. Store it someplace else. Automate it so you don't forget. Got a small network? That's still doable, although a bit more complicated. A bigger network? Now that's not going to come without some pain. Let's try to keep the discomfort to a minimum.

Amanda is a free, open source, backup solution. It's not something you're going to use for just your personal stuff, since there's servers involved, but if you've got a bunch of machines to watch over, it may be worth a try. You install the server piece on a Linux box—it needs to use tar, awk, Samba, and Perl—and then a client app on each machine you want to back up. There's a client available for Windows, Mac (OS X), and all sorts of other Unix-like systems. It boasts an easy, well-documented setup process, and gives you the option of backing up to disk or tape, or even both at the same time. And since it uses tar and other native tools, if everything goes sideways, you can still restore without Amanda being available.

You can grab a copy of Amanda for free. They've also got paid versions available if you want to save your backups in the Cloud.

Download Amanda

If you're running several apps on your Windows system, you know it's easy for things to get complicated and messy. Icons and windows scattered all over the place, taskbars and menus thrown here and there. And if you're lucky, you might even find the applications you want to work with. What a mess. So how are you going to clean things up?

Iconize can take any application and stick it in the System Tray. Just right-click on any app and choose to send it to the Tray. A quick double-click restores your program to its previous size, so you're always ready to go. No sense taking up a bunch of room for applications that are just "hanging out"; fire 'em up when you really need them.

Iconize is a free download. It's a Windows app, and should run just fine on anything from Win98 up through Windows 7.

Download Iconize

Back in the day when computer keyboards were these big hulking things that took up half of your desktop, there were all kinds of indicator lights that let you keep track of the state of your CapsLock, NumLock, and ScrollLock keys. We never could figure out what the purpose of that last one was, but it must have been important, 'cause it had its own light, right? Fast forward to today.

Whether you're using a laptop or pounding away on a desktop machine with a real keyboard, there's a good chance that you don't have those lights any more. When you start typing, WILL YOU GET ALL CAPS, or will the Powers of Capitalization we with you? Will you be entering numbers, or just moving your cursor around on the screen? And will your scrolling be locked, or will it just be confusing…. Keyboard LEDs is an app that may bring you back a semblance of sanity.

With this free tool, you can display virtual LED lights in your System Tray, or even on your desktop, so that you will know once and for all how your keyboard is going to behave before you hit a single key. Customize its appearance so it will the the most—or least—noticible to you. Set it to start up when Windows does, so you'll never be without.

Keyboard LEDs is a Windows application. You can use it for free at home or in business. And keep an eye on that ScrollLock.

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You put a luggage tag on your suitcase. Your mom wrote your name in your clothes when you went off to camp. But what about your USB drive? Sure, the drive itself probably didn't cost you too much, but the data on there could be priceless. If you misplace it, how will you ever get it back? Maybe through the help of Lost USB Drive.

Lost USB Drive is a tool that lets you put a "please take me home" message on your removable drive. Not unlike pinning a note to a kid's sweater, it asks whoever finds the missing drive to return it to its owner. Set up as an autorun file, like the autorun.inf you find on CDs and such, it will automatically load when your drive is inserted into a Windows machine. You get to customize your message, so you can add whatever contact information you need to make sure that your missing drive comes home to you, as well as maybe offering a reward for its safe return.

You can download Lost USB Drive for free. It may seem a little complicated to set it up, but the website gives some pretty reasonable instructions to help you through it.

Download Lost USB Drive

How many different types of archive files do you suppose there are? The ability to take a bunch of files and either combine them all together so that they travel as a group (like TAR) or to squish them all into a compact little bundle (like ZIP files) is pretty handy. When you're presented with an archive file that you need to open up, hopefully it's in one of these, or some other commonly-recognized format. Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of lesser-known (and used) formats out there than may not lend themselves to an easy unpacking job. For those, you may need a more robust tool, like Universal Extractor.

