Some Free Utilities I Have Found Useful Lately

Instead of overloading the list in the sidebar of this page, I'd like to highlight some free utilities that I have found to be very useful lately:

• BitDefender Free Edition v10 - Antivirus
• ClamWin - Antivirus (for the Outlook module)
• AutoHotKey - Automation and Hot Keys
  
• Using this, I have remapped CapsLock to minimize the current window, and I've dedicated keys to close windows and open a new email message (mailto:)

• Taskbar Shuffle - Rearrange and Quickly Close Buttons on the Taskbar
• Copernic Desktop Search - Excellent Search Replacement for Outlook 2003, Good for IM logs (PS, I recommend Pidgin with the Aero theme)
  
• Glary Registry Repair - repairs registry errors without causing new problems, unlike outdated versions of RegSeeker and EasyCleaner
• General Tweaks from Kellys Korner

Some other free software that I've come to greatly appreciate lately are Audacity 1.3 Beta (the chains are really helpful for cleaning up podcasts), and AbiWord for simpler word processing without the UI weirdness of Word (but still including grammar checking!). Even though I have Microsoft Word 2003 installed, I use AbiWord as the default program for .doc files, and I find it faster and easier.

In an upcoming post, I'll highlight my favorite Firefox extensions.