Windows 8 — streamlining the update process

Windows 8 — streamlining the update process

By Susan Bradley

It appears that Microsoft has heard our complaints about a tedious part of the Windows updating process.

Changes in Windows 8 should make the never-ending task of installing patches a bit easier, by reducing mandatory system restarts.

On Feb. 29, Microsoft will reportedly release a Consumer Preview, beta version of Windows 8. It could be the first comprehensive look at what might be the company’s most advanced — and already controversial — Windows yet. But as you probably know, Microsoft has released hints and sneak peaks about Win8 for months now through its Windows 8 engineering blog, “Building Windows 8,” and the Windows 8 Developer Preview released this past September.

From a Windows updating perspective, one of the more interesting Windows 8 tidbits was discussed in the Nov. 14, 2011, Building Windows 8 blog. It reveals a plan to minimize the number of mandatory system reboots that often take place when Windows automatically adds patches. In fact, Microsoft states that in most cases, Windows 8 users should see only one system restart per month — on Patch Tuesday, when all updates have been installed. The exception would be any out-of-cycle critical patches MS sends out between Patch Tuesdays.

In the blog’s historical background on Windows Update, Microsoft provides an interesting peek into how most people install updates. For example (based on Windows users who have opted into Microsoft’s reporting system), 89 percent of Windows 7 users install Windows updates automatically. Of that group, 39 percent use the Install at shutdown option, 31 percent use the Interactive option, and 30 percent use Install-at-scheduled-time.

I’d love to interview that 39 percent and ask them whether they really wanted to install updates at shutdown — or just didn’t notice the Shut down and install updates notification when they turned off their computers. Based on the number of people in various Windows forums that complain about this behavior, I’m convinced few of those folks actually want that option (especially busy notebook users who want to quickly get up and go, then end up cursing Windows when it wants to install a dozen updates before shutting down).

Windows 8 changes updating in two ways. First, Windows Update will consolidate updates that need a system restart (regardless of when they came out during the month) and synchronize that final reboot step with the restarts required by the Patch Tuesday (the second Tuesday of each month) security updates. Secondly, once updates are installed, Windows Update will warn users of an upcoming reboot over three days, via a message in the user sign-in screen (see Figure 1) and within Windows Update (see Figure 2). You should no longer receive those annoying restart popup messages.

Figure 1. Windows 8 will eliminate forced system-reboot popup warnings. A new notification will show up in the sign-in window.

Figure 2. The mandatory reboot warning will also show up in Windows Update.

Windows 8 will give you two new restart options on the lock screen when a reboot is needed: Update and restart and Update and shut down. If you don’t restart the PC within three days, Windows Update will do it for you. To prevent data loss, Windows Update will wait until the next time you sign into the system and warn you that Windows will restart in 15 minutes, giving you time to save your work. Windows Update will also delay the forced restart if you’re running a presentation, game, or movie.

Although it’s clear that Microsoft is trying to minimize the reboots, it unfortunately can’t get rid of them altogether. MS hasn’t come up with a way to turn off services temporarily, patch the vulnerable parts, and restart the services — all without a reboot.

Many aspects of system updating remain in Win8

The overall update process in Windows 8 remains unchanged from previous versions of Windows. Starting with Vista, Microsoft uses a process called Component-Based Servicing (CBS). You see CBS as that power-off message, “Stage 1 of 3, do not shut down your computer.” It’s identifying files, staging them for installation, determining what files are needed, resolving dependencies, and — finally — completing the installation.

CBS is not well documented, as technical architect Greg Lambert noted in a 2008 blog. A Microsoft Ask the Performance Team blog gives a general summary of how CBS works.

Also unchanged is Windows’ use of .NET Framework — Windows 8 will include .NET 4.5. We can hope that version will be better behaved and not give us the patching grief we’ve had with previous .NET updates.

Windows 8 also continues a feature initiated with Vista. Applications that work with the Windows Restart Manager API (more info) can reboot a PC and return to the same pre-reboot state. Unfortunately, most apps don’t use this feature (MS Office 2007 and 2010 are two examples of apps that do).

