Do you know you can download free utilities from Microsoft to enhance your experiences on desktop? Check out these three utilities: Alt-Tab Replacement, Virtual Desktop Manager and Image Resizer. They are pretty useful. I like Alt-Tab Replacement, it adds a preview screen on the task switching window, able you to view the current content and status of the window before switching:
RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer – Are you a serious photographer? Now you can organize and work with digital RAW files in Windows Explorer (much as you can with JPEG images). This tool provides thumbnails, previews, printing, and metadata display for RAW images.
ClearType Tuner (New) – This PowerToy lets you use ClearType technology to make it easier to read text on your screen, and installs in the Control Panel for easy access.
HTML Slide Show Wizard (Updated) – This wizard helps you create an HTML slide show of your digital pictures, ready to place on your Web site.
Open Command Window Here – This PowerToy adds an “Open Command Window Here” context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.
Alt-Tab Replacement – With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.
Tweak UI – This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more. (Version 2.10 requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2003.)
Power Calculator – With this PowerToy you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions.
Image Resizer – This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
CD Slide Show Generator – With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show. The Generator works downlevel on Windows 9x machines as well.
Virtual Desktop Manager – Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.
Taskbar Magnifier – Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.
Webcam Timershot – This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate.
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP – [Microsoft PowerToys via Lifehacker]
