An Easier Way to Share Print Screens

If you’re a tech savvy like myself, you’ve come across the annoyance of having to
do the tedious process of sharing a print screen with others. While some mediums to conquer them with live feeds such as Skype or Join.Me, sometimes you just want to share a snapshot and send it to someone else (or many others for that matter) with ease. A very good program to conquer this is LightShot. This very lightweight program, when running, replaces the usual print screen function and allows for the user to effortlessly upload their screenshot to a free hosting site, from which you can quickly share with others in a matter of seconds and saves massive amounts of time. But this is not the only option available to the user. On the pressing of the print screen button, LightShot will show an overlay, in which the user can adjust the size of the capture area, along with other things to do with their image, such as saving it to the computer instead. On top of this, the program also allows for the screenshot to be edited in their online photo manipulation site, in order to add things such as highlights and text. It is a great program and only takes a few minutes (if that), to download and install!

Rating: A* A B C D E F… G?

Link to program: www.prntscr.com

Review: Windows Speech Recognition

As of late, I have been experimenting with an essentially hidden feature that lies inside of Windows 8. It was present in Windows 7, but has been expanded upon in the more recent versions of Windows. This “hidden” feature is ‘Windows Speech Recognition‘. Much like Apple’s ‘Siri’ for their mobiles and tablets, W.S.R. allows for the user to control their device via speech. The user will say something, and then the computer will act accordingly, and is great for those who are lazy (like myself) who just want to get around their computer without having to reach to their keyboards, or mice. W.S.R. does not only control the computer, but it also allows for the user to dictate: take for example, a Word document to user wants to edit. Instead of having to type their document, said user can simply speak into their microphone and the program will attempt to type out what you had said to it. The program is actually surprisingly accurate and can understand many accents and dialects.

However, the program does not come without flaw. As much as you can navigate the computer basically, when it comes to more advanced operations, Windows Speech Recognition just does not cut the cheese. For example, the program does not have the ability to navigate webpages, which I think is its biggest problem. It only recognises control elements; meaning it can only use buttons, text fields and menus etc. that are part of the program’s interface itself, and it cannot recognise elements on a page. Considering I spend a lot of time on the internet instead of using actual applications, it isn’t really that useful. Sometimes, it’s just better off to use the mouse when navigating, which I believe is a shame.

Pros:

• Effortless navigation
• Dictation is very accurate and is good for those who cannot be bothered to type and just want to say what they want in their documents etc.
• Is very fast in analysing your commands/dictations.

Cons:

• Can be very tedious
• Does not support navigation of web-pages
• Depends heavily on the quality of your microphone; cheap ones, and ones that come with laptops for example may not be picked up well by the program.

I really like the idea of W.S.R. and in some case is very useful, however, in a lot of situations the program is just too tedious to use and you’d be better off just doing it the normal way.

Rating: A* A B C D E F… G?

c-grade: It’s pretty good.

The Hard-Drive Spy Tool

(for Windows only)
Sometimes, your hard-drive has some secrets hidden inside which slow down your computer to a standstill. As I myself have been experiencing these problems recently, I came across a program which allows you to view the space hoggers lurking in the depths of your HDD.

The program in question is WizTree. The program will scan a hard-drive you select and it will show you what and where large files are stored; even giving you percentages to how much of its parent it uses. For example: say my hard-drive had a capacity 100GB. A folder on it could be 50GB- therefore showing that this folder uses 50% of its parent, the hard-drive. But, for the individual files inside the folder, the parent for them would be the folder that contained them.

The program does this seamlessly and extremely quickly; no matter the processor speed or the amount of data stored on your hard-drive. Give it a few seconds and the program is done. From there it inherits standard Windows Explorer features, allowing you to modify, delete and move these files.

I highly recommend this software if you are going through problems with computer speed and are not sure with what the cause is; or if you just want to see what is piling up.

Download Link: http://antibody-software.com/files/wiztree_1_06_setup.exe
Portable Edition: http://antibody-software.com/files/wiztree_1_06_portable.zip

Developer Site: http://antibody-software.com/