The "Runaway" Computer

Ever feel like your computer is filling up faster than you can handle? Do you need software that can give you the big picture of your computer? Are you frustrated with how complex certain simple things on the computer are?

We feel the same way. Our days are spent on the computer. Simple things become annoying very quickly. We provide a handful of tools to help you wrestle your computer back under your control.

FRSFileList™ is our free software application that helps you identify the files on your computer that you may wish to delete. It can identify the largest files on a disk drive, or just within a particular directory (and all of its sub-directories). If your computer is running low on space, this is a great way to find out which files are taking up the most space, and which ones you might want to delete.

How many times have you downloaded or saved a file and can't remember where you put it? FRSFileList makes it easy to quickly find such a file when you search for the newest files on your computer.

For the ultimate control over the files on your computer, download and use FRSFileMgr™. This powerful tool will help you manage your files, and make you more productive. It was designed to be used instead of Windows® Explorer, because Microsoft's product has become a jack-of-all-trades and a master-of-none. FRSFileMgr focuses on just helping you manage your files on your computer. It easy to use because it doesn't have all of the encumbrances that Explorer has.

Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft has really reduced the functionality and capability of Windows® Explorer with regard to file management. Then when Windows® 7 came out, a lot of things that we were able to do in Explorer on Windows 2000 and Windows XP are simply not there anymore. You can no longer easily associate any application with a file extension anymore. You used to be able to flag, with a little tweaking in the Registry, an application to be used as the editor for a particular file extension. This is no longer possible in Windows 7. Microsoft has also gotten rid of the icon that indicates when a directory is shared with other users on your local area network. Windows® Explorer has never been able to print the listing of files in a directory. All of these things, and more, are provided in FRSFileMgr today.

Microsoft is focusing more and more on virtual folders instead of actual directories. Even though Microsoft's own research showed that very few people used the "My Documents", "My Music", etc. folders but actually like to use the real directories, they decided that an even larger abstraction layer was necessary starting with Windows 7, called "libraries". This overloads Windows® Explorer with virtual folders and it obscures the actual directories. Each time Explorer starts, it always shows the virtual folders and the new "libraries" instead of your actual directory structure. The problem is that once you get beyond the basics of using the computer, you are going to want to see the actual directories where your actual files are stored, so that you can manage them directly. FRSFileMgr brings you back to focusing on the actual directories, where real files are stored.

Need a quick way of rebooting or shutting down your computer? Use our free FRSPCReboot and FRSPCShutdown. The installation program for these applications will create a Desktop icon (if you so choose) and/or one on the Start menu's Programs menu. Clicking on these shortcut will quickly reboot or shut down your computer. No complicated clicking through Windows' convoluted ways to reach that simple functionality.

If you use batch or script files, you can use FRSPCReboot and FRSPCShutdown to automate rebooting or shutting down of your computer, respectively. We use FRSPCShutdown as part of a batch file that performs end-of-the-day backing up of critical and/or daily-changing data files to another hard drive. When the work of backing up has completed, the batch files calls FRSPCShutdown so that the computer is automatically turned off. We then created a shortcut to this batch file on our computer's Desktop. At the end of the work day, we double-click that icon, the computer's key data is backed up, and then the computer is shut down. It is a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Here's an example batch file:

@ECHO OFF
REM ***************************************************************************
REM Does a full daily backup and turns off the computer.
REM ***************************************************************************
XCOPY "C:\MyApp\MyData\*.*" "F:\DailyBackup\MyData\" /D /E /C /I /F /H /R /K /Y
XCOPY "C:\App2\MoreData\*.*" "F:\DailyBackup\MoreData\" /D /E /C /I /F /H /R /K /Y
CALL "C:\Program Files (x86)\FRSPCShutdown\FRSPCShutdown.exe"
EXIT


If you have a need to have your computer automatically shut down at a certain time of a certain day, use the Windows' Task Scheduler to automate the shutdown of your computer using FRSPCShutdown. You might want to do this for your work computer so that it is shut down by a certain time at the end of the day, in case you forget to do so. Another use might be to restrict the maximum time your child is allowed to work on the computer (although software applications can tell Windows not to reboot if their state is critical, so there is a way to circumvent this). Here are the steps to do this in Windows 2000 and XP (click here for Vista and click here for Windows 7):

1. Go to Windows' Control Panel.
2. Click on "Scheduled Tasks".
3. Click on "Add Scheduled Task".
4. In the Scheduled Task Wizard window press the Next button to get started.
5. Once the list of software applications appears, find and select FRSPCShutdown.
6. Press the Next button in the Wizard.
7. On the next screen you can specify the name of the scheduled task and how often it is to be run. In our example we want to run FRSPCShutdown at the end of the work day at 6pm. That way if we forget to turn the computer off, it will do so automatically.
8. Continue on with the Wizard (you have to specify your logon credentials in the next step) to create the scheduled task. Assuming our computer is on, as per the example above, FRSPCShutdown will trigger the shut down of our computer at 6pm.

Never put a shortcut to FRSPCShutdown or FRSPCReboot in your Windows "Startup" group! When your computer boots up, it will immediately shut down or reboot! You'll never gain access to it! You have been warned!