Windows Component Store, the folder that loves to suck up hard-drive space (discussed in my Aug. 25, 2011, Top Story), is still on Windows 8. However, it looks like Microsoft put it on a diet. On a freshly built Windows 8 test system, it took up 3.68GB of space — a bit leaner than the 5.51GB it occupied on a virgin Win7 installation.

The Windowsupdate.log, which documents updates detected and installed, appears unchanged in Windows 8. The same is true for the Windows Software Distribution folder, which sometimes needs to be reset to fix issues with Windows Update, as noted in MS Help and Support article 822798.

Other Windows Update changes unknown

I’m still waiting to see which Windows Update user-interface changes are in store for us in Win8. The Developer preview was targeted primarily at a tablet experience, which uses the new Metro interface — and thus hid the standard Windows Update control-panel view. The Consumer Preview due out at the end of this month will hopefully offer a more traditional desktop platform, along with Metro.

It’s unrealistic to think there will soon come a time when forced system reboots are just a painful memory. But it’s good to know that Microsoft understands the problem and is making it easier to manage.

Why would you change your default calendar?

By Kathleen Atkins

If you carry a smartphone or other portable device, it’s likely you want your calendar to have the same data on it, no matter where you are.

Lounge member t8ntlikly posted a query asking how to make his Windows Live calendar the default calendar in Outlook — just so he could keep Outlook and his Windows phone synchronized.

He received the help he needed — plus a boost to his enthusiasm and ambition for what he might accomplish with his new phone. More»

The following links are this week’s most interesting Lounge threads, including several new questions to which you might be able to provide responses:

☼ starred posts — particularly useful

If you’re not already a Lounge member, use the quick registration form to sign up for free. The ability to post comments and take advantage of other Lounge features is available only to registered members.

If you’re already registered, you can jump right into today’s discussions in the Lounge.

The Lounge Life column is a digest of the best of the WS Lounge discussion board. Kathleen Atkins is associate editor of Windows Secrets.

Fiery Celtic dancing by Dutch horse in the U.S.

By Kathleen Atkins Peaceful multiculturalism is alive and dancing in a California dressage circle. The dancing horse is a Friesian, from a famous line of early and high Middle Ages war horses. “Riverdance” might have something to gain by asking this performer to join its troupe of Irish dancers. Play the video

What, exactly, does System Restore protect?

By Fred Langa System Restore has been around since Windows ME, but it’s still misunderstood by many Windows users. It has also evolved over time, gaining new features and functions — which only adds to the confusion.

Protecting Windows’ essential system files

Reader Art Williams is seeking clarity on one of Windows’ most important, self-protective subsystems.

• “I would like to know what exactly is backed up in a System Restore restore point. More importantly, what’s not backed up?

  “I’ve read that you can adjust the size of the restore point file, which could mean less data is going to be backed up. I’ve also heard that system restore often does not work.

  “Many people I know have a false sense of security and think of the restore point as an image [backup] and that it will always bail them out.”

Here’s a quick reference on System Restore:

System Restore is a largely automated process that protects your essential programs — but not your data. Its primarily task is to protect the software that does the actual work of running a PC, such as the operating system files and drivers. If something goes wrong on your PC, System Restore can put those essential files back the way they were before the problem happened.

System Restore can also monitor and protect third-party software — but only if that software follows Microsoft’s recommended setup procedures, such as installing itself through Windows’ Installer software and properly adding its data to the Registry.

System Restore generally does nothing with personal data: documents, photos, MP3s, and so on. You use standard backups or system images for those files (a point I’ll come back to in a moment).

Here’s an example: Let’s say you downloaded a bunch of photos from your camera and then installed a new photo-editing application. If the app set itself up properly (using the rules I mentioned above), System Restore should have backed up the new software — but it didn’t back up the new photos.

A few days after installing the photo-editing app, your system starts misbehaving (possibly caused by the new app). You decide to roll the system back to an earlier configuration to see whether that fixes the problem. At that point, System Restore should disable the photo tool and put all system software and settings (including Registry data) back the way they were before the photo tool was installed. But System Restore doesn’t delete (or roll back) your photos — they’re left untouched.

To be clear, System Restore is not a system image — a different type of backup that copies a PC’s entire setup: all files, right down to their location on your hard drive.

System Restore also is not a standard backup — a type of backup that copies whatever programs, data, or other files you specify.

