Before you proceed, make sure it’s a permission issue and not just some file that is still in use. In that case, instead of proceeding below, you’d either make sure the program that is using the file is closed or use a tool such as Process Explorer to close the file handle.

I also want to point out that you should take care for what directory you’re doing this and for what reason, e.g. don’t execute these steps on your “C:\” drive (supposing that’s where your Windows is installed on), because that would mean all users would get full control over every other user’s files and worse, it would expose your whole operating system to possible malicious software (even with UAC enabled).

Typically you would want to follow these steps for a folder you want to get rid of anyway, either by afterwards manually deleting it or by allowing an uninstaller to do its job properly, thanks to these modified relaxed permissions.

Be careful, you are about to modify multiple directory and file permissions without the possibility to undo your actions. By proceeding, you fully agree that the consequences of any actions or decisions taken on the basis of the information provided here is your own responsibility.

1. Open a command prompt with elevated rights like this:
   • Press the Win keyboard key or click the Vista Start button
   • Type “cmd” (without quotes) into the Start Search textbox
   • Press Ctrl+Shift+Enter keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+Shift+Enter is the general keyboard shortcut that triggers elevation to “Run as Administrator”.
   • Press Alt+C or press Continue to confirm the UAC elevation warning prompt (if enabled).
2. Take ownership of everything in that folder by executing the following command in the command prompt (replace “D:\Foo\Bar” with your problem directory):

   takeown /F "D:\Foo\Bar" /R /D Y

3. Reset permissions and then give all users full control over everything in it by executing the following commands in the command prompt (again, replace “D:\Foo\Bar” with your problem directory):

   icacls "D:\Foo\Bar" /reset /T /C
   icacls "D:\Foo\Bar" /grant Users:(OI)(CI)F /T /C

All users now have full control over the directory.

In this article I’d like to list some network and internet tools that deserve some attention. Anything from general every-day-use tools to more advanced analysis software goes in here. Here’s some of the better software out there:

• BitMeter II: this free bandwidth meter allows you to visually monitor your internet connection by displaying a scrolling graph that shows your upload and download speed over time. The different colours on the graph represent your upload and download speeds, the display updates every second, and the current speeds are also displayed numerically in the lower part of the window. If you want to see historical data you can use the Statistics window to see what’s been going on over the last few hours, days or weeks. Go to the product page for a detailed overview of features.

• FileZilla FTP Client & Server: the open-source client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. For a list of features, check out the website or, for more information, the wiki. The server software is an open-source FTP server supported by the same project. It supports FTP and FTP over SSL/TLS. If you’re using FTP, this is an application you’ll want to have installed for sure! I’m happily using it for years already now.

• iPig (iOpus Private Internet Gateway): the iOpus Private Internet Gateway (iPIG) creates a secure “tunnel” that protects your inbound and outbound communications at any Wi-Fi hotspot or wired network. It’s extremely easy to setup and the iPig Server Express Edition, which is recommendable to install if you don’t want your traffic to go through their servers, is free for up to 5 users. If you’re the only one using it, that’s more than enough. I especially like how easy it is to setup a server and client.

• Mozilla Firefox: an extremely popular open-source web browser. At the moment, Firefox has a recorded usage share of about 21%, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer (around 68%). The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that “just surfs the web” and delivers the “best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people.” Personally, I’m already using it for years and it’s truly great in features, speed, performance, security, flexibility and user-friendliness! I can heartily recommend it!

• Mozilla Thunderbird: open-source e-mail and news client. Thunderbird offers a variety of ways for you to organize and display your folders, whether by favorites, recently viewed or folders containing unread messages. As always, you can also set up RSS and newsgroup folders to stay on top of news and your interests. Check out the website to get a complete overview of all features of this great piece of software. I’m using it for years already and I’m sticking to it. I especially like the junk e-mail handling features.

• PuTTY: open-source client program for the SSH, Telnet and Rlogin network protocols. These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session: the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs. In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to another machine. PuTTY opens a window to communicate with the other machine. It’s a small tool and great in many ways. If you’re running Windows and you’d rather want it to sit in the System Tray, check out PuTTYtray as well.

• TCPView: free Windows Sysinternals tool that shows you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On newer Windows versions, TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows.
  
  Update (March, 14th): CurrPorts is a free tool by NirSoft that does exactly the same, but additionally allows for filters to be set: e.g. only show connections of a named process, udp/tcp, remote/local ports, IP addresses, etc. This is a huge advantage over TCPView when you want to inspect a certain application!

