This is a new series starting today that will cover up to three cool downloads that will either make your life easier or just be a nice add-on.
Stop Your Web Indulgence
Everyone who surfs the web knows that they have a weak spot where they spend too much time on a particular topic such as celebrity news, or for me it's spending too much time promoting my wonderful website. A company who partnered with Firefox has developed an add-on called MeeTimer that will calculate all the time you've spent on a website for up to a year. Once Firefox restarts go to Tools--MeeTimer--Options and reconfigure the options to your liking.
The drawback to this add-on is you have to manually go to a site and right-click the Firefox tray icon and select Discourage Me. The add-on though provides a huge amount of stats, but mainly the timer is great and the ability to warn you if you've viewed a site for too long. PC Energy Tracker
Windows XP has an included tool within Power Options that works and is integrated with Local Cooling, a utility developed by UniBlue. Vista users don't be discouraged though as it works perfectly fine on my computer. It works in the background and you can maximize it whenever you are on the computer. It's basically software that will tell you exactly how much you've saved if you close down your computer a little bit ealier or put it to sleep. You set exactly what those times are, for example, turning off your monitor in 45min.
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As you can see my power use is pretty high in my opinion and so I will make changes to reduce that. Compared to other people though I believe it actually is low. The drawback is that the program actually takes control of your computer to shut down your computer when you say it should, like 45min. If you only want it to control your monitor then you can set the values to everything else to 0. Once this program is installed you can register at Local Cooling and it will keep track of your power usage and you can compare yourself to businesses and individuals who also have this utility.Keep Track of Your Bandwidth
If your ISP providor caps your bandwidth for each ISP then this tool is for you. Some ISP providors have been known to stop the amount of data you move to and from your computer (download and upload). BitMeter II is a free utility that will calculate how much bandwidth you've used per month. You'll need to know your monthly limit though as that is how it will notify you when you've used a customizable percentage of that bandwidth. Right when you install the tool, BitMeter II will start tracking your download and upload speeds and put it all on spreadsheets, graphs, and charts which come in handy down the road. On top of this, BitMeter II includes a calculator that estimates how long a download will take. This isn't a biggie as Vista has that included and I believe XP does to.