For its intended uses, System Restore is quite reliable. The problem arises when a system crashes and users think System Restore failed because it did not restore their data. But that’s not what System Restore is for.

System Restore also has other constraints that can lead to misunderstandings and trouble. For example, each time System Restore runs, it creates a new restore point — the collection of the files it backed up. By default, Windows creates these restore points frequently, which can potentially consume a lot of disk space.

How frequently? Normally, System Restore runs at least once every 24 hours, or when you start your PC after it’s been off for more than 24 hours. System Restore also runs when:

• Software is installed using the Windows Installer.
• Windows Update installs new updates.
• You install a new driver that is not preapproved (digitally signed) by Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL).
• You trigger a restore point manually (see Microsoft’s how-to instructions for XP, Vista, and Win7).

When the space allotted to restore points fills up, the oldest copies are deleted to make room for newer ones. And this is another way you can be misled into thinking that System Restore “often fails.” It doesn’t have infinite capacity; once your old restore points are gone, they’re gone for good.

Yes, you can manually increase or decrease the amount of space available to System Restore. And yes, if the space reserved for restore points is set too low, it can prevent the creation of new restore points. In a normal configuration, System Restore automatically sets aside 3–15 percent of your disk space (depending on the Windows version), as explained in an MSDN article.

If you’re encountering System Restore failures, or if you want to have more restore points available for recovery, increase the amount of space available. If you don’t use System Restore much, or you want to save disk space for other purposes, decrease the space allotted to System Restore. Here’s how:

• Windows 7: Click to Control Panel/System and Security/System and then (in the left pane of the default view) click Advanced system settings. A System Properties dialog will open. Click the System Protection tab (see Figure 1) and then click Configure. In the next dialog box (shown in Figure 2) move the slider to the amount of disk space you wish to set aside. You also can click the Turn off system protection radio button to disable System Restore altogether.

  
  Figure 1. Under the System Protection tab, press the Configure button to open the Restore settings.

  
  Figure 2. Windows XP and Win7 (shown) make it easy to adjust the space allocated to System Restore; just move the slider.

• Windows XP: Click to Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance/System. When the System Properties dialog opens, click the System Restore tab and move the slider, as described for Windows 7 above.
• Vista: Oddly, Vista has the worst implemented System Restore of any of the three current desktop versions of Windows. It lacks any simple way to adjust the amount of space the restore points use.

  You can, however, adjust Vista’s restore-point space allocation via a command-line setting. In a Vista admin-level account, open a Command window and type in the following:

  vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on=C: /maxsize=3GB

  Now change the 3GB to whatever size you wish and press Enter. You also can change the restore-point allocation for other drives by entering a drive letter other than C:, if you wish.

With a reasonable amount of disk space to work with, System Restore can do a fine job of keeping your essential software backed up and available for quick restoration. But, as should be perfectly clear by now, it cannot and will not protect your data files.

For more information on Windows’ various backup options, see the May 12, 2011, Top Story, “Build a complete Windows 7 safety net.” That article also includes links to information on backups in Vista and XP.

A related article, the June 16, 2011, Top Story, “RPV: Win7’s least-known data-protection system,” details Restore Previous Version, a major enhancement to System Restore that’s specific to Windows 7.

Are built-in password managers safe?

Layne Marshal asks whether it’s safe to use the password management tools built into some software.

• “Your Jan. 26 column contained a discussion on password managers. It prompted me to ask, finally, whether the security systems in Firefox and Thunderbird are adequate to the task. Or do you encourage using something in addition to what Mozilla provides in those two applications?”

Mozilla’s password managers use high-quality encryption. If your master password is good (a relatively long, hard-to-guess string of letters, numbers, and punctuation), then these built-in password tools should be fine.

However, I still prefer to use a good third-party password manager. With a third-party tool, even if a hacker knows which browser and e-mail client I’m using, he’ll still have to guess which third-party password software I’ve installed, guess which encryption type is in use, and guess where my password files are located. (I freely admit this last worry verges on the excessive.)

Use any good password manager, secure it with a strong master password, and your passwords should be safe from all normal types of hack attacks.

Reader corrects Fred on DOCSIS 3 technology

One of the great things about the Windows Secrets readership is its deep level of collective technical expertise. All of us together are vastly smarter than any one of us is alone.

