Note: Most of these apps do, indeed, use less than 10MB of hard drive space when installed, or use that much when they're running in the background. Some will scale in use as you demand more or less from them—DisplayFusion or UltraMon, for example, when handling very high-resolution backgrounds or a wall of monitors—but all should have an almost negligible performance impact on a modern system.
10. Taskbar Shuffle
You
don't open your programs in the order you want them neatly arranged on
your taskbar, you open them when you need them. Taskbar Shuffle knows
this, and makes it easy to quickly swap windows
around, along with system tray icons. It also allows you to close out
windows with a simple middle-click, which alone could make it worth the
roughly 6MB price of admission. You won't know you wanted to fling
windows out of your cursor's way until you try it.
9. Everything
It's
probably smaller than your desktop wallpaper. But Everything is more
useful and efficient than applications 25x its size. Everything only
searches through file names, not inside the contents of them, but it
does so stupid-fast as you type. You'll usually find your file with a
few keystrokes, and Google fans will appreciate the boolean operators
that enable and/or elegance. Definitely an app you'll want to
right-click and create a keyboard shortcut for. There's also Locate32,
which does a bit more, is portable, and has more user-friendly
features—we just like Everything for its single box that searches, uh,
everything.
DisplyFusion or 8. UltraMon
If
you're rocking dual, triple, or even quadruple monitors at home or at
the office (and, let us just say, lucky you on that last bit), these
apps have a relatively small system footprint, but make a big impact in
how your system looks. They both manage separate or split wallpapers
across multiple monitors, and can grab and rotate images from your
computer, Flickr, or other sources. With DisplayFusion's recent update,
they also both maintain your Windows taskbar across all your monitors
(or don't, if that's how you like it). Our resident multi-monitor
enthusiast Jason still keeps both apps on his system for the little
things, like multi-monitor screensavers in UltraMon, but both are among
the very select paid apps we'll admit to being worth shelling out for
(although both have restricted "free" versions as well).
7. Texter
I
know, it's like we never give up on promoting this, right? Well, what
can we say—we (the royal "we," really) wrote it because it filled a
need in our half-breed lives of alternating text and HTML. Turns out,
though, that folks ranging from power emailers to military writers have
found dull, boring text they can automate, misspelled words to catch on
the fly, or perhaps powerful, seriously secretive acronyms they'd
occasionally like to spell out. For less than 2.5MB of RAM on most
systems, this one packs a pretty hefty punch.
6. Revo Uninstaller
In
a magical world without computer stress, we're all running virtual
machines to try out software we might not want, and we simply uninstall
it there, keeping one system nearly pristine. For the real world, Revo
Uninstaller scrubs an application and all its traces off your Windows
system. It can also turn off programs that are starting up with
Windows, and uninstall applications with a crosshair "Hunter Mode" that
doesn't require you to know what it's named.
5. NirSoft's password recovery tools
Nir Sofer has contributed a wealth of great applications
to the Windows world, but his Lifetime Achievement award for free
software could be granted on his password utilities alone. Need to
share your network password, but haven't actually typed it in forever
and a day? Network Password Recovery to the rescue. Need to unlock an Outlook PST file? Hit up PstPassword. Nir's got you covered for email clients, IM apps, and, for every other app in your system that you can only see asteriks for, Asterisk Logger. Use them with the light side of the geek Force, and you'll own Nir a beer after he saves your unlucky day.
4. CCleaner
With good reason, this tiny, powerful little app has remained our readers' favorite Windows maintenance tool.
With a few clicks, it guns through your web browser remains, Recycle
Bin, temporary system files, registry, and unnecessary application
left-behinds, clearing them out and, in some cases, freeing up at least
a DivX movie's worth of space. It also offers a startup program
analyzer and disabling tool, and can be run on a schedule for that light, regular crap-free feeling (ew, but good, right?)
3. Process Explorer
Windows
Task Manager isn't a bad tool, necessarily, but it only gives you a
layman's view of what's eating up memory or pulling serious CPU cycles.
Process Explorer expands on the vagueries of "rundll" or "svchost" with
a double-click, links background services to applications, and points
to the folders they come from. You might not need it all the time, but
when you're rooting around and trying to free up system memory, it's like a finely-tuned metal detector.
2. Replacements for built-in Windows utilities
There
are a lot of good reasons to keep on rockin' Windows XP, but some of
the built-in utilities can feel a bit, well, dated—and that goes for a
good number of Vista tools, tool. Notepads without tabs? A Paint app
that can't really resize or undo more than one action? Skip the
headaches and work-arounds and run down our list of power replacements for built-in Windows utilities,
almost all of which are tiny litle buggers that do their work a whole
lot better than Windows' own stuff. This editor, for instance, tries
not to think about what file copying was like before TeraCopy came
along—or, if he does, tries to keep himself calm about that 4GB
transfer that failed out for no reason, overnight.
1. Rainlendar
If you feel like you've heard this one before without really knowing why, you probably saw it listed as the best calendar application,
or listed as one of the tools used to create a Featured Desktop. This
customizable little guy gives you a floating, tiny, yet informative
calendar on your desktop, along with a to-do list. It integrates with
Outlook, Google Calendar, and most other iCal-supporting scheduling
systems. The full app with offline Outlook, GCal and shared calendar
support costs €10 (or about $14-15), but could totally be worth the
price for anyone who doesn't like to have to open a browser, or flip up
Outlook, just to see what's going on Monday.
As we've learned from reading our comments over many years (collectively, at least), any Windows power-user has their own stash of little helpers that can move the rock down the road. Which teensy-weensy little apps get past the velvet rope to your system tray, or into your must-install list? Share your links and the reasons why they win in the comments.
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