Universal Extractor might be likened to a Swiss Army knife, in that it's a tool of a thousand and one uses (or at least a couple dozen). You would probably have a hard time throwing an archive file at it that it didn't recognize, and having done so, it will dutifully extract the contents of that file for you to do with it what you will. What it won't do, however, is to create an archive file. This tool extracts files from an existing archive, but it won't create a new one where none previously existed. You can direct it to extract files to the directory where the archive file resides, or you can point it elsewhere to put your files in a more useful location. It integrates with the context (right click) menu of Windows Explorer, so you can drive it from there, rather than having to fire up a standalone app.

A free download, Universal Extractor is a Windows application.

Download Universal Extractor

Backups are good. Backups are important. Backups can help save your bacon when your system goes down and your data gets eaten. Okay, everybody can probably agree with that. But what about taking it to the next level? What if it's not just the data, but the whole system?

PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost—not the more-common ICMP echo request of Unix fame) is a tool that can help you through the really tough times. Like when your system completely dies. Or maybe when you've got a standard install that you want to use to clone a couple—or a whole enterprise—worth of machines. Since you've burned it to a CD (or DVD), you can boot from that disk and restore your drive, partitions and all. It's smart enough to work with networks, so you can do clones or restores to and from network volumes.

You can grab PING for free, making it much cheaper than a copy of Ghost, and use it with your Windows machine.

Download PING

If you spend your life on Twitter, it might be nice to have a record of your "Tweets". Unfortunately there's no built-in way to do that. Sure, your old posts are always there in your Profile page, but as well all know, sometimes Twitter can have, ummm, issues. The only totally safe way to keep track of what you've Tweeted is to save it yourself.

TwitterBackup is an aptly named application that allows you to do just that. Fire it up, give it your Twitter login credentials, and it will grab a copy of what you've done out there. It saves things off in an XML file on your local drive, so you can access it with any text editor. While it's doing its thing, it performs an "incremental backup", so it only adds newer Tweets to what you've already got backed up.

You can grab TwitterBackup for free. It's a Java application, so you should be able to run it on any system that has the appropriate Java runtime installed on it.

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Is anything ever really the way you want it to be? Sure, maybe you know you've got the perfect peanut butter and banana sandwich recipe (Elvis has left the building), but more often than not, you're always tweaking this and fiddling with that in the quest for that elusive perfection. If you're a computer geek, that goes double (at least). Add this new app, reorganize those files, the list is never ending. Your friends may think it's time for an intervention, but we're going to suggest something else you can use in your tweaking.

BulkFileChanger is a tool that lets you mess around with the dates and times on your files, as well as their attributes. You can adjust the creation, modification, or access time stamps for a single file. or you can grab a bunch of them at one time. In addition, you've got access to Windows' archive, hidden, read-only, and system attributes. If you were on a Unix-y box, it would be like you've combined "touch" and "chmod" and put a pretty face on them. Now you can fiddle to your heart's content.

A free Windows download, BulkFileChanger runs under any flavor of Windows from Win2000 up through Windows 7.

Download BulkFileChanger

If you've got a laptop and actually bring it with you, you know about the challenges of hooking up to different networks at different times. Tweaking your network settings in Windows is not the most user-friendly thing you're going to do today, since there are several different tweaks you must apply, as well as having to reboot your machine to make those changes all go into effect. While it may be a necessary pain in the neck, it is a pain nevertheless.

Free IP Switcher might make your day a little better. Its tabbed interface lets you enter and save configuration information for home, office, school, or any other location you frequent. Choose a fixed IP or let an address be assigned to you via the magic of DHCP. Pick a gateway and DNS settings for each location. You can even set up different computer names and membership in different groups for each location. Configure it to auto-start with Windows and now you don't have to cringe when it's time to plug in to a different network.

You can download Free IP Switcher for, um, free. It runs under Windows (Win2k and later).

Download Free IP Switcher