I’ve previously discussed virtual server infrastructure with an article on Microsoft’s Hyper-V which comes included with Windows Server 2008. Due to the performance hit that a Server 2008 machine will take just by having the Hyper-V role installed, I went looking for another solution. I had a few criteria though. Since I was just doing this for myself and my own curiosity, I wanted it to be free or near there. I also wanted it to have as little performance impact as possible, but produce a fully stable and functional virtual machine.

[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404techsupport.com]. 

This article presents three handy free programs designed to remove installed applications from your system: Appremover, PC Decrapifier, and Revo Uninstraller. All three are portable (or, in the case of Revo, have a portable version available).

MaxTo is a free program that splits your screen into custom regions and then nables you to maximize and snap your windows to these regions on-demand. It supports 2 “layers”, main and alternate, such that the user can split the screen into, say, vertical regions in one layer and horizontal regions in another (or even vertical/horizontal combinations) . It allows you to toggle window maximization for the main and alternate settings via two user-definable hotkeys, such that maximizing without pressing hotkeys results in normal window maximizing behavior.

StExBar is a free Windows extension that adds a number of useful functions as a Windows explorer toolbar, including a filtering box, toggle show system files, copy names or paths, mass rename, and a command line console. It allows you to add your own functions to the toolbar (or as keyboard shortcuts) if you have an executable or script.

Free Disk Usage Analyzer is a free hard drive analysis tool that reveals those files and folders on your drive(s) that are occupying the most disk space. It displays ranked lists of both your top space-hogging files and folders.

Dyson is a free cross-platform real time strategy game with abstract visuals. It manages to be simple and elegant even as it combines elements such as the emergence of life, a Darwinian “sperm wars” motif, and intra-species competition with your standard world-domination game concept.

TaggedFrog is a free utility that allows you to tag any files on your hard disk by keyword and access or filter them through a tag cloud. Users can also create filters by file-type to filter their results, and create favorite “sets” or combinations of tags for quick browsing.

WindowsPager is a free program that adds four virtual desktops/workspaces to your desktop. It integrates the new workspaces as icons in your taskbar and allows for managing your open windows through the right click context menu. WindowsPager is a portable app with very light resource consumption.