If you are using Windows, there’s a high possiblity that you know the Task Manager. If you make a right click on the taskbar (empty grey bar on the bottom of your screen), you can start it. In this window it will show you all details of your PC, switch to the “Performance” tab please and you will see what I mean. While you keep watching it, you will realize that the “History” is limited to a few seconds. Now I will explain how I’m doing this history even for single programs over several days.

Open “Computer Management” under your “Control Panel – Administrative Tools” and click under “Performance Logs and Alerts” the icon “Counter Logs”. By right click in the white frame on the right side you can choose “New Log Settings..”. Enter a name for you trace and go through your parameters. On the General tab you see where the log files are saved. Open “Add Counters..” and choose “Processor” under “Performance object” and the following counter “% Processor Time” (This is the % of CPU like in the Task Manager).

If you click on “Add” don’t worry it isn’t responding with “Saved, it’s ok”, but it will. After choosing the counters, you can setup the interval. I recommend you to save the logs with the file type “Text file (Tab delimited)” because later with this an excel import is much easier. Don’t forget to start the Trace “Manually” or  by a specific time.

At the end you’ll have a big Text file, if you open it with Excel it can be imported very beautiful way. If you use these datas for a graphical view, it will come out like this:

My mac was once very hot on the undersurface and I worried about its condition. I’ve found a great tool named XRG, which shows exactly what I need. CPU, Memory, Temperature, Network and Disk information with beautiful graphs. So I can always see how hot my mac is and if it’s busy with something. I don’t have to mention that it’s open source and free

Fortunetly I have a new 26″ screen from iiyama where I’ve a lot of space for such things..

For windows I’m using Moo0, a similar product for free.

How can I offer files and folders on a web page for everybody with access policies? For my company I had to look for exactly this. We have technical guides for engineers and solution drawings for sales people and we wanted to share this with everyone, even our guy is on the customer side. The easiest thing as usual is a web interface. Imagine you enter a URL, provide name and password and you feel like browsing in the Windows Explorer. You can rename, move, delete, edit and open them with a very nice guy and this for free? Open Source projects are my favorite and this I can warmly recommend, the PHPfileNavigator 2.

You need an Apache Webserver, PHP and MySQL for using it. The interface is very intuitive and good-looking. Makes happy to work with it. Have a look here for screenshots and the download.

For a few weeks, I’m working with Microsoft’s Outlook in the office. It’s not the best E-Mail client, but at least it’s synchronizing with my mobile. The only thing I didn’t like was the attachments in every mail. In fact it is the picture of our company signature in Lotus Notes. For your information, Lotus Notes is not a real E-Mail Program, it’s more usable as a work-delay utility.

I’ve found on the way through the world wide web the tool from http://www.kopf.com.br/outlook/. Even if it’s beta version, it’s working perfectly for me. All the other tools, you have to pay for.

bbPress is not as good as I thought. It’s small, fast but if you once have problems, forget it. I tried to move it from a to b, but the code is so unlogical, I gave up. Also phpBB is too complicated for me.

Let’s talk today about punBB. I spent many hours in searching a good and easy PHP forum and finally I’ve found this.

I also had to create a Support Forum for my company. Finally I’ve found a good and easy PHP tool. It’s called SMF (Simple Machines Forum). The name sounds very stupid and I was little bit shocked about this un-cool name, but I gave it a try and it’s really amazing. I took the SMF v1.1.8 with the mod (modification) Topic Solved. I’ve never seen such a easy installation of a modification/plugin. It’s easy to configure and to use. The user can accept or refuse an answer and the whole post get green or red. The thread icon change automatically in a hand with thumb up or down. Cool!

Also for the company’s website, the demand was to have a simple list of bugs, with a search and filter option. I’ve tried some things with Excel as an export in HTML, but the bad point was, that it’s not possible to edit it online. That’s why I started to search in the World Wide Web.

The perfect solution for me, is the tool phpMyEdit, a MySQL table and PHP. First, it’s not easy to do it. First create a new table in your MySQL database. Create therein the fields you need for your table. Because you wouldn’t like to edit it with SQL commands, use the great app http://www.phpmyedit.org/.

phpMyEdit generates PHP code for displaying/editing MySQL tables in HTML. All you need to do is to write a simple calling program (a utility to do this is included). It includes a huge set of table manipulation functions (record addition, change, view, copy, and removal), table sorting, filtering, table lookups, and more.

In my case, I’ve created a php file with just read permission for the normal users and a php file with admin permission for me. Absolutely cool!

I created for the website of my company a web page which is looking like a ftp, but more comfortable. I’ve even included it within the wordpress site. Sorry to not be able to show it you, because it’s in the company’s network, but imagine a wordpress homepage and when you click on “Documents” on the left side, it will open in the central frame the content of a Web-Ftp, you can browse in folders and when you click on a file, it will open it, or you can force them to download it by clicking on the document.

Please have a look at this great PHP file: http://autoindex.sourceforge.net/

AutoIndex is a PHP script that makes a table that lists the files in a directory, and lets users access the files and subdirectories. It includes searching, icons for each file type, an admin panel, uploads, access logging, file descriptions, and more.

It’s not easy to find a date and time for everybody to hold a conference on which everybody is available. I recently attended a discussion by mail, when the initiator wrote a mail with the two possible dates and all 20 people wrote back. From New York, Paris, London over Hong Kong everybody wrote back to everybody. I’m not interested if someone can or cannot attend this conference call.

So I remembered a very nice tool I’ve found once. It’s call Doodle and therein you can define some dates and all the participants. Then you send the link to all people and wait. Everybody click on the link and define his dates without mailing around. Just check online the votes..

This week I installed many servers in my office and I really appreciate the work of one tool named BgInfo. You launch the programm and define which information you want to display on the desktop background. For example: Boot time, Windows version, Windows SP version, CPU, Free Space, IP addresses and any individual text. It’s very useful if you have a KVM, many PC’s and you don’t know on which one you are connected right now.

KVM for people who don’t know, it’s a box where you can connect several PC’s (12 for example) and just one Screen, Keyboard and Mouse. To switch between the computers you just press some buttons on the keyboard or a button on the KVM itself. Very useful if you have several servers, where you don’t need to work on it all the time.

Unfortunetly BgInfo has been bought by Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897557.aspx

Which one is better? This question is very simple. IMAP4 is the winner. The thing is that most people don’t know the difference. Most E-Mail clients do understand both protocols and you can see the difference by the server’s name or port number. If you have imap.mail.com or pop.mail.com and if you have port 110 or 995 for POP3 and port 143 or 993 for IMAP4 connections.

POP3 – With this protocol you don’t need a permanent connection to the mail server. The only available functions are listing, downloading and deleting of E-Mails. Standard port is 110 or 995 if you use SSL (Secure sockets layer). As described it’s very simple means less functionalities.

IMAP4 is the replacement of POP3, means it has much more functions and the main point is, that it’s synchrosing perfectly with several E-Mail clients.

Of course it depends on your E-Mail provider if you can use IMAP4 or not. I can’t work without IMAP4 and I can’t understand why POP3 is still existing.