Utilities still working on Windows 10

While I try to get used to the new Windows 10 OS, I think it can be worth mentioning two utility programs which are not officially documented to be working on this OS but I found them to have no problems.

The first one is MS Keyboard Layout Creator. I use this to create a modified keyboard layout supporting some IMO useful characters not found on a traditional IT keyboard. Among these are the tilde “~” and the grave accent “`”. Quite handy for who uses UNIX, Perl and other. I prefer MSKLC over other programs because it lets you creates a new keyboard layout in a dll you load in place of (or in addition to) the default layout for your keyboard. So no need to have additional running programs (I understand that a program which does the keyboard remapping “online” can do lot more things, but I don’t need them at the moment). And it does not rely on scancodes swapping/changing since with this technique you can only change or swap a key, but not add new key combinations (for example, scancode 29 produces “~” in US layout and”\” in IT layout; and there’s no scancode corresponding to “~” in IT. So there’s no way to have “~” in the IT layout with scancode manipulations).

I was able to install MSKLC on Win10, recompile my layout, and reinstall it on Windows 10.

The other one is RedMon – Redirection Port Monitor. With this print monitor you can define a logical printer port which hands your print jobs to a program of your choice. Again, the program can still be installed on Windows 10. The only thing worth noticing is that when you create and configure the redirected port, you have to do it with administrator privilege. Simply run “printui /s /t2” from an elevated command prompt to launch the printing server properties panel. Here you can create the redirected port to be used by your printer. By the way, here you can also install some printer drivers to your server. As always, you can chose to install a driver present in your Windows DVD, or third party drivers from disk. One thing I do with printers attached to a redmon port is to use old Apple LaserWriter drivers, both monochromatic and color versions. These are rather old printers and their drivers are not included in Windows any more, but I find these to be the most affordable Postscript generating drivers. You can still find them included in an old Windows XP DVD. Do you know a 64 bit version of XP existed? If you have an ISO of this, in \AMD64\NTPRINT.INF you can find the drivers for the Apple printers I mentioned before (along with all the printer drivers from old XP). In particular, I use the “Apple LaserWriter 16/600 PS” for black/white and the “Apple Color LaserWriter 12/600” for color. Together with redmon you can produce PDFs, fax your documents, send them to what you want… since the postscript produced can be handed over to any program, the possibilities are endless.

Comments are closed.