For example, reader John Spragens sent in a gentle correction to a comment I made in the Jan. 19 item, “DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem upgrade conundrum” — and provides info on a topic that I had never heard of.

• “For some providers — Comcast among them — DOCSIS 3 is needed for faster service levels. Search for ‘DOCSIS channel bonding’ for some background.”

DOCSIS “channel bonding” is indeed a way of creating and using more than one DOCSIS channel to enhance throughput. It’s analogous to the modem-bonding and ISDN channel-bonding techniques used in days of yore. See, for example, Motorola’s .pdf white paper on the subject.

Thanks, John!

A simple screen-capture/OCR application

Our recent coverage of screen-capture tools (Dec. 1, 2011, “Windows 7’s built-in screen-capture tool” and Jan. 12 , “A more complete screen-snipping tool’) is still generating interesting reader feedback, such as this note on screen-capture optical character recognition (OCR) from Mal Owen.

• “I found a very clever piece of software. Ideal for capturing text in an error bubble, or on-screen text, or .pdf document. Check out ‘Screen OCR.’ It works brilliantly and is much simpler to use than some of the other products.”

DS Screen OCR (site) is $30, but you can try it free for 21 days.

Thanks, Mal!

How to change Microsoft's %$#@! Ribbon

By Woody Leonhard The Microsoft Ribbon evokes a wide range of responses, from abject apathy to raging conflagration. I’ve never been a fan of the Ribbon, but then I didn’t get to make the rules. Love or hate the Ribbon, you can make it more to your liking — add buttons, move controls around, create new tabs, and more.

From half-baked idea to a functional tool

Microsoft’s Ribbon made its debut in Office 2007 and was immediately condemned by legions of long-time Office users, many of whom had difficulty adapting to its radically different format. (I’ve heard rumors that there were huge battles within Microsoft over whether the Ribbon should see the light of day.) It didn’t help that Microsoft’s implementation of the Ribbon was inconsistent. For example, on Outlook 2007, Microsoft added the Ribbon on some windows and not on others. (The main Outlook 2007 window doesn’t have a Ribbon, relying instead on old-fashioned menus.)

The Ribbon came into its own with Office 2010. Not only did all Office 2010 apps have a fully implemented version of the Ribbon, it showed up on a few non-Office apps as well. For example, Windows 7’s Paint and WordPad have it, though in a relatively rudimentary form. There are Ribbons of various pedigrees in current versions of Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker.

According to a Jan. 30 “Building Windows 8” blog, the next iteration of Windows Explorer will also get the Ribbon. (The Windows 8 Customer Preview beta should emerge from Microsoft around the end of this month.) Microsoft currently plans to minimize the Ribbon, by default. But in this case, minimized means you’ll initially see just the Win8 Explorer menu headings (File, Home, Share, View, and Manage), but when you click them, you’ll get the Ribbon.

Like it or not, the Ribbon is here to stay. I guess it’s a step in the right direction — especially if you can tailor it to your work habits.

The method I’ll describe for changing the Ribbon works only with the 2010 versions of Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Sooner or later, the same method should become available in other Office applications. We might even see more of it in Windows 8 … or Windows 9, if Metro doesn’t make Ribbons obsolete. … Yes! I’m joking.

On a related topic, Fred Langa’s Feb. 10, 2011, Top Story, “Unlock the power of the Quick Access Toolbar,” covers another type of Office customization. The QAT is the tiny toolbar at the top of Office applications, which you can also enhance to your liking. (You can customize the QAT in Windows Paint, among others, but the choices are severely limited.)

Making simple changes to your Ribbons

As I already mentioned, the following instructions apply to Office 2010 apps (Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word). A Microsoft MSDN article describes how to make Ribbon changes in Office 2007 apps, but it’s rather convoluted. Don’t let the article’s title, “Customizing the Word 2007 Fluent Ribbon is as easy as 1-2-3” fool you.

Customizing Office 2010 Ribbons isn’t exactly user-friendly, either, but taking some time to learn the process is time well spent.

