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Another BSOD? No sweat. Hard drive reads taking longer than normal? You’re well on your way to a full diagnosis before Joes of the average persuasion even realize there’s a problem. But that doesn’t mean you’re exempt from keeping your system in tip-top shape (not to mention putting all that processing power to good use) with a custom battery of best-of-breed utilities. There’s a buffet of choices that would make Ruby Tuesday’s salad bar cower in fear, but many diamonds in the rough often remain there. This month, sit back and let us do the heavy lifting. Let us tell you about how all those cool utilities and applications solve problems, add convenience, plug security holes, and generally make your computing life a little better. This isn’t the first time we’ve done this. In fact, we try to do this once a year. Because we try to avoid covering programs we’ve already recently mentioned, odds are that there’s a lot of new programs in our list that you’ve never heard about before, but you can always go to our Web site and check out what’s made the grade in the past. We also like to highlight shareware, freeware, and open-source software here, too, because you can check out the latest retail stuff by reading the boxes in your local Super-BestBull’s-eye-Mart. Are these programs safe? We think so. Before recommending them, we installed them on several computers running a top-notch antivirus program (either Eset’s NOD32 or Norton AntiVirus 2008), an excellent antispyware program (SUPERAntiSpyware), and a good two-way software firewall (Comodo Firewall), just to make sure they aren’t infecting your files, downloading Trojans, or trying to phone “home.” That said, we always download software directly from their authors, and of course, different versions might behave differently, so we’d like to encourage a little bit of wariness and suggest you scan what you download before using. Odds are there’s a solution here to a problem that’s been vexing you, so let’s dive in.
Though we would all like a second computer just to play games, the economics of keeping a totally clean computer, free of unwanted programs and processes running in the background, just aren’t feasible for most of us. Fortunately, AlacrityPC is the next best thing. Once set up, AlacrityPC will turn off or disable any background processes on your computer and then launch your game. If there’s an auxiliary program your game needs to launch, AlacrityPC will open that, too. Once the game is finished, AlacrityPC will reload all the background programs it disabled. If you have a lot of background tasks, the FPS speedup is noticeable. You might remember FSAutoStart, which acts a lot like AlacrityPC, from our roundup last year, but AlacrityPC is even better. If you think locating new drivers is tricky, just try removing old drivers; it can be even worse. This is especially true when upgrading a system from one vendor’s product (say, AMD) to another vendor’s product (such as Nvidia). And while you should be able to do it manually, Driverheaven’s Driver Cleaner Platinum takes out all the guesswork. You select the drivers you want to remove from a regularly updated list, click Start, and all is squeaky clean in moments. AcroPDF Systems Adobe’s Acrobat may be the standard in reading PDFs, but it’s also unbelievably slow at times. Most of this sloth is due to all the plug-ins Adobe has seen fit to grace us with, which enable Acrobat to display 3D animations, play audio, and do all sorts of other things that most us never see or use. Fortunately, PDF SpeedUp can enable and disable various elements of Acrobat, allowing Acrobat Reader to launch many times quicker. Bitsum Technologies Runaway processes can bring your computer to its knees, but sometimes it’s even worse than that. Have you ever been unable to shut down a program because it was using 100% (and then some) of your CPU? Once installed (and configured, if you’re a techie who likes to tinker) Process Lasso automatically and dynamically reduces the priority of any “out-of-control” program, which therefore allows all your other programs more access to CPU time.
