Sharing Wares #5

Power Rename

Windows 95, Windows NT--Freeware

For me, the upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 a couple of years back wasn't too painful. Everything went relatively smoothly, and the time since then has been pretty okay (considering it is a Microsoft product). One of the most annoying parts of my operating system history is a legacy of my 16-bit past lingering on my 32-bit present. Files from Windows 3.1 or DOS, when imported into a 32-bit OS, have their filenames all in capital letters. This is really annoying. I went out to look for a program to correct this annoyance a while back, and stumbled upon Power Rename, a great piece of freeware which can do that and a whole bunch more. You "write" a renaming script using checkboxes within the program, and execute that script on multiple files at once. This script can convert cases in filenames, search and replace strings, change three-letter extensions, and even increment a number over a batch of files. This saves an infinite amount of time in doctoring the names of your files, and is definitely worth the few minutes to download and the whopping $0 you pay for it.

ThumbsPlus

Windows, MacIntosh--Shareware - $60

Since the advent of the Web, it has been one of man's compulsions to download, download, download. And this downloading is usually dominated by pictures -- clipart, animation, Playboy pictorials, and the cardinal vice of the wired world, web porn. One morning you wake up, and you have 4,000 gif and jpg files in 70 different directories scattered throughout your hard drive. Where's the Kelly Monaco centerfold from the April '97 Playboy? Where's that smut you've been hiding from your girlfriend? Where the heck did you put that little image of Grandpa Simpson? ThumbsPlus is solution to all of your problems. Just open the program, select a folder, and it displays thumbnails of every image file in that directory. Index all of your folders that contain pictures, and in about 30 seconds you can find that action shot of Vinnie Del Negro sinking a jumpshot. Highly recommended for the aforementioned connoisseurs of, um, those, uh, forbidden photographs.

Oscar 8.0

Windows 95--Freeware

Registration numbers? We don't need no stinkin' registration numbers. The underbelly of the Web, the crackz/warez/gamez/serialz/appz/et ceteraz crew, has put together a database of around 1000 registration numbers for pieces of commercial software, a compilation of years of cracking applications and trading serial numbers. Next time you get an illegal copy of a program, or download one from a mysterious FTP server, now there's no reason to fret over getting a registration number to install the app. Without a registration number, you can't install many programs. Without registration numbers, you still have Oscar.

NOTE: PCC does not condone software piracy and is not responsible for actions taken based upon this review.