Newsletter Archives

• FileOptimizer — Over 90 tools working together to squish your files

  Posted on April 28, 2025 at 02:42 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  There are many reasons to make your files smaller, from compressing images for a website so they load faster to sending dog pics to your cousin Brody who uses dial-up Internet in the swamp.

  FileOptimizer by Spanish developer Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro is a collection of over 90 free and/or open-source programs that all work together to do one thing: squish your files down to their smallest size without messing them up. So if you’re just too cheap to spend more than $2.95 on a flash drive, this program is for you!

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.17.0, 2025-04-28).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, File compression, FileOptimizer, Newsletters, Tetrimone, Tetris

• NotifyIcons — Put that System tray to work!

  Posted on April 7, 2025 at 02:43 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  The Windows System tray (or status notification area) tells us when our Internet is down, when our printer is out of ink, and provides countless other alerts.

  Windows and other programs install NotifyIcons to our System trays to accomplish this.

  During our morning coffee sipping/software hunt the other day, we came across two pretty neat utilities, Icon Meter and Temperature Icon Meter.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.14.0, 2025-04-07).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Icon Meter, Newsletters, PixiEditor, Temperature Icon Meter

• Password Generators — Your first line of defense

  Posted on March 10, 2025 at 02:43 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  If you create a password that is easy to remember, you create a password that can be cracked.

  These are no longer the days of P@ssw0rd123, Fido2002, or 22222. No joke — an entire county government in our area used that last one on both of their servers until we helped them out.

  You may think your password is fine because your account gets locked if a wrong password is tried too many times. Well, that used to be the case. If a hacker used a rainbow table that tried 2 million passwords and could try only one possible password every 15 minutes, that would have taken a very long time.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.10.0, 2025-03-10).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Newsletters, Password generators, Password Tech, RandomPass

• Back to BASICs — Hello, World!

  Posted on February 10, 2025 at 02:43 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  My mom ran the media center at my school when I was a teen, and she happened to have control of a coveted personal computer.

  Sometimes, that TI-99 made it to our home on the weekends. As I think back to messing around with TI BASIC, I realize that — to some of you — BASIC seems pretty amateur. Well, not all of us are old enough to have had snowball fights in the woods of Wisconsin with Seymour Cray.

  Anyway, I found eight pretty nifty BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programs for you to geek out on. All of them will run on your Windows machine, so have fun!

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.06.0, 2025-02-10).

  Freeware Spotlight bas55, Basic, BASIC-256, Craft Basic, Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Decimal BASIC, FreeBASIC, GCBASIC, Great Cow BASIC, Microsoft Small Basic, Newsletters, QB64

• Treasure Hunt — 10 hidden gems on OlderGeeks.com

  Posted on January 13, 2025 at 02:45 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 22.02 • 2025-01-13

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  This week we’re looking at ten very useful and free programs that just kind of got buried in the thousands of other programs on our website.

  This is not a “Top Ten” list — the selections are not ranked. But most have their place and serve a purpose, so I hope you’ll find something useful here.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.02.0, 2025-01-13).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Freeware Spotlight ChrisPC DNS Switch, Cstitch, Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, GrandOrgue, Hosts File Editor, Lum Screen Recorder, MiTeC DirList, Newsletters, Piggy Banks, SyncDroid, WaGi’s IP-Blacklister, Writemonkey

• FotoSketcher — Look, kids! Mom’s an artist!

  Posted on December 23, 2024 at 02:43 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  I’m not. So finding a free tool that makes me appear to be an artist was very exciting. And a portable free tool — even better!

  FotoSketcher by French developer David Thoiron (all things artsy come from France) lets you load a photo so it can make art from it. Let me show you. Grab a copy of FotoSketcher from OlderGeeks.com, and we’ll play around with it.

