Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.0

Description: PureText is a small app that runs in the background and provides the functionality of pasting whatever was copied into the clipboard (using a user-definable hotkey) as simple text without any of the formatting of the original.

There are 2 kinds of people who will read this; the first group will be wondering why anybody in the world would want this functionality, while people in the second group are merely thinking “AHA! - where do I download this!”. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0

Description: Color Correction Wizard is a program that can perfrom automatic or manual color correction to a single image or a group of images in an easy, wizard-style interface.

This program only recently became freeware. Here’s what you need to know about it:

• It has a very intuitive, wizard-style interface.
• Can work with a single image or a number of images in batches. For groups of images, it can apply the same modifications to get the same ‘look’ across the board or it can scroll through all of the images in sequence, allowing you to decide on a custom intervention for each one.
• Can perform autocorrection for either contrast or color balance or both.
• If you do not want autocorrection, it will allow you to manually modify contrast and color levels through simple slider controls. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.03

Description: Gamma Bros is a surprisingly playable free shoot em up game that is purposely ‘retro’ in its pixellated graphics and design. It is a flash game that you can play online in your browser, but is also downloadable if you would rather play it from your hard drive.

The storyline is as follows: the brothers Buzz and Zap Gamma need to get home to earth for dinner after a hard day’s work at a giant space station near Jupiter. The long float downward is fraught with hostile enemy aliens and ships, but luckily their little spaceships come equipped with a four-way laser (that can also be upgraded to much deadlier weaponry). Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 5.0

Description: FileMenu Tools adds a number of useful commands into the Windows right-click context menu. It is highly customizable, in that you can select exactly which commands you want displayed, and will allow you to insert seperators and submenus as you see fit. It will also allow you to create your own custom commands that can access external programs via the command-line-interface.

I am a big fan of anything that has to do with the Windows context menu. If you’re like me, you’ll like this program very much. FileMenu Tools enables you to do the following: Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 5.1

Description: Favorites Plus is a program that can convert your Internet Explorer favorites into an html web page categorized according to your IE favorites folder structure. It can do this for all your bookmarks or a subset that you select. It can also set the resulting html page as your IE home page.

Useful things, bookmarks, aren’t they? Well apparently not. According to two University of Washington researchers, bookmarks have become “information closets that contain a jumble of sites people never return to”. Only a very small number of users (estimated at fewer than 1%) actually return to websites they bookmarked, and only the “hyperorganized” ever go back and sort sites into folders and clean out dead links. (Lisa Guernsey, “Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites,” New York Times, Jan 22, 2004). Read more »

Rting: 5

Version tested: 1.0 Beta

Description: Registry Distiller is a free registry cleaner that will optimize your system by removing obsolete and incorrect information from the registry, resulting in a faster computer that is less prone to errors.

The Windows registry is a database that stores settings, options and preferences pertaining to the operating system, software and hardware on a PC. Depending on what you do with your computer, the registry can grow cosiderably; in my experience, the registry tends to grow much like an untended garden. With time, especially if you install and/or uninstall a lot of software (like I do) it will invariably contain obsolete or incorrect information. These can slow your system’s performance and cause errors and/or crashed. If your system is sluggish or slow it very well may be due to registry problems. (Note that you should consider other reasons first, including: spyware/malware, a fragmented hard drive, faulty memory, too many programs running at once competing for your system resources, problems with your drivers). Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.6

Description: PC Decrapifier is a program that will automatically remove a specific list of unwanted software that comes preinstalled on new computers. It was designed for programs that come preinstalled on DELL computers but will remove these from any PC. A list of the software that the version tested removes is provided here.

Most computers today come pre-loaded with all sorts of programs and services that the manufacturer installed for you. These include anything from AOL to the ubiquitous “Get high speed internet” icons to MS Photo Story and trial versions of Quickbooks. In my experience, many of these are (a) bloated programs that (b) take a lot of space, and (c) will most likely never be used. Many are lite or trial versions designed for a captive audience of users that are not computer savvy, with the hope that they will get used to the software foisted on them and end up paying for it. Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 3.3.0

Description: GParted Live CD is a powerful full-featured partition management software that can create, resize, check, copy, merge, and destroy partitions, and supports multiple file systems.

This is a really good open source partition management software that is very simple and has a self explanatory interface. It can format and perform operations on a all the major file systems (including FAT32 and NTFS). Read more »

Rating: 4

Version tested: 2.19c

Description: Little Fighter 2 is a freeware beat-em-up game that can be loosely described as a miniature Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. It features one-to-one fights or all out battles with dozens of participants, with up to four human players.

