Anyone who works or has worked in an office environment has come up against this problem at some point or another.  You create a document in a feverish frenzy, send it to the printer with a flourish, and go stand by the industrial monolith to await the hard copy of your genius.

And wait.

There’s no telling how many times you’ll try to reprint before you finally realize that you neglected to change back to your “usual” printer after some other anomalous print job.  And while the worst case scenario is having to rescue a hapless coworker from the pile of copies you sent to the “wrong” printer next to his desk, it’s still a time-consuming and frustrating error.  As such, I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear there’s a free program that will render this irritating gaffe obsolete.

Enter Automatic Printer Switcher from Computed Synergy! This program runs in the background of Windows to redirect print jobs according to your every whim.  You simply download and run the program, open the other programs whose print jobs you wish to control, and use the handy interface to pair program with printer.  With a few clicks of a mouse, Word documents will print in your office, Excel spreadsheets will become PDFs, and that funny email forward from Aunt Mabel or your plane tickets to Maui will emerge from that printer in the corner that your boss can’t see.

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If you’re like me you have a ton of icons on your desktop, but they’re all over the place and sometimes difficult to keep track of. There’s a great free application that you can use on any version of Windows XP and up (XP, Vista and 7) called Fences by Stardock.

Fences allows you to group your icons within individual…well…fences. Each fence is re-sizable, movable as a group of icons and has it’s own label. All you need to do to create a fence is right click and hold and drag a box around the icons you wish to group together, like in the video below.

The free version allows for an unlimited number of fences, quick hide abilities, auto scaling of fences for when you change resolutions and the ability to save configurations before you makes changes and revert if you don’t like your new setup.  They offer a paid version that gives you the ability to automatically grab files by extension, date, name, etc, set different opacity levels for different fences.

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