Here’s a simple Ribbon change to get you started. Let’s say we want to put an old-fashioned File New icon on Word’s Home tab. (Word typically starts on the Home tab when launched.) Unless you’re new to PCs and started with Word 2010, you’ll know about the classic menu combination File/New — the way we’ve created new documents for many years. But in Word 2010, File is a tab, not a menu header, and New is down below the Recent option on the separate File window. When you click New, you have to wait a moment while it populates pictures of templates; then you choose one of the templates — usually Blank Document.

File/New (the menu options, not the tab) used to be — and for me, still is — a commonly used command. I hate pecking down three levels just to open a new document.

Here’s how to put File/New on the Word 2010 Home Tab.

• Step 1. Right-click on any part of the Ribbon and choose Customize the Ribbon. A large dialog box will pop up. The left side of it looks like Figure 1.

  
  Figure 1. On the left side of the Customize Ribbon dialog box, you see a list of all the commands that can be added to your Ribbons.

• Step 2. Under Choose commands from:, scroll down to the command you want to put on the Ribbon. In this case, I want to add New, so I scroll down and click it. Don’t bother to click Add just yet; if you do, you’ll get an error.
• Step 3. Microsoft won’t let you put a new command on an existing Ribbon tab. You must create a completely new group within that tab. (I warned you that it isn’t user-friendly, yes?) Create a new group inside the Home tab by going to the right side of the dialog box and, up at the top, clicking on Home. Next, click the New Group button (below the list of Ribbon tabs). You’ll see the new group listed under Home as, uh, New Group (Custom), as shown in Figure 2.

  
  Figure 2. After creating a new group under the Home tab, give it a more meaningful name.

• Step 4. With New Group (Custom) highlighted, click Rename. Enter the new name in the Display name box, select an icon, and click OK. The name of your group gets changed in the Home tab’s groups list.
• Step 5. With the new group highlighted on the right pane and Next highlighted on the left pane, click the Add >> button. An icon labeled New will appear under your new Home-tab group.
• Step 6. If you want your new group to appear on the far-right side of the Home tab, you don’t need to do anything. But if you want it to appear on the left side, keep clicking the up-arrow (shown on the far-right side of Figure 2) until your new group appears at the top of the list.
• Step 7. Click OK. Your new group appears on the left of the Home tab, and New Blank Document is the only icon inside the new group (as shown in Figure 3).

  
  Figure 3. New Blank Document appears as the only button in the New File group on the Home tab.

If that seems a little convoluted in these times of click and drag — not to mention swipe and pinch — I’d have to agree. It’s more like what you would’ve expected with Word 6. But at least it works.

Some advanced shenanigans with Ribbons

With that exercise completed, it should be fairly obvious how to create and rename groups, add commands, and put them within the Ribbon where you want them.

After looking at Figure 2, you’ve probably guessed that a group can be hidden by simply unchecking the box next to it. You can hide entire tabs, too.

Adding a new tab isn’t quite so obvious. Let’s say you want to add one to the right of the References tab. In the Main Tabs column of the Customize the Ribbon dialog box, click on References. At the bottom of the column, click New Tab. The new tab New Tab (Custom) will appear below References. Click Rename to give it a useful label.

To delete a Custom Tab, right-click on the tab name and choose Remove. To get rid of all customizations to a specific tab, select the tab and then click the Reset button. Choose Reset only selected Ribbon tab.

Importing and exporting custom Ribbons is easy, using the Import/Export button at the bottom of the dialog box. When you export or import a custom Ribbon, your Quick Access Tab comes along for the ride. When you import a custom Ribbon, all of your current Ribbon and QAT customizations get thrown away.

A Microsoft Office support site has useful (and free) custom Ribbons with a new tab called Favorites. There are Favorites for the 2010 versions of Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio, and Word. The Favorites tab for Word includes common items from the Word 2003 File menu, such as New, Open, Close, Save, Save As, Print, Print Preview, Properties, and Exit. It’s like getting back the Word 2003 File menu, only with big icons and a few extra functions.

Just remember, if you install a Ribbon with the Favorites tab into any of your 2010 Office apps, you’ll delete all current Ribbon customizations and Quick Access Tab changes. You can, however, customize the new Favorites tab as you like.