Here’s what you need to know about this game:

• The different modes of play are this game’s strong suite, and these add a lot to the game; you could choose to fight one-on-one or in teams or even armies of fighters; a one-off game or championship, etc. Read more »

Rating: 4

Version tested: 2.51.0.1117

Description: URLMenu is a bookmark launcher that resides in the system tray. It works with Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape bookmarks.

This program is somewhat dated, but still very useful. Here’s a list of its most useful functions; note that this applies only to the supported browsers (no Firefox, unfortunately):

• Find and launch any of your bookmarks from the system tray (see screenshot)
• Bookmark any URL automatically by copying it (CTRL-C) twice in quick succession.
• Find link function: will prompt a little window where you can filter your bookmarks by whatever you type in.
• Add link function: bookmart a URL quickly from the system tray. Read more »

Rating: 4 

Version tested:  Beta

[Note: this review was written by my friend Navdeep Dhillon; see his personal blog here; also see Infact, the free ebook site he built with his team - The Freewaregenius]

Description: Blogger is a free service owned by Google that allows you to publish your own blog and host in on Blogger’s own servers as a subdomain of blogspot.com or on a server of your choosing. Blogger beta introduces a dynamic blogging platform and other improvements such as tagging and drag and drop template modifications.

I recently started using Google’s new Blogger beta. Its definitely a big step up from the previous version of Blogger.One no brainer new feature is the introduction of tags. Perhaps a couple years late, but a welcomed new feature nonetheless. I was getting quite tired of loading my entries with keywords, and then relying on the search capability to “kind of” get tags to work. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: Unknown (beta?)

Description: Ballistic is an action-packed 3D puzzle game viewed sideways from a 2D perspective. Your objective is to negotiate the laws of physics in your quest to navigate a ball inside a maze-like virtual world and arrive at your target before the clock winds down. 

Imagine a solid, curvy world of slippery mazes that keeps shifting and moving in its entirety. This is the world of Ballistic, and YOU do all the world-moving (you prime mover you), with the simple objective of guiding a ball-like object in its travels through the maze to various target teleporters. The point is to move the physical environment to harness the pull of gravity below. Or above, as hitting some objects reverses gravity, making things interesting to say the least. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 3.4.0

Description: TugZip is a poweful, full-featured 100% free compression/archiving program that supports all the major compression formats including ZIP, RAR, ACE and many others (see below).

TugZip is my definite choice for powerful, free compression program, for the following reasons:

• TugZip is a very powerful freeware compression tool rivaling 7-Zip in my experience.
• Allows you to extract multiple folders; each into its own folder or all in one folder.
• Can create self extracting archives (also includes a scripting tool for automated backups
• Allows drag and drop file compression/decompression.
• Supports all major compression formats; it can read AND write the following (7-ZIP, BZ2, CAB, LHA (LZH), SQX, TAR, TGZ, YZ1 and ZIP), and can read (only) the following: A, ACE, ARJ, CPIO, DEB, GCA, GZ, IMP, LIB, RAR, RPM, TBZ, and TAZ archives. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.2.85

Description: JDiskReport is a program that can perform a scan and generate detailed reports on the sizes of files and folders that exist on your hard drive.

If you think you know exactly what files and folders occupy the most space on your hard drive you are probably mistaken. JDiskReport is a program that can tell you exactly where all of hard drive capacity is being used up. It can do this from a hi-level macro perspective and allow you to drill down to any level of detail that you want.

This program will generate pie charts, ring charts, bar charts, or file/folder lists (all of these are sortable by size). It can also create a number of reports such as: top 100 largets files report, reports showing the distribution of files sizes and distribution of modification dates, and a report that shows the distribution of files by type. For example, I learned that the largest chunk of files on my hard drive were .mp3 files, followed by .xls files (not very useful perhaps but interesting).

As a freeware program this is a full-featured program and probably the best in its category; here’s what I like about it: Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.2.85

Description: Startup Delayer is an award winning program that can potentially decrease your system’s booting time by scheduling a delayed launch of some of your startup applications.

The idea behind this program is that when Windows boots, it attempts to launch a number of applications in succession that end up simultaneously competing for resources, overloading the system and delaying the successful conclusion of the booting process. Startup Delayer is a scheduler that will let you determine the timing and sequence of launching startup applications when booting in a way that could potentially make your computer responsive much earlier.

I have tested this and it seems to work. I used the following pseudo-scientific methodology: Read more »