A clutter-free context menu
Choice is always nice to have, but too much will certainly lead to clutter. It's a perpetual problem for those who install many programs, or prefer different programs to an all-in-one. Speaking for myself, in spite of WinZip being very capable of compression, I prefer the quick usability of WinRAR, and the fact that it can handle several compression types. Say hello to MMM from Hace Software.

Beat malicious programs

By spotting them before they spot on you. OK, don't you sometimes wish there were an easier way to spot certain types of files before you opened them? And I'm not referring to only .EXEs. Sure, you could unhide known extensions, but that would cause all extensions to show up. How bout an option that lets you select what filetype extensions you want to see?

Being able to do so would have a two-fold advantage: one, for security reasons, you can make programs -- especially that come through popular e-mail clients such as Outlook -- obvious. For example, picture.jpg.exe, a malicious program masquerading as an image file. Second, you can easily discern the filetypes you need to -- this is more of a convenience factor than anything else; a geek thing, I know!

The Two Ways
The first, and easiest way to do this, is through Windows' own flip switch to display all filetype associations. The disadvantage of this is that whenever you try to rename a file, you have to be careful not to change the extension by mistake. Not a problem with Vista, though. Also, depending on your choice of aesthetics, viewing file extensions all the time can make your files look a bit ugly, which is why many people prefer to hide them.

There's a second and geekier way, through a Registry hack. Unfortunately, I know of no program that does this for you easily. If you guys do, do give us a holler. Be careful though -- tinkering with the Windows Registry is something you must be careful while doing.

The Geekier Way
As an example, to display the file extension for only EXEs, we'll be delving into the Registry. Do the usual Start | Run, then type in "regedit" and press OK.

1. Click on "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT"

2. Search for a folder called exefile; press F3 to search again if you don't find it.

3. Right-click in the right pane and select New | String Value

4. Type in AlwaysShowExt and press OK.

(You'll need to restart for the changes to take effect.) From now on, all EXEs will show up with the .exe extension even when "Hide extensions for known file types" is selected under Folder Options.

If you're really security-conscious, you can repeat the steps for cmdfile, comfile (in Windows 2000 and XP only), batfile, and scrfile. Not enough yet? Go paranoid by editing JSFile, JSEFile, VBEFile, VBSFile, and WSFFile. These are script files that can be just as harmful as EXEs. (OK, I'll admit it: I went the easy way!)