Add-on app brings back the old Office menus

I would be derelict in my duties to old Office users (like myself!) if I didn’t mention how to bring the classic Office 2003 menus back. It’s odd, but Office 2011 for the Mac gives you the option to choose between Ribbons or menus. It would seem that loyal Windows users have received short shrift — and not for the first time.

The best program I know for bringing Office 2003 menus into Office 2007 and 2010 is UBit Software’s UBitMenu (info/download page). It’s free for private use and very reasonable in cost for businesses.

Microsoft offers interactive guides on an Office support page to “help” you through the transition from menus to Ribbons — if you want to be helped. But will MS give you the option to revert to old-fashioned menus? Unlikely. At least, not on Windows.

I hope that UBit will make a similar tool for the new version of Explorer, when Windows 8 ships later this year. And I expect they’ll make something similar for Office 15, due out late this year or early next year.

Getting to basics: straight and simple text

By Lincoln Spector You have arrays of sophisticated computer tools to choose from for almost any endeavor, but you can’t seem to get your text in plain form anymore, even when that’s the only thing you need. For times when simplest is best, here are some tools for transforming formatted or bitmapped material into words — just words.

When none of your many options will do

Today’s computer tools handle images, music, and videos with ease. And for a long time now, you’ve had choices among sophisticated word processors, too: you can gussy up written language by picking fancy fonts and then adding bold, italic, and/or underlining for emphasis. You can choose from dozens of paragraph styles or design whole pages, arranging all the elements into a complete document.

But there are also those times when all you want is the plain, unvarnished, editable text — and getting it isn’t easy. Perhaps you’ve copied a paragraph from a webpage and want to paste it into an e-mail (with proper citation, of course). But you don’t want it in that ugly font. Maybe you need to grab the exact wording of an error message. Or even more complicated, your lawyer just e-mailed you a .pdf of an important contract. You can read it, but you can’t search or edit it because, technically speaking, there is no text there — it’s just one big, long, bitmapped image of text.

For those situations when you need to change formatted text (or a bitmap of text) into pure, simple words, there are free apps that are up for the task. I’ll start with three that let you copy formatted text to Windows’ clipboard, then paste it into any other app as plain, unformatted text. I’ll also tell you about three OCR tools that can convert bitmapped text into the real thing — and none of them need a scanner.

Dump the formatting and just paste the text

What’s the best way to strip formatting from a block of text? The method most PC users employ is to copy it into Notepad, then copy and paste it again into its final destination (such as an e-mail message). But that’s a hassle. Another option: Word has a Paste Text Only option, but that helps only if the application you’re pasting into happens to be Word.

Here are three better, quicker, and easier solutions. Any one of them can make plain-text pasting so easy that you can forget about Word’s Paste Text Only feature.

Each of these programs has its particular strengths; I’ll start with the simplest and work up to the one with the fullest set of features.

► Get Plain Text: Aside from 144KB of hard-drive space, the small and practically invisible Get Plain Text (info/download page) consumes almost no PC resources — it loads quickly, strips formatting from any text in the clipboard, and then goes away. It doesn’t even display an onscreen message.

To make Get Plain Text truly convenient, you should put its icon (see Figure 1) in Windows XP’s or Vista’s Quick Launch toolbar, or pin it to the taskbar in Windows 7. Then simply copy any formatted text onto the clipboard, click the Get Plain Text icon, and paste plain text where you want it. The program comes in installable and portable versions. The only difference: the installable version puts the program into its own folder and adds it to the Start menu.

Figure 1. The GetPlainText icon in the Windows 7 taskbar

► PureText: If clicking an icon every time you want to remove formatting seems like an unnecessary step, consider PureText (info). Once PureText is running, pasting plain text from the clipboard is as simple as pressing Windows Key+V (instead of the traditional Ctrl+V). You can change this hotkey combination to something you find easier to remember. I use PureText many times a day, and I’d hate to be without it.

You don’t have to install PureText; just move the .exe from the downloaded .zip file into a convenient location onto a local hard drive. Launch it, right-click its taskbar icon, then check Automatically run PureText each time I log on to Windows. Running in the background, PureText takes up about 1.2MB of memory — not a lot.

► HovText: This app works much like PureText but offers more flexibility. HovText (info) can be set to automatically load and reside in memory, and you can select a different hotkey combination in the HovText settings dialog box. (See Figure 2.)

