Another Windows 10 Essential: Image Resizer

This adds an item to your right-click menu dropdown, which, when clicked on, brings up the little window shown center-right, with choices of what you want to do. It's the successor to the old Powertoys for Windows version, updated to make it better and working for the latest Windows you can't buy yet, and it's even handier now than it was back when. I wouldn't be without it, especially these days, when we're all working with images so much. 

If some of these add-ins I'm mentioning here sound like I'm repeating myself from previous blogs of the past, you're absolutely right - I am repeating these, not because I've got a memory problem, but perhaps because you might, and I don't want anyone to miss out installing these into Windows 10, because these little freebie add-ins make the system a lot more user-friendly, and the name of this game is just that: user friendliness. We're trying to smooth out the bumps that we've all been grumbling about, and my small contribution is point out some of these handy little items that I think improve the whole thing and make it more convenient to use. 

Satya Nadella recently expressed the hope that we would all come to love our Windows. Loving Windows should be easier if it is configured to smoothly do whatever we wish of it, and presumably, that's the object of all this testing and feedback of it. Ideally we will create a Windows that's simply indispensable. One that intuitively "just works" without us having to sweat the details a whole lot. So let's "add and subtract" here until we get it just so. I love "tinkering" with Windows, adding little improvements. It's fun, and makes it nicer to use. And trimming out the deadwood hasn't hurt it a bit either. We could do more of that.

My "Ideal Windows" would be a very adaptable "chassis" into and onto which I can add a wide variety of both Microsoft and third-party programs to create my own customized system. A system that might not be better or worse than yours but one that would be uniquely mine, arranged exactly as I prefer it - not as someone else thought I should have it. This is making me think of a "modular" configuration, with compatible components for various purposes, that we could mix and match to suit ourselves, depending on which activities we're into.

I think one of the big objections to Windows of old was that it didn't conform to us, we had to learn to conform to it, and what I'd like to see now is the reverse of that: have Windows comfortably conform to the user's preferences, rather than the other way around as in the past. Pick our brains, and find out everything we'd like to do with the operating system on our device, and then put together a system that can be easily altered to suit a range of those tasks. Don't ask us to march in lock-step chanting some mystical Microsoft mantra. We're not the Munchkins and the Wicked Witch of the West is dead. It's the Twenty-First Century, and we want to fly while we still have wings.