• UltraVNC: is a powerful, easy to use and open-source software title that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. If you provide computer support, you can quickly access your customer’s computers from anywhere in the world and resolve helpdesk issues remotely.

• Wireshark: an open-source network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.

• WebBug: a free program that lets you enter a URL, then displays exactly what it sends to the web server and, when the response is received, exactly what the web server sends back. This is a ‘fun’ program if you’re curious about the HTTP protocol, and is a useful debugging tool if you are trying to resolve a problem. It will handle the HTTP/1.1 version of the Web protocol in addition to the older HTTP/1.0 and HTTP 0.9, as well as conditional GETs. It can also be configured to be used with a proxy server. It also allows for the entry of custom headers so that users can test anything they like.

• Xenu’s Link Sleuth: free tool that checks web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time. If you maintain any website, this is a great tool to use. Nobody wants to click on links going places that don’t exist anymore, also not your site’s visitors.

People should inform themselves about existing alternatives and I don’t agree that Microsoft should be forced to ship their product with a range of other browsers. When you buy something with batteries included, do you get 5 batteries of different brands? And what with less-known web browsers such as Maxthon, Flock, etc. Don’t they also deserve a fair chance? The idea to ship Windows without any web browser at all is also a bad one, because some users would have absolutely no idea where to get their “window onto the world” from. In the end they’d blame Windows for not being able to read their daily news website anymore. I think a screen mentioning that Internet Explorer is installed by default, but can be uninstalled and replaced by any web browser of the user’s choice, would already do fine.

The icon used above was designed by Archangel-Daemon over at deviantART.

In this article I’ll list some system tools that I would like to give some attention. These are the ones that come in handy when things go wrong, or that keep things in order in the first place. Either that, or they perform a general-purpose task that I could be without. Here’s my selection:

• 7-Zip: open-source Windows utility for manipulating archives similar to WinZip. Formats 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR are supported fully, other formats can be unpacked. For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip. It’s powerful, fast, flexible and very robust and optionally integrates with the Windows Shell. I like it a lot and I’ll never see those annoying WinZip nag screens again!

• Ad-Aware Free: this free product from Lavasoft protects you against malware: spyware, trojans, rootkits, hijackers, keyloggers and the likes. I run it once in a while to keep things clean. This free version can be a bit confusing to find on the website, because Lavasoft likes to promote their non-free versions quite a bit more. Just keep clicking on the “Ad-Aware Free” buttons and you’ll get to the download.

• Autoruns: this free Windows tool has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. It is one of the Windows Sysinternals utilities.

• AVG Anti-Virus (Free Edition): basic antivirus and antispyware protection for Windows available to download for free. This free version has limited features, no support, and is available for private and non-commercial use only. It offers protection against viruses, spyware, adware and identity-theft. If a good, free anti-virus program is all you care for, this is the one to pick!

• CCleaner: a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool by Piriform. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. I really like the fact that you can run this tool by right-clicking the Recycle bin and selecting “Open CCleaner…”. Everytime I run it, and it again cleans my system of hundreds of megabytes of junk, I’m always amazed how much stuff gets collected on your PC after a while.

• DAEMON Tools Lite: this free version is an advanced application for Microsoft Windows which provides one of the best optical media emulation in the industry. DAEMON Tools enables you to use your CD/DVD images as if they were already burned to CD/DVD. This very neat if you have a CD you regularly need to pop into your CD/DVD drive. You can make an image of it (e.g. an .iso image) and then “mount” this image in a virtual CD/DVD drive using DAEMON Tools. It’s as if you walked again to your closet for the 190th time, took that CD out and put it in. Just that you didn’t. Very handy tool!

• DirSync Pro (Directory Synchronize Pro): a small, but powerful open-source utility for file and folder synchronization. DirSync Pro can be used to synchronize the content of one or many folders recursively. Using DirSync Pro you can make incremental backups. In this way you’ll spare lots of time because you don’t have to copy all the files each time you want to update your backup; only new/modified/larger files would be copied. Use DirSync Pro to easily synchronize files from your desktop PC to your USB-stick (PDA, Notebook, …).

• HashCheck: this open-source shell extension makes it easy for you to calculate and verify checksums (including hashes) from Windows Explorer. HashCheck can process and verify the checksums/hashes stored in checksum files – these are files with a .sfv, .md4, .md5, or .sha1 file extension. Just double-click on the checksum file, and HashCheck will check the actual checksums of the listed files against those specified in the checksum file. It will also add a “Checksums” tab to the shell’s file properties dialog so that you could easily check the hash of a file (or even multiple files and directories) from Windows Explorer. You can also save the results to a checksum file.

