There is an endless supply of tools for us to utilize to grant ourselves more control over our keyboards through macro creation and profiles but the same cannot be said about mice. While you can often find powerful mouse customization software accompanying your mouse, you'll be hard pressed to find a suitable replacement if you don't want to use the included software or if you do not have the mouse that that specific software was designed for.

Whether you choose not to use the software that was made for your mouse because it is buggy or forces mouse acceleration on you, our latest Curious Finding: X-Mouse Button Control by Highresolution Enterprises will give you more control over your rodent without needing to have a special model. Although X-Mouse Button Control is a powerful program that is not resource intensive, it only has support for 5 mouse buttons, a scroll wheel and tilt functionality.

Still, if you're like me and use your mouse to begin transmitting on Mumble or Ventrilo or if you just want to disable your mouse's backwards and forwards buttons, then you'll want to grab this program to save yourself from a lot of headaches.

System Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7. Both 32bit and 64bit. You will also need a mouse and driver that supports 5 buttons. NOTE: If your mouse has 5 buttons but the 4th and 5th buttons don't do anything in XP64 by default - this probably wont work for you.

License: X-Mouse Button Control is completely free.

Screenshot:

Download: [X-Mouse Button Control]

If you've already tried X-Mouse Button Control and know of a better alternative or need help using the program, please leave a comment.

When it comes to yelling at your teammates that you're being attacked and begging for cover, nothing brings your point across better than voice communication. Of course, most games come with good ol' text chat but having to stop defending yourself just to ask for help is sure to lose you the match or game. Although most games offer in-game voice communication, there are some modern games (like Shattered Horizon) that do not and, let's face it, the majority of the time the in-game voice quality is absolutely horrendous anyway. This is where today's Curious Finding Mumble comes in to save us from having to put up with robotic, static-filled conversation.

While Mumble isn't the first application to provide this functionality, it is arguably the program that does it best. Other voice communication (or VOIP) software like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak simply can't match the voice quality or the price of Mumble. When using Mumble I often find myself looking around to see where the person talking to me is standing, simply because it sounds like they are right there in the room with me. Whereas when using another voice communication application or in-game voice chat, I sometimes find it difficult to understand what people are saying because the voice quality isn't good or clear enough.

If you’re like me and you tend to wonder what things you have installed on your system or you want to take good care of your system, you’ll find yourself regularly looking at Add/Remove Programs to decide on what junk you can remove from your system.

When doing so, one thing will stick out like a sore thumb if you’ve been a good computer user and have been keeping your system up to date: multiple installations of different Java versions. Now, you could go and manually uninstall all the other Java versions – like I used to do – but why waste time?

Today’s Curious Finding makes that task as simple as clicking a few times. JavaRa by RaProducts allows you to easily remove older versions of Java and update your system to the latest version with a few clicks of your mouse.

RaProducts describes it best:

"JavaRa is a simple tool that does a simple job: it removes old and redundant versions of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Simply select “Check for Updates” or “Remove Older Version” to begin."

System Requirements: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista without UAC (although I can use it just fine with UAC).

License: JavaRa is completely free and open source.

Screenshot:

Download: [JavaRa]

With the advent of rich text formatting came the annoyance of having to deal with copying text with the formatting included. Usually, this isn't a problem but if you, say, use Microsoft Word to write-up articles and use WordPress's visual editor, then you'll see what I mean.

Whenever you copy text from Word to a WordPress visual editor, the formatting goes along with it. This usually results in oddly formatted articles because of a different font or colour that you use in Word and can be annoying to have to fix. In fact, it is so annoying that I usually just delete the whole article and re-paste it again, but this time I'll go through Notepad first: copy text from Word to Notepad then to WordPress - effectively removing all rich text formatting, as Notepad does not support it.

Or you also have the option of not using the Visual Editor and using the HTML editor instead. The problem with this is that quite a few plugins just aren't as cool when you use the boring old HTML editor. Not to forget that a lot of WordPress's - or any visual editor's - core functionality is really only realised through the use of the visual editor. Even more important is the fact that, for one example, when creating a link using the visual editor, it adds on key information that helps with SEO or standards compliance like a title for the link that would otherwise be omitted when using the HTML editor.

Up until now, I've opted to go the HTML editor route, switching to the visual editor when need be but this still proves to be annoying. Thankfully, there is an answer: PureText by Steve Miller.

In a nutshell, PureText automates the Word -> Notepad -> WordPress method and proves to be significantly less annoying. Once you've downloaded PureText and run it (no installation required), it'll add a system tray icon that can be clicked on to convert the current clipboard to pure text or right clicked on to get to the usual options menu. To happily become rich text formatting free, you simply hit the assigned hotkey (WIN + V by default) and it will convert the clipboard to pure text and paste it (if that's what you want it to do or you could just have the hotkey only convert the clipboard to pure text).