The settings box also lets you change how HovText’s hotkey functions. By default, it behaves like PureText: removing formatting and pasting plain text. But it can also be set to activate and deactivate the app.

When HovText is active, all text in the clipboard is automatically stripped of formatting. It also remembers the last 10 instances of copied text. When the app is deactivated, the copy-and-paste function works as usual. You can also set HovText to strip away leading and trailing spaces around selected text.

Figure 2. The HovText Settings dialog box lets you assign duties to your hotkey.

As I write this article, you can download the current Version 2.0 or a beta of 3.0. After trying both, I prefer the beta — version 2.0 wouldn’t let me assign Windows Key+V as the hotkey. On the other hand, the beta takes up about 7MB of memory, while 2.0 uses only 2.6MB. Both versions run on 32-bit Windows.

OCR: Turn pictures of text into the real thing

Pulling plain text out of fancy text is easy, compared to finding it in a bitmapped image. When a picture contains text, your eye and brain see the words — but a computer sees merely light and dark pixels. You can’t copy and paste those pixels as text, you can’t search them for a word, and you can’t edit them.

These text-like images pop up in various places. Sometimes a Web designer chooses to display text on a page in a .jpg image. (Try grabbing the movie title or the time off this film program page.) Or a friend sends you an old family recipe for baked salmon, captured on her smartphone. Perhaps someone sends you an important legal document as a .pdf, but the document contains nothing but large bitmaps of printed pages. (This has happened to me on more than one occasion.)

The fix for the problem of bitmapped text is an optical character reader (OCR) application. You probably associate OCR software with scanners, but they can also be used with image files and images copied to the clipboard.

Obviously, a free Windows OCR program that handles nonscanner sources would be ideal, but so far I’ve not found one worth recommending. However, there is a nifty OCR feature in a program you might already have — Microsoft’s OneNote. And if you don’t, there are free Web services that will do the trick.

If you have Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010, there’s a good chance you have OneNote. It came with Office 2007 Home and Student and Ultimate editions and comes with all versions of Office 2010. Primarily an outliner/organizer/note-taking tool, it also has handy OCR capabilities built in. (For more on OneNote’s abilities, see Katherine Murray’s Feb. 2 article, “Take a note: OneNote versus Evernote.”)

To extract text from an image, start by importing the image into OneNote. Use one of the import tools in OneNote’s Insert tab, or simply paste the image into a blank OneNote page from the clipboard. Then right-click the image that you placed in OneNote and select Copy Text from Picture from the drop-down menu (see Figure 3). Any text OneNote could recognize is now in the clipboard. From there, paste it into an e-mail message, Word document, OneNote page, or almost any other application you choose.

Figure 3. You can use the OCR function in OneNote to extract text from an image.

Don’t have OneNote? Try the Web-based Free-OCR service (info page). Upload a file (.pdf, .jpg, .gif, .tiff, or .bmp), enter a captcha code to prove you’re a real person — and editable text soon appears in a window. Simply copy and paste it to where it’s needed.

There’s one problem with Free-OCR (aside from the annoying captcha). The maximum file size is 2MB — probably too small for those .pdfs from your lawyer.

That’s why Free Online OCR (home page) makes a better choice for large bitmapped documents. As with Free OCR, you simply upload an image or .pdf file to the Free Online OCR site for conversion. Unlike Free OCR, Free Online OCR accepts files as large as 50MB. It also outputs text into Word, .pdf, .rtf, or plain-text formats, which you can then download and save. (And there’s no annoying captcha to deal with.)

Even with the captcha, I prefer Free OCR for small text bitmaps. If you’re copying only a paragraph or three, why go to the bother of downloading and opening a file before you can select and copy the text?

One concern with both these Web services: neither of them is a secure site. Be careful what you upload to them.

Most important, keep in mind that OCR is imperfect — all OCR software makes mistakes. (Some image documents are much easier for an OCR app to read than others.) After you convert an image to text, proofread it carefully — or at minimum, run it through a spellchecker.

But even with those caveats, getting text into a plain and simple format without having to retype it can be an immense time-saver. Sometimes, a thousand words are worth more than a picture — especially if the picture is of a thousand words.