The Windows Task Manager does a terrible job showing you what’s running on your system, because it has separate tabs for what it considers to be Applications and Processes and merely displays a list you can’t really interact with. SystemExplorer displays a combined list of everything that’s running (along with charts and graphs); lets you check various online databases to identify strangely named processes with a single mouse-click; and lists open drivers, browser helpers, uninstallers, and a lot more. Beepa It’s hard to gauge any improvements with in-game speed without an FPS meter, but what if your favorite game lacks this critical feature? In those cases, turn to Fraps, which adds an on-screen FPS meter to pretty much any game, including DirectX and OpenGL games. As a bonus, Fraps lets you take screenshots of any game. It even captures movies of in-game action, sort of like a virtual in-game VCR. The paid version removes watermarks and dramatically increases the length of your movie captures. (Movie captures using the free version of Fraps are limited to 30 seconds.) Microsoft BootVis is an interactive graph that displays exactly what your computer is doing when booting and how long each step takes. Once analyzed, BootVis uses routines built into Windows XP (sorry Vista users) to defragment and optimize your startup files and routines, often with amazing results. Why Microsoft disavowed BootVis for end users is anyone’s guess, but it’s widely available thanks to Google and dozens of reputable download sites. BMSoftware Informatica Opinions vary on whether or not the Windows Registry fragments over time to the point that it requires defragmentation. Still, if you think defragging your Registry is worthwhile, you might as well use a program that: A) is free; B) is easy to use and pleasant to look at; and C) can back up and restore your Registry with just a click or two for each procedure. Reg-Defrag meets all these criteria and actually shaved five seconds off the boot time of one of our test systems. We’ve recommended the various “Sysinternals" tools for years, even before Microsoft absorbed them all. Now, Microsoft has seen fit to package them all into one easy-to-install suite, yet they’re still free. Now you can download Process Explorer, DebugView, DiskMon, FileMon, Process Monitor, and many others with just a single click, and all the icons appear within a single Start menu folder. NirSoft The problem with passwords, of course, is that they can be easily forgotten. And when that happens, you’re sunk, right? Not necessarily. NirSoft offers about a dozen free password “snoopers,” which are able to tease out all the passwords Outlook Express remembers for your email accounts, for example. There’s one such program to tease passwords out of different applications, but SniffPass is more of a generic tool. It listens into the TCP/IP stream of a computer and determines passwords for pretty much all unencrypted POP3, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, and HTTP connections as they happen. Brilliant! (Note: Some AV programs will flag NirSoft’s password-recovery software as “hacking tools.” That’s not technically incorrect, but there’s no hidden payload to worry about with them.)
If you regularly use P2P software, then there are probably thousands and thousands of IP addresses you don’t want connecting to your computer, such as those from the RIAA and their associates, government organizations, and many others. PeerGuardian is a utility that downloads lists of these "suspect" IP addresses and then prevents them from connecting to any software running on your computer, be it P2P software, an email or FTP server, or even a Web server. Nu2 Productions By now, we’re used to Linux LiveCDs, which let us boot into a completely functional operating environment from a bootable CD or DVD. With BartPE, and your own WinXP installation CD, you can pretty much do the same thing with a version of Windows. Once you use BartPE to create your WinXP CD, it’s incredibly handy for copying files from hard drives that won’t boot anymore, performing antivirus and antispyware scans, and getting into a Windows network. NetCitadel Most pro-level firewalls accept detailed lists of rules that designate what network connections to allow or deny. In Linux, IPTables’ program and set of utilities usually handle this, but there are other mechanisms, too. Firewall Builder is a GUI that makes building sets of rules a point-and-click affair. It supports iptables (netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX (FWSM, ASA), and Cisco routers extended access lists. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Eset In our opinion, there are three top-notch antivirus programs available, and this year it’s NOD32’s turn to shine. Its detection rates are every bit as good as Norton AV 2008 and Kaspersky, but its memory and CPU footprint are basically negligible compared to the competition. It isn’t quite as comprehensive as its competition, but if you need to protect a gaming machine or older computer from today’s viruses and want to keep those PCs fast, NOD32 is your best choice. Avira If you insist on not paying for good antivirus protection, then AntiVir is probably your best choice, offering better detection rates than AVG Free while remaining relatively lightweight. The free personal edition occasionally pops up a nag screen that reminds you about more capable (and for-pay) versions of AntiVir, and it would be wrong-wrong-wrong to use Google to look up how to disable it. SplashData Are you still writing down your passwords on slips of paper and Post-it notes? You know you shouldn’t be doing that, so SplashID is an easy sell. SplashID stores your passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal data within an encrypted filestore. It also syncs with your Windows Mobile, Palm, or Blackberry handhelds, and stores your data within an encrypted filestore in your portable device, too. There’s no longer a need to be without your passwords. Malwarebytes There’s no shortage of anti-malware programs to combat the ever-growing spyware scourge, yet much of it seems to come up short in the “I need a program to clean my computer out now that it’s acting funny” department. Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware does about the best job at cleaning out infections when other anti-malware cleaners fail to live up to the task. Try the free stuff first, but when those fail, check out this little gem. You probably won’t need to look for anything else. Available for Linux and Windows, VMware Server is basically a free version of VMware Workstation, and it’s the best of the free virtual computing options. In other words, you can install and run a copy of Windows within Windows for free (along with your licensed copy of Windows, of course), which provides the ultimate “sandbox” for testing new software, checking for viruses, or visiting potentially unsecure Web sites. You can also use VMware Server to run a Web server in a virtual machine; if it’s ever compromised, your base computer remains unscathed. VMware VMware Player is another free virtual computing utility, but it exists to let you run other virtual machines created by other users and companies on your own computer. You can’t use it to create your own virtual machines from scratch, but it is simpler to install and use. There are more than a hundred different Virtual Appliances that are ready to go, and using them instead of your base machine to visit Web sites essentially guarantees that your base machine will remain safe.