• KeePass Password Safe: an open-source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). It’s light-weight and easy-to-use.

• Process Explorer: ever wanted to delete a file, but Windows said the file was in use and can’t be deleted right now. You had to restart your Windows to finally be able to delete it. This free tool shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded and lets you easily close some problematic handles. It’s useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work. It is one of the Windows Sysinternals utilities.

• Process Monitor: a free, advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Windows Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

• Recuva (pronounced “recover”): a freeware Windows utility by Piriform to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

• TrueCrypt: open-source on-the-fly disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. Among its main features are the ability to create a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk, encrypting an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive or encrypting a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication). Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent. Very nice software to keep your sensitive documents secure.

• WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics): a free disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. It’s amazing how much visual feedback this tool gives about the drive and folders you select for analysis. Just take a look at the picture and you’ll know what I mean. You can immediately spot what directories are the biggest and which files take up most space. It’s really amazing and a great tool to keep your system clean and tidy!

How does it work exactly? Fractal flames are rendered as PNG images (depending on the machine, this typically takes multiple seconds for a single frame) by distributed client software (i.e. the screensaver itself), which are then transferred across the internet to an Electric Sheep server. The server stitches these images together as a compressed 800×600 MPEG-2 video file, called a “sheep” (most are around 4 seconds long), which are organized in “flocks”, e.g. the screenshot above is a (resized) still taken from sheep 10708 of flock 243. The finished sheep are automatically downloaded by the client software. While the screen saver is running, sheep are selected from the available ones in a way to result (if possible) in a smooth, seamless, mesmerizing animation: often several sheep are candidates as a continuation of a currently playing sheep. Anyone watching one of the screen savers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

Electric Sheep is available for PC (Windows & Linux) and Mac (OS X) and installs like a breeze. Here’s a short sample clip (with reduced quality) to give an idea what it actually looks like:

This time I’d like to list some image, audio and video viewing/manipulation applications that I would like to recommend. I want fast and light-weight viewers that open my files immediately but powerful full-featured editing tools for the more complex tasks:

• CamStudio: open-source application that it is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs). It can also add screen captions to your recordings and with the unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalize your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself picture-in-picture over your desktop.

• Foobar2000: free advanced audio player with features including full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats. While I don’t use it to play audio files, I find it very useful to do batch audio conversions with it. It’s an extremely powerful and flexible tool. I should actually use it more often, simply because it’s so good!

• GIMP: open-source image manipulation program that can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. It is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. There’s even a modification of the GIMP called GIMPshop intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop.

• Inkscape: open-source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. Take a look at the screenshots and be amazed.

• IrfanView: free, very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer. It’s extremely feature-rich and extremely fast, which makes it my favorite image viewer and editor. For more advanced stuff, I’d recommend GIMP, but for all your quick and easy conversion, resizing, cutting, color enhancing (and many more) needs, this is the program you’re looking for.

• Media Player Classic: open-source video player that mimics the look and feel of the old, light-weight Windows Media Player 6.4 but integrates most options and features found in modern media players. After additionally installing the K-Lite Codec Pack, QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative as well, you’ll be able to play almost any kind of video format.

• Miro: open-source internet TV and video player. It plays virtually any kind of video file, there’s lots of channels (also HD video content) with many added daily. You can search millions of videos, download them, watch and enjoy them. I must admit I haven’t used it too often yet, but it looks very promising.

• VirtualDubMod: open-source, based on the famous video editing software VirtualDub (by Avery Lee). Born as a unification of several existing modifications, a lot of new features have been added, including support for the matroska container format. It’s a superior tool to capture, encode, convert and edit video fragments. Highly recommended tool!

• WinSnap: free (up to version 1.1.10) enhancement utility for taking and editing screenshots. Standard features include easy capture of non-rectangular windows with customized and transparent backgrounds, simple and automatic canvas transformations, coloring effects, and the addition of eye-candy drop shadows. WinSnap supports a variety of image formats and has advanced auto-save features. Note that later versions from NTWind are not free anymore, but don’t worry: version 1.1.10 has everything you’ll need. It’s a highly recommendable tool!

I know that there’s often a lot of alternative solutions, not necessarily worse than the ones I suggest here, but I’ll try to limit myself to one main title for every need. I have these applications installed and use most of them very often.

