The main reason you may want to sync folders on a single machine is to backup your data. You would probably be best to find a backup utility to do this.

If you want to sync folders over networked drives, this guide may help you also. There are more detailed articles at Inspect My Gadget on syncing documents between two networked computers. Find them here.

On the very odd occasion you do want to sync folders on a single computer, it is not too hard to achieve. There are  number of applications available to help you do this, but many of them cost money. Windows has a solution by a command in the command prompt which will work on all Windows PC’s. Microsoft also offers a program called SyncToy which does the same thing with a nice GUI interface.

This is a two part article. Part 1 will look at using xcopy to sync your folders, and Part 2 will look at using SyncToy.

Part 1 will cover the following topics.

• How to use xcopy
• How to put xcopy into a batch file
• How to schedule the batch file to run a sync at a set time.

The reason I like xcopy is that it is quick to setup, and you do not require any additional software to get it to work. This means it is good for 1 off syncs. SyncToy will be the best solution for most people who require to sync more frequently.

Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed that with all the screen resolution changing software over the last few days, that your wallpaper does not want to play the game. If you change your resolution with a dual monitor setup, the wallpaper of your secondary monitor will change to the size of your main monitor. This is a little ugly and I can understand that in some scenarios, you may want a solution to make this much prettier.

Along comes DisplayFusion which will solve this problem for you, as it has done for me. DisplayFusion is a great utility to look after the wallpaper of your dual monitor setup.

You are able to stretch your wallpaper across multiple monitors, select a different wallpaper for each desktop as well as the ability to use images from flickr as your wallpaper.

If you change your resolution, DisplayFusion will recognise this and give you a balloon popup to adjust your wallpaper to suit. With 2 clicks, you can be back in action. Look out for future versions as this hopefully will become an automatic feature. Worth noting is that your Windows wallpapers are normally stored in your “C:\Windows\Web” folder

While this application won’t be suitable for all scenarios, it is great for anyone wanting more control over their dual monitor configuration. I thank the How-to Geek for letting me know of this.

Available from Binary Fortress. That’s enough screen resolution stuff from IMG for a while.

Last week I showed you Reschange 3.11 which is a command line utility to change your screen resolution. Since then, Cybernetnews has reported on a tiny utility called JRes, otherwise known as JustinRes. I didn’t know of this utility previously and it is worth comparing the two as they both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

This utility clocks in at a tiny 5kb and runs in your tasktray. Once you click on it, you get to switch between a whole range of resolutions, refresh rates as well as bit depth, covering just about any resolution you might want.

This is great for quick resolution changes and it works well. To make it run at startup, place the executable in your Start Menus –> Startup folder. This will do the job for me changing resolutions. The only drawback I found with JRes is that it lacks dual monitor support.

As with ResChange, there is no 15 second revert if you enter into a resolution your monitor or card does not support. Worth keeping in mind is Windows Safe Mode which will get you out of this dilemma. Press F8 just before Windows starts up and then you can enter safe mode to set the resolution back to whatever you would like.

So take your pick, JRes for speed, and Reschange for more configuration control. It all depends on how often you want to change your resolution and for whatever reason.

Available from Nullsoft.

Joystick 2 mouse lets you use your game controller to move your mouse around the screen, and a whole lot more. You can do just about any Windows function with this program, including typing (though this would be a nightmare), all from your game controller.

The reason I looked into this was so that I could control Windows Media Centre from my couch. I had all sorts of problems finding a suitable tool. Eventually I came across this gem. After installing it, I found out that it could do much more than I initially wanted. There is no reason why it could not be configured to control first person shooter games.

It is highly configurable, allowing you to change almost every aspect of it. You can use it to control any application. The only drawback I found was that there was no option to disable/enable this utility from the controller. Disabling it is possible by exiting the program, but without the program open, you can no longer use your controller to re-launch the program.

Logitech users would probably be best using the profiler software which can be downloaded from their website. This will allow similar functionality.

Joystick 2 Mouse 3 is available for free from the authors website, or get it from Tucows.

Most applications are best run at a high resolution to ensure you have plenty of screen space, however some games require you to change your screen resolution to a setting which the game supports.

To change your screen resolution, you would generally need to go into your display properties and tinker with a few settings. While this is easy enough to do occasionally, if it is something you want to do regularly, it becomes quite an annoying process. It gets even worse if you require low resolutions, as they are not always made available to you here. You would need to go further and enter into the advanced section of your display properties to switch between the resolutions.

I constantly need to switch between 1280×1024 and 640×480, as my CRT TV only supports the lower resolution. I used ResChange to setup some desktop shortcuts to make the job much quicker and easier. I can also see this being useful for a range of scenarios such as wide-screen laptops connecting to 16:9 projectors on a regular basis.

ResChange is a command line utility which will do as the name suggests, change your resolution. You can apply a whole range of switches such as height, width, frequency, as well as telling ResChange which monitor to do the change to if you have dual screen setup (defaults to monitor 1).

Once installed, I made shortcuts with the following switches:

For 640×480 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=640 -height=480 -refresh=60

For 1280×1024 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=1280 -height=1024 -refresh=max

While compatibility mode would allow me to run some things at the lower resolution, not all programs support it, so changing the resolution of Windows was best. This has worked flawlessly for me in both XP and Vista. If you need a range of resolutions, you could make a start menu group with multiple shortcuts for various resolutions in there.

(Update 4/8/08: This is now called Display Changer. There are some new features whcih make it even more handy.)

Available for free from Softpedia.