  The file you are downloading is a simple EXE file that you just click on to run. There is nothing to install. It runs on any 64-bit (most common) version of Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10. or 11.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.52.0, 2024-12-23).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, FotoSketcher, Image Editor, Image Generation, Image manipulation, Newsletters

• SimilarImagesFinder — It’s time to clean house

  Posted on December 9, 2024 at 02:43 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  I’ve decided to stop looking at, and ignoring, that giant folder of pictures. Like with a cluttered closet, it’s time to dig in and reclaim some storage!

  Over the last 20 years, with everyone in the family adding pictures, I know that there are multiple copies of the same pictures on my computer. I have avoided cleaning them because I am simply afraid that I will delete the only copy of a picture. With Kurt Zimmermann’s free SimilarImagesFinder, I don’t have to be afraid because it lets me compare the similar images myself. There are AI apps out there that claim to do this automatically, but I ain’t lettin’ no robot delete pictures of my girls.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.50.0, 2024-12-09).

  Freeware Spotlight Comparison, Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, images, Newsletters, Organization, Photos, Riter, SimilarImagesFinder

• SCleaner — Stay ahead of the cleaning

  Posted on November 18, 2024 at 02:43 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  My husband and I have different philosophies regarding our cars. I throw things away when I exit my car. He waits until the fast-food bags are tickling his knees to clean his car. It’s the same with our computers.

  To stay on top of keeping my computer running smoothly, I clean its software every single day. Not once a week. Not once a month — every single day.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.47.0, 2024-11-18).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Newsletters, SCleaner, System cleanup

• WinDirStat — It was a very long wait

  Posted on November 4, 2024 at 02:44 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  WinDirStat has been a staple for system administrators and users for a very long time. Nineteen years ago came its latest update — until now.

  2005: Condoleezza Rice sworn in. Airbus A380 unveiled. Charles and Camilla engaged. YouTube launched. “Million Dollar Baby” wins. Hurricane Katrina blows. Ted Koppel retires. And WinDirStat gets its last update for 19 years.

  At first we didn’t even notice that our favorite freeware hard-drive-space analyzer was going into hibernation like a very sleepy bear. But then, years later, something was amiss.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.45.0, 2024-11-04).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Folder Size Analyzer, Folder utilities, Newsletters, WinDirStat

• Reset Windows Update Tool — but you might never use it for that

  Posted on October 21, 2024 at 02:43 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  Like naming your entire toolbox “hammer,” sometimes a name does not do a computer tool justice.

  Reset Windows Update Tool (RWUT) is a free and open-source creation by the Colombian developer Manuel Gil that does so much more than its name suggests. Sure, it will fix things when Windows refuses to update, but it will fix some of other the big issues your Windows 10 or 11 install might face.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.43.0, 2024-10-21).

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Newsletters, Realistic VHS Video Converter, Reset Windows Update Tool

• Backup! It’s been a really bad week for SSDs.

  Posted on October 7, 2024 at 02:43 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  There are experts out there who will tell me it’s not true and that I’m imagining things.

  But gosh darn it! When the temperature changes, we get an increasing number of failed drives at the shop. And with solid-state drives (SSDs), it happens even more!

  I’m going to use my soapbox here this week to show you how to back up your drives — both SSDs and traditional hard drives (HDDs). I will point you to some free programs, but remember that modern versions of Windows have backup tools built in. Just type in Backup on the search bar at the bottom of your desktop. You’ll find it.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.41.0, 2024-10-07).

  Freeware Spotlight AOMEI Backupper, Backup, Cobian Reflector, Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Hasleo Backup, Newsletters, Personal Backup

• Jim’s Toolbox — So many nifty tools in one collection

  Posted on September 23, 2024 at 02:45 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.39 • 2024-09-23

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  There is nothing wrong with knowing of powerful commands to fix computers but not remembering the actual commands. That’s what tech notes and Google are for. But what if you didn’t have to look them up?

  Cemil “Jim” Taşdemir has created Jim’s Toolbox. A collection of all the tools we like to use, but with easy launch buttons so there is nothing to remember!

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.39.0, 2024-09-23).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Freeware Spotlight Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, Jim's Toolbox, Newsletters, Utilities
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