WinXP does a lot of “phoning home,” whether it’s Automatic Updates or minor things, such as automatically downloading playback codecs. xp-AntiSpy provides a simple list of checkboxes that easily disables all the individual elements of WinXP that you think might be “spying” on you. It can also enable and disable many minor Windows annoyances, such as clearing the swapfile with every shutdown, hiding your computer in the Windows Network explorer, making Windows’ balloon tips disappear forevermore, etc. Abelhadigital.com Windows keeps a listing of computer names and their IP addresses in something called a hosts file. This plain-text file is easily edited, but the process is a little tedious if you have hundreds of entries within it. HostsMan automates the process and offers you some protection against malware hijacking the hosts file, as well.
Much like Windows’ own Registry, Firefox has many hundreds of “hidden” settings that control its functions; typing about:conifg into the Address bar gets you access. There are a few dozen of these settings that can speed up Firefox in different scenarios, but hand-editing them can be annoying and fraught with errors. Fire-Tune does this work for you, editing the settings to maximize your browsing speed depending on your Internet connection speed and your CPU speed. It also restores changes if you don’t like them. Francis Gastellu Why Copy and Paste, Copy and Paste, Copy and Paste when you can Copy Copy Copy and Paste Paste Paste? ClipX is a multiple clipboard utility that stores about 20 of the most recently copied items into its stack, and then lets you Paste them by pressing Windows key-V instead of CTRL-V. A menu appears with the graphics and text that you’ve copied recently, and hotkeys let you paste what you need. (You can also use your mouse.) It’s much more intuitive than our description suggests, but trust us: It’s a huge time-saver. EnTech Taiwan PowerStrip is the original video card tweaker, allowing for adjustments in resolution, gamma, color correction, geometry, and overclocking of pretty much any video card made since the Matrox Millennium I. It can even perform this magic with two different video cards from two different vendors installed at the same time. PowerStrip is smart enough to apply different settings when it detects different programs opening and closing. Another handy utility from the folks at Driver Heaven, DH Shutdown will shut down, restart, or log you out of your computer. You can configure it to run on a regular schedule or set it to work its magic after a certain amount of time elapses. It can also perform these actions after it observes a certain amount of system inactivity. This is a must-have for users who know Windows sometimes needs a cleansing restart to keep things moving smoothly. A software junkie’s dream, Total Uninstall has two modes. In one mode, it takes a snapshot of your system and Registry, monitors an installation program, then takes a second snapshot, and finally compares the two snapshots. It then gives you a list of all the changes the program made to your system during installation. Its second mode analyzes an installed program the best it can, and then uninstalls it for you, which is handy when a native uninstaller gets corrupted or fails. Microsoft released a handy program called TweakUI for WinXP many moons ago, but it never saw fit to do so for Windows Vista. Thankfully, WinBubble has picked up the baton and is running with it like crazy. We don’t have the space to list the hundreds of different tweaks WinBubble can handle, but because it’s free, there’s no reason you can’t download it and see for yourself. When you need to know what’s inside a computer but can’t open it up, SIW is a handy hardware and software checker that reminds us of a Windows version of Apple’s “About this Mac.” Going beyond the basics, SIW also displays all of your Microsoft product keys/serial numbers, has hardware and network monitors, and can export all this data as TXT, CSV, and even HTML files.