In this article I want to list my favorite productivity and office-related applications:

• Foxit Reader: free PDF document viewer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. I’m especially surprised about the huge launch speed difference with Adobe Reader. I always felt opening a PDF file was cumbersome before, because it meant staring at a splash screen for several seconds. But times have changed for me: with this application you’re looking at the file almost instantly!

• GnuCash: open-source personal and small-business financial-accounting software. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. It has capabilities similar to Quicken and more.

• OpenOffice.org: open-source office suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is a collection of applications that work together closely to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. Many of the components are designed to mirror those available in Microsoft Office. Check out the article I wrote earlier about this it as well.

• PDFCreator: open-source tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application that is able to print. It installs itself as a virtual printer under Windows. To create a PDF file, just select this printer called PDFCreator and print to it. But instead of a printed sheet of paper rolling out somewhere, you’ll then get a dialog with details to save the newly created PDF file on disk instead.

• PDFTK Builder: PDFTK Builder is a free (open source) graphical interface to the Windows version of PDFTK making it much easier to use. It allows you to collate, i.e. rearrange (reorder, delete & duplicate) pages in a single document and/or merge pages from multiple PDF documents, split documents, rotate pages, set passwords (and rights) as well as adding a watermark.

• Rainlendar: a free feature rich calendar application that is easy to use and doesn’t take much space on your desktop. All the future events are shown in a separate list where you can see the week’s events at one glance. You can also have a separate list for your long term tasks. The appearance can be customized with skins. It’s worth to go and check out the website for a complete list of features.

I’m currently developing mainly in C# and ASP.NET (in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET) and I regularly need to build a lot of solution files (often containing multiple projects) in succession. Today I got tired of having to open and build them all one by one. I wanted a simple utility or even a command line script that could build several Visual Studio .NET solution files in batch but also offering an acceptable level of error reporting.

However, after going through a list of promising candidates for the job and having looked at MSBuild and NAnt in particular, I came to the conclusion that they were all a bit too much hassle for the simple task at hand.

Then I found MegaBuild (by Bill Menees) which was exactly what I needed:

MegaBuild is an automated build utility.  It is primarily intended to build multiple Visual Studio 2002, 2003, 2005, or 2008 solutions, but it also includes steps to run OS commands, send email, add output, wait a specified amount of time, or play sounds.  Plus you can write your own custom step types that integrate into MegaBuild using the provided MegaBuild SDK.

I set up a MegaBuild project file containing all solution files in the right order in no time and I can build everything with a single click from now on. It clearly shows where warnings and errors occur and offers enough options to make me happy!

Most people are quite familiar with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), but have you already heard of OpenOffice.org?

It is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. And yes, you also can open and save Microsoft Office files with it.

OpenOffice.org is a collection of applications that work together closely to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. Many of the components are designed to mirror those available in Microsoft Office. The components available include:

Writer is a word processor similar in look and feel to Microsoft Word and offering a comparable range of functions and tools. It also includes the ability to export Portable Document Format (PDF) files with no additional software, and can also function as a WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing web pages.

Calc is a spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system which automatically defines series for graphing, based on the layout of the user’s data. Calc is also capable of writing spreadsheets directly as a PDF file.

Impress is a presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. It can export presentations to Adobe Flash (SWF) files allowing them to be played on any computer with the Flash player installed. It also includes the ability to create PDF files, and the ability to read Microsoft PowerPoint’s .ppt format.

Base is a database program similar to Microsoft Access. Base allows the creation and manipulation of databases, and the building of forms and reports to provide easy access to data for end-users. As with Access, Base may be used as a front-end to a number of different database systems, including Access databases (JET), ODBC data sources and MySQL/PostgreSQL.

Draw is a vector graphics editor comparable in features to early versions of CorelDRAW. It features versatile connectors between shapes, which are available in a range of line styles and facilitate building drawings such as flowcharts. It has similar features to Desktop publishing software such as Scribus and Microsoft Publisher.

Math is a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae, similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. Formulae can be embedded inside other OpenOffice.org documents, such as those created by Writer. It supports multiple fonts and can export to PDF.

Go ahead and get it now completely free of charge!

Today I also uninstalled mIRC (an IRC client) because I have no need for it anymore. Thanks to Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), I can now hang around on my favorite chat channels and get popup notifications when my nickname gets mentioned without needing an extra program to clutter up my system.

Pidgin is free software (GPL). For more information, visit the official website.