For years, I have used StatBar as my Windows status bar. It is a great little program - small, simple, and free. I only have two complaints with it: it hasn't been updated in years and it is a bit of a CPU hog. It also doesn't have a clock, which is a bit of an annoyance.
For whatever reason, today I decided to look around to see what other options there were. One program which looked interesting was WinBar. It is quite similar to StatBar in pretty much all respects, except it has a clock and may be a bit less of a resource hog. On the down side, it only has indicators for num caps and scroll lock, not for insert.
Since I went to the work of installing WinBar and deactivating the automatic startup of StatBar, I guess I'll use WinBar for a while.
I found one other program which appears to be absolutely amazing - Samurize. It appears to be incredibly powerful and configurable. My guess is it could do everything I would want and then some. Unfortunately, it is a bit too configurable. I spent a bit of time looking at the site, tutorials, forums, etc., but I'm afraid that it would take me days to figure out how to configure the program to do exactly what I want. It does appear to be in active development, and appears to have a large community creating plug-ins and added functionality. The other issue with Samurize is that many of the plug-ins attempt to execute code which is flagged as potentially malicious. Without knowing the authors, and without the sort of self-policing provided by the open-source community, I am wary of allowing the flagged code to execute.
While I was searching, I did find a site with a good list of free PC programs to fill various needs: http://www.cronc.com/resources/ is the main page which has links to sub-lists, http://www.cronc.com/resources/recovery-system.php is a list of system type utilities.
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Posted by David at December 12, 2006 06:48 PM