17 of 26

Looking for a free text editor on Windows that doesn’t suck?  Look no further than Notepad++.  Notepad++ is a fantastic light-weight text editor that I’ve been using for a few years now.  It’s very easy to use and has syntax highlighting for nearly 50 languages.  I use it to edit any text that doesn’t need to be compiled by Visual Studio .  It also integrates into Windows Explorer so you can open files with Notepad++ via the context menu.

Finally, Notepad++ has a plugin architecture so if it doesn’t already have something you need, odds are that someone wrote a plugin to do it. You can find a list of Notepad++ plugins here.

Using Notepad++ to develop the eHow Earnings Tracker

Ever wonder where all of the space on your hard drive has gone?  I certainly do from time to time, and for years I’ve been using a great tool called TreeSize Free from JAM Software to find out.  TreeSize Free is a lightweight program (~1.55MB)  that hooks itself into the context menu in Windows Explorer.

Once it’s installed, you can just right click on any directory or drive and select “TreeSize Free” from the context menu.  TreeSize will then scan the selected directory or drive and give you a summary of all the space taken up by the files and subdirectories.

TreeSize Free has a variety of options that let you customize the display.  You can choose the units (KB, MB, GB, or mixed) to use in the display or instead you can view by percentage of space occupied.  You can even tell it to show you the number of files in each directory.  Overall, it’s a very useful tool that’s simple to use.

So that’s where my hard drive space went!

If you need some serious hard drive analysis and reporting, they have a professional version available.