FoxIt is probably the most popular and fastest of the new crop of “alternative PDF viewers,” and we have no arguments. It opens PDF files in a fraction of the time Adobe Acrobat does and scrolls through them as if viewing text files in Notepad. The free version does everything the free Acrobat Reader does (but faster), and it also gives you all the high-end annotation features. Buy the Pro Pack to avoid stamping your modified PDF files with a watermark when you annotate. PictureCode Digital cameras let us capture images that would be nothing but dark shadows in front of a black curtain, but most of the time those images have a lot of digital noise. When you zoom in to a dark area, ever wonder what those multicolored pixels are? That’s digital noise. Noise Ninja 2 magically eliminates digital noise from your photos, either with a standalone program and a handy batch mode, or via a Photoshop plug-in. It’s no wonder Noise Ninja is used at seven of the 10 largest U.S. newspapers. Jan Fiala If you think text files are a multimedia format (and honestly, what techie doesn’t?), then PSPad is the text file “player” you should be using. PSPad pretty much has it all—integrated hex editor, project support, FTP client, macro recorder, file search/replace, code explorer, code page conversion, bulk search and replace, and lots more. It sports a clear interface and works great as a “portable application” on a thumb drive. We know how it is. You get a brand-new monitor or widescreen notebook, but the display seems a little “off.” CalibrationAider is the tool you need to whip your display into shape. It displays dozens of test patterns in both grayscale and color. It even has tools to help you find dead pixels that are more thorough than just looking at pretty photos and scrutinizing them with a magnifying glass. Iconico If you design Web art, then you need to match colors all the time, but that’s usually such a hassle. Some programs want colors in hexadecimal, while others want decimal. Either way, screen resolutions have grown large enough that selecting the exact pixel you want to grab a color from can be tough. For these situations, ColorPic is a miracle, because it magnifies the screen where the cursor is grabbing colors, displays colors in Hex and Decimal, and remembers the 10 previously selected colors for easy re-use. There are many free PDF creators (including one that comes with Open-Office), but we like doPDF the best. It’s very small and light and uses absolutely no resources when idle. It installs as a printer driver (without the need for you to install GhostScript), so you can make PDFs from anything that prints, including Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Lots of handy presets take out the guesswork of making PDFs. You’ll still need Acrobat Reader (or something else, like FoxIt) to view your new PDF files, however. Though a little old and tricky to locate and download, DVDShrink remains the standard in free and simple DVD backup software. With just a few clicks, DVD-Shrink can, well, shrink the contents of a DVD, and then burn a copy directly to a blank disc. It can make a 9GB movie disc fit onto a single-layer 4.5GB disc with surprisingly good video quality, too. Suppose you have an audiobook file saved as an MP3 file. That’s a fine format for simple playback, but if you want to listen to that audiobook on an iPod, then you’re really missing out. When “spoken word” files are converted to proper audiobook format, your iPod will remember where you last left off and can alter the playback/reading speed. Where are we going with this? Converting MP3 files to audiobook files is normally pretty tedious and annoying, but MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter makes short work of the job. It also has a batch mode. You say you can’t be bothered with your defragmenter’s interface, and you don’t want to pay for it, either? No problem. JkDefrag is the minimalist’s disk optimizer (but it’s thorough, too), launching from the command line and then getting to work immediately. You say you want a minimal interface for Windows, or a screensaver version, or a version that comes as a DLL so you can integrate it with your own software? JkDefrag has those versions, too, and they’re all open source, so you can see how they work, too.