System Requirements: Windows 9x, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7. Both 32bit and 64bit.

License: PureText is completely free.

Download: [PureText]

Are you faced with the same annoyances? Let us know so I know I'm not suffering alone. Or maybe you know of a program that does this better? Leave a comment so we can hear about it!

Taskbar Shuffle is yet another program that provides a feature people would expect to come with Windows: reordering the taskbar. Luckily for some of us, Microsoft has realised just how useful allowing us to re-order the taskbar is and has provided it as a feature in their latest operating system (at the time of posting), Windows 7. But, for those of us still stuck in the pre-Windows 7 era, Taskbar Shuffle is truly a blessing.

If you’re an organization freak like me (at least when it comes to my computer…) then you’ll love this program. It brings browser-tab like functionality to your taskbar. If your programs are not opened in the right order, just click on one and drag and drop it to the right place. It is that simple.

That’s not all this program enables you to do though. You can also re-order your system tray icons by holding down ctrl (hotkey is configurable) and then clicking and dragging them wherever you want, close buttons with the middle mouse button and change the way your taskbar behaves.

Taskbar Shuffle adds a new icon to your system tray, but you can easily disable it in its settings.

Once you've had a chance to use Taskbar Shuffle and like what it has to offer, please consider donating to its developer Jay Elaraj to support his work.

System Requirements: Windows 9x, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista . Both 32bit and 64bit.

License: Taskbar Shuffle is completely free.

Download: [Taskbar Shuffle]

Already have Windows 7? Or already using Taskbar Shuffle? Let us know what you think about the new Windows 7 taskbar or Taskbar Shuffle in our comments.

As the internet continues to rapidly grow in size and popularity, the number of sites we register to, and so have usernames and passwords for, does too. Provided you are security conscious - and you really should be - each of those usernames and passwords will be something different.

Just think about it for a second, if you have the same password for every site you visit on the internet and one of those sites get compromised, there goes your entire identity on the internet. Scary, isn't it? So you really should think hard about having different passwords for different sites and services.

Couple this with the usernames and passwords of the Administrator account and local user account on your system (they ARE different right?) and we have even more usernames and passwords to remember. With such a large volume of login information to keep track of, it's no wonder people forget their passwords. If you are one of those people who forget their passwords often (whether you are security conscious or not), then you'll find KeePass Password Safe by Dominik Reichl and his SourceForge Project very useful.

KeePass Password Safe is an amazing little password manager whose databases are encrypted with two ciphers that are regarded as very secure by the security community – AES and Twofish – and a secure password generator (depending on your settings), among other things. Since this application is open source, you can easily look through the code yourself to see if there are any backdoors or malicious code that may compromise your security.

Once you've been exposed to the wonders of KeePass Password Safe, you should consider donating to Dominik Reichl's SourceForge project to keep it running.

System Requirements: Windows 9x, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7 - all with the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher. Or Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, etc. - all with Mono 2.2 or higher.

License: KeePass Password Safe is completely free AND open source.

Screenshot:

Download: [KeePass Password Safe]

Let us know what your favourite password management program is or if you already use KeePass Password Safe by leaving a comment!

People strive to improve on technology not only to expand our horizons but, more importantly, to develop ways to afford ourselves more control over the various things in our lives. With this in mind, is it not ironic when that same drive to advance our technology results in less control than we had before?

How many times have you tried to delete a file only to be told it’s in use?

When I was using Windows XP, I honestly lost count how many times a day I would encounter this error. Now that I'm on Windows 7 it's not as a persistent annoyance in my daily computing as it was before, but it still happens and when it does I am left completely in the dark; helpless - removed of any control over the situation. All the error tells me is that something went wrong. But just what went wrong? And what caused it? By default, on your general Windows installation you'll never know.

Enter our saviour: LockHunter by Crystal Rich LTD. LockHunter is an application that, among other things, tells you what process is preventing you from performing actions on a file. Once you know what program is holding your file hostage, LockHunter lets you unlock, rename, delete the file or even kill the kidnapping program - perfect for dealing with malicious software like viruses, for example.

Once you've had a chance to try out LockHunter and decide you like what it offers, I encourage you to consider donating to its developer to thank them for their hard work.

Note: I previously had a similar application called Unlocker labeled as a Curious Finding however found that it did not work with any 64bit operating system or Windows 7.

System Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7. Both 32bit and 64bit.

License: LockHunter is completely free.

Screenshot:

Download: [LockHunter]

Curious Findings was a series that originally began on my own personal blog , primarily, for me to record the useful apps I had found or on my system in case I needed to reformat my hard drive or something to that effect. Since then, it has evolved into a series that introduces people to interesting and useful applications that they are unlikely to have heard of before and provides people with the opportunity to share their own curious findings with like-minded individuals.