NirSoft Windows keeps a list of all USB devices it has ever seen; it refers back to that list whenever you plug in a USB device. This normally works out fine, but if a thumb drive you’ve used for months suddenly stops working correctly, that darn list keeps Windows from trying to reload a driver. USBDeview lets you see and edit the USB device list, which can kick start a USB device from “nonfunctional” to “working” with just a few clicks. Impressum The optical disc-burning tools that come with Windows are meager at best, but if you bought an OEM optical drive, then yours probably didn’t come with any software you can use that’s any better. CDBurnerXP comes to the rescue, offering all of the burning tools (including support for burning BDs and HD DVDs) that come with the software that ships with most retail drives (usually, an OEM version of Nero Burning ROM), but for free. And don't let the name fool you—CDBurnerXP works just fine with Vista. HP There are several little utilities that know how to format and prepare a USB flash drive (or SD card or CompactFlash card) so that it becomes bootable, but HP’s tool is about the easiest to use, lets you select between FreeDOS and your own supplied version of DOS (we use the one that came with Windows 98), and it’s fast and free. Copernic Forget about Google Desktop Search and Yahoo! Desktop search; those bloated applications add widgets and toolbars to what should be an inherently simple, lightweight program. Copernic Desktop Search is a lean and mean desktop search program that displays its results in an attractive and coherent window and corrects your misspelled search terms based on your previously found documents. Plus, it displays a genuinely useful preview of the found document or file. Gibson Research Not all hard drive failures have to result in disaster. Sometimes failures result from the drive being unable to read data from “weak spots” on the platters. In these cases, SpinRite can usually repair the problem. By creating a bootable floppy disk (or other bootable media) and DOS, it can read the disk “underneath” the levels normally used by Windows, making a surprising number of failed hard drives come back to life—normally for long enough to get your data off. It’s worth a shot when nothing else works. Alex Feinman If you just need to burn an ISO image to a disc or create an ISO file from a disc, there’s no need to break out a whole disc-burning suite. Instead, just install the ISO Recorder Power Toy and simply right-click the disc and choose Create ISO Image from the pop-up menu. You can also right-click an ISO file and choose Burn To Disc from the popup menu. What could be easier? Beagle Project Much like Apple's Spotlight or Windows’ Google Desktop Search, Beagle indexes your Linux computer’s files in the background and then lets you search for content (such as documents, email, bookmarks, MP3s, and images) via an attractive interface. Most Linux distros come with this useful program, but you can download and install it yourself if yours didn’t. Dino Nuhagic Who says you have to install WinXP and Vista the way that Microsoft intended? With nLite (for WinXP) and vLite (for Vista), you can add drivers, hot-fixes, and service packs to your existing Windows installation CD, allowing your potentially five-year-old disc to load Windows properly on a modern machine, without fumbling around for a floppy drive and without pressing “F6” when the setup program starts (in WinXP’s case). You can also remove various unwanted elements of Windows, tweak some default options, and automate the installation process. You’ll need a blank CD to write the new installation disc to. Thanks to TinySpell, you won’t have any excuses for typos. TinySpell lives in your Taskbar Tray, constantly monitoring what you type in every single program you have. If it detects a misspelling, it can either play a sound, flash an icon, and/or display a list of correctly spelled words that you might want to use instead. There are a few program that can’t display alternative spellings (such as Opera), but they’re relatively few and far between.