Most other sites of similar nature provide you with a list of "amazing" applications but don't provide you with any insight as to how the software performed or what it can be used for - basically, it is apparent that the poster most likely never even touched the program they were advertising. Here at M for Mature, any Curious Finding is put through a lot of use before being accepted as a suitable write-up subject for the series and our experiences with the applications, as well as why we use them, can really shorten the amount of time you spend searching for that specific application you need for a certain task.

The best part is: if anyone is aware of a better alternative to our recommendation(s) - with community and your involvement - it will likely be mentioned in our comments.

Over the next few months (time permitting), the Curious Findings series will be undergoing a revival. Posts from my old personal blog will start finding its way to our front page (rewritten and laid out properly to bring you the MfM quality you've come to expect from us) along with new posts in the series.

With all that out-of-the-way,  it's official: the Curious Findings series is back!

In keeping with the theme of our previous Curious Finding, our next one will further empower you with more control over the files on your system, through search.

While having the ability to search for a file on a system and instantly know whether or not it exists is an extremely useful thing to have, our previous Curious Finding: Everything doesn't provide the functionality needed to search within files, like Windows Search does, and so does not give you enough control over your files as you'll only be able to search for things by their name.

Now, you could go back to Windows Search out of spite towards Everything for not including such basic functionality (although that's probably one of the reasons why it is so fast) but why would you, when our next Curious Finding, AstroGrep, will fill the void that Everything has left? And be just as fast as Everything?

While this program would more likely be useful to Developers than the average person, I've already found some uses for it that have nothing at all to do with programming: searching chat logs for a phrase I'm looking for or just finding a file that contains a piece of information I need, but forgot where I put it, for starters.

Still, I believe you could use this Curious Finding to do the same thing Everything does, albeit by searching the contents of files, rather than their names. Don't quote me on that, though, as I have not tested that theory yet. I have, however, been using this program to search for key snippets of code within applications that span a few thousand files and receiving my results without delay so I don't see why my theory would be inaccurate.

So, if you're already enjoying the instant and powerful searching Everything provides but miss the ability to search within your files, take a look at AstroGrep. You won't be disappointed.

One of the deciding factors in my making this a Curious Finding is that, while there are a few hundred applications that allow you to do a similar thing, most of them are incredibly expensive and stubbornly attached to sister products (like PowerGREP) or don't provide everything that AstroGrep does, for the same price: free.

Here's a small tip for those of you who want to use AstroGrep with Notepad++ that will enable you to double click on a result in AstroGrep and open up the appropriate file in Notepad++ with the exact matching line highlighted:

1. Open up AstroGrep
2. Click on Tools -> Options (or press F9)
3. Click on the Text Editors tab
4. Click Add...
5. File Type: *
6. Text Editor Location: the path to notepad++
7. Command Line: -n%2 %1
8. When done, the Text Editors dialog should look like this:

System Requirements: Windows 9x, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista. Version 1.1+ of the .NET framework is required as well.

License: AstroGrep is completely free AND open source.

Screenshot:

Download: [AstroGrep]

Having a world of information within the palm of your hand is a great and powerful thing. Being able to access that information - instantly - with a few clicks and some typing is something long sought after and something that anyone can benefit from.

If you have been using Windows for a while, I am sure you have run into several issues when it comes to finding the file you're looking for on your harddrive (HDD). Generally, starting off the process of finding what you want is easy - you open the search feature on Windows, you type what you are looking for and then you search. And then you wait, and wait..and wait. When the search process is finally completed, you turn up empty handed.

Why empty handed? Well, maybe because you were tired of Windows being "slow" and decided to follow a performance improvement article that advised you to turn off the indexing service or your system hasn't been idle enough to index that part of your HDD. Either way, regardless of the reason, it's not part of Windows's search's database and so you won't find it through Windows's search.

If Windows search has not indexed the location of the file on your HDD, it is as good as your file not existing. There is simply no way to access information through a search engine if that engine does not know it exists. So what now? Well, you have a few choices:

1. Re-enable the indexing services on your computer and allow it to sit idle over a long period of time
2. Re-enable the indexing service and start a manual index build

Either of these methods require you to wait, and we all know that waiting is the last thing you want to do…

Enter the our first Curious Finding, the wonderful program called Everything by VoidTools, and all these problems disappear.

With the installation of a really small program (293 KB at time of writing), you can access every file on any local NTFS drive on your system - instantly. You simply run Everything, type a search in the search box and the results are instantly (or close enough to instantly) displayed. The best part is, you don't need to wait forever for Everything to index your drive because it does that pretty much instantly too - and - without the use of or need for the Windows indexing service.

So, what are you waiting for? Download Everything and see for yourself just how useful and powerful Everything really is. Oh, and did I mention it supports regular expressions (regex) too?

System Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 or Windows Vista

License: "Everything" is completely free.

Download: [Everything]