Janus Olsen Who says you should only perform Internet searches from your Web browser? With Transfz, just highlight a word (or set of words) from any application anywhere in your computer and press the Transfz hotkey. A new pop-up menu appears, letting you search for the selected word from online dictionaries, encyclopedias, Wikipedia, Google, and many others. A full API lets you write your own search scripts with virtually any language, too. Computer Technology If your Taskbar is too crowded with different minimized applications, then you probably need TrayIt! Just start TrayIt! and hold down the CTRL key when minimizing a program; this handy tool minimizes the program to the Taskbar Tray instead. Right-click the tray icon and tell the application to always minimize to the Tray, and it will never pollute your Taskbar again. Johan Piculell Linux, and now MacOS, have had “virtual desktops” for quite some time, yet Windows doesn’t come with anything like it out of the box. Thankfully, VirtuaWin is a capable duplicate of the multiple-screen setup that makes having dozens of open applications possible with just one monitor, and at a price that can’t be beat. It’s loaded with features, and constant development helps it shake off problem applications (such as most of Adobe’s CS3) that normally confuse other competing virtual desktop programs. Northglide To steal a phrase from SideSlide’s Web site, “SideSlide is an advanced, unobtrusive, dockable, skinnable, keyboard-accessible, highly configurable Desktop Extension on steroids.” Fair enough. It docks and hides next to any screen edge and provides a handy spot to store program icons, URLs, RSS feeds, sticky notes, photos, Web snippets, and more. SideSlide is also totally skinnable, and it responds to many different keyboard shortcuts. Tordex The Quick Launch bar is a handy way to start a handful of programs with just one click, but True Launch Bar has it beat by a mile. True Launch Bar lets you add folders and categories of icons, basically resulting in pop-up menus for your Taskbar. Add some custom icons, plug-ins like a weather-bug or WinAmp controller, and then add a custom skin, and you probably won’t recognize your supercharged Quick Launch Bar again.
Opera has always been the “alternative” alternative browser, but you may not know it also comes with an excellent download manager, a BitTorrent client, IRC client, and perhaps the most unique mail client (dubbed M2) available. If that weren’t enough, it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux; and its datafiles are all compatible, so you can use Opera on multiboot machines without missing your data. Holger Lembke When it comes time to figuring out what’s slowing down your downloads and browsing, you need a good traceroute program. 3d Traceroute is totally free and offers a good features set and a unique 3D view that really helps you visualize where slow spots are between you and your online resource. Xlightftpd.com WinXP doesn’t come with an FTP server, but if you need to serve files to less than five people at the same time, then xLight’s free FTP server is a good option. It runs fast without taxing your CPU or memory, and it has a simple GUI that will have you wondering why anyone would bother with INI files and comand-line prompts just to share some files with people. Mozilla Group The Mac has iCal, and the Internet has Google Calendar, but when you need a simple, network-aware scheduling program, what can you use for Windows? Outlook? If you think Outlook is way too complicated, then Mozilla Sunbird may be just the thing. It can talk to Google Calendar (with an add-on) and iCal servers and save files locally; plus, it’s compatible with Linux and Mac OS, too. The Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird does essentially the same thing, but Sunbird is great for non-Thunderbird users. Dslreports.com Windows has a significant number of TCP/IP tweaks that can dramatically improve your connection speed and latency, depending on the type of Internet connection you have. Unfortunately, most of those tweaks require editing the Registry in various places, and that can be a drag. Dr. TCP lets you edit things like the TCP Receive Window size, MTU size, Windows scaling, and many other network attributes with a simple, single dialog box. If a restart is required, Dr.TCP will tell you that, too. Typo3 AOE Media Although there is no shortage of good commercial FTP clients, FileZilla has the goods to win you over. Its interface is very configurable, so it can look and work a lot like the program you’re used to. It has all the features of commercial FTP programs, such as drag-and-drop, auto-resuming broken downloads, and secure transfers over SSL and SSH, but it’s totally free. If that weren’t enough, FileZilla’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Don’t you hate it when you have a very high-speed Internet connection, but your downloads from what should be fast servers are slow? If the speed reduction is due to connection throttling, then Free Download Manager might help, because it automatically divides large downloads into separate segments, attempts to grab each individually, and then stitches them together once they’re all downloaded. It can also download all the files from a Web server and FTP server, and it can even download and convert YouTube (or other Flash-based videos). MobaSSH installs a secure command-line link into any Windows machine and makes available many Linux command-line tools for easy remote control and access. Because it only grants access to SSH clients instead of simple Telnet clients, good security and password protection is enforced at all times. Commands includes those for secure file transfers via WinSCP, processor and task management, user management, backups and restorations via tar and gzip, and many, many others. Pavel Cvrcek Thunderbird and Firefox put a mess of files all over the place, so making complete backups of your personal settings and data can be a little bit of a trick. MozBackup, on the other hand, can back up and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, and cache with just a few clicks.
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