Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

Digg has come up with some new front ends to their service. It looks like Intel sponsored one of the interfaces, which is the type of business activity they do a lot of. So I decided to download the Flash object and run it on my PC. I’ve never scene a such a CPU intensive object! It had my AMD Athlon 3500+ maxed out consistently! Maybe they have something in there that makes AMD processors look bad ;). Just kidding, I haven’t even tried it on an Intel machine but I’m sure that Flash object will max out most of today’s desktop machines. The good news is that there is a great solution to that problem. Just log onto Digg’s site and let their processors do the work. There is no difference in the quality or look of the object and Digg has 3 more ‘views’ of their data.

This is truly the best way I’ve seen for staying up on the day’s news. You can view it through some really great visual interfaces and you’re only 2 clicks away from the actual story. Of course, the information you are getting is Digg data. Therefore, it is based on their ‘rating’ of the stories but Digg is as good a measure as anything else out there today. So with all things considered, this is a great way to get the news and you don’t even have to download anything. Just go to Digg’s site and pick which interface is the best for you. You can follow the link below to their website and start interacting with today’s news data right away!

http://labs.digg.com/arc/

Friends, I am still a fan of launchy however, I was surprised to find out that Launchy and each of its plugins draws a ‘critical security threat’ and each must stay connected to the internet to work! Why in the world would a program launcher need to stay connected to the internet? Your guess is as good as mine. So one word of advice… Minimize the problem by double checking the plugin folder to make sure that no modules exist in that folder. You can delete everything in the plugin folder… It looks like there may be room for improvement on the program launcher front after all. I was very surprised the application was doing this. And when I shut it down via my firewall, I couldn’t get my firewall to accept my browser any longer. I ended up having to uninstall and re-install my firewall. A fine waste of an afternoon that was. So heads up! I’m still using it but I am certainly looking for something that accomplishes the same thing without connecting to the internet.
I’ve worked with so many program launchers over the years and I’ve seen the task approached a number of different ways but when it gets right down to getting access to my programs quickly, Launchy is the best possible solution. Instead of having to work to update your shortcuts every time you add new software or change the list of things you want to run, you point launchy at a directory and it does the rest. So setting up and maintaining Launchy is truly a snap.

When you want to run an application you just tap ‘alt+space bar’ (at the same time) and small search window will appear. You start typing in the application that you want to work with and you see the file name fill in the search window and then you hit enter and Launchy disappears again until you need it. Launchy also employs some intelligence so it knows what programs you run regularly and gives them priority over the .exe files that you rarely use.

To wrap things up… Launchy is extremely lean on resources to run, it is unbelievably slim on set up and maintenance, and it is as smart as a program launcher can be. Which leads me to believe that there will never be a need to run another program launcher (well… as long as we use keyboards) because the task of launching programs can’t be completed any more efficiently than Launchy does it.

This is your ‘1 click’ download link for Launchy.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132975&package_id=146049

I recommend downloading the skins too. After you download just unzip them and put them in the ’skins’ file where Launchy is installed… probably c:\program files\Launchy\skins You can download the Skins and get other product information from Launchy’s main page at this link.

http://www.launchy.net/#download

Do you have trouble weeding through all the crap to find the things that you use all the time? This program from Hace will enable you to easily and efficiently edit your context menu and move all the junk under a file heading “rarely used”. It is an easy interface that lets you select which entries to leave in your context menu. The name of the product is Mmm. Once you pick what you want to show in your context menu Mmm has to run all the time but it uses almost no cpu or memory and is a process clearly visible in task manager (or process explorer). Therefore, it does assign itself to your “start with Windows” list of programs that run automatically every time you boot up. Mmm is an easy, clean, and efficient way to take care of your context menu.

http://www.hace.us-inc.com/

Caffe1ne (notice the 1 in place of the i) is a small, useful, bit of freeware that puts an icon in your system tray (a coffee cup) which gives you a switch to stop your screen saver, or system lock, from engaging. Have you ever been watching a video when suddenly your screensaver engages? It’s a drag! So this little product solves that problem nicely. Try it out, you won’t be disappointed.

http://www.snapfiles.com/opinions/Caffe1ne/Caffe1ne.html

This is a great application that allows you to easily change the colors of your ‘folders’. I use this to organize the files in my ‘c:\program files’, everything that I’ve installed and use I color blue, everything I want to uninstall I color red, anything that I know is something my operating system needs I color gray

and anything that I don’t know or have no idea how it got there I color pink. It’s another dimension to folder management and it is very useful. The nice thing about this product is how easy it is to color the folder. After you install the product, every time you right click on a folder you’ll see the icolor menu choice and you just pick what color you want the folder to be. There are several folder ’skins’ to choose from so you can change your style if you get tired of the old XP folders. I have not had a problem with this product interfering with the windows icon system, which was something I was a little worried about, but I’ve used it for well over a year and have not had any issues. I’ve also noticed that it has a process that runs all the time but it doesn’t take much memory to run. It’s always at the bottom of my list of processes (which is good because I sort them by virtual memory used).

This freeware is mostly for looks but I need to emphasize the value I’ve experienced by using it to sort my program folders. I use customized icons on most of the folders I use regularly but this was a good way to organize my program folders so I know at a glance what is new, what I need to uninstall, and what to leave alone. For those of us with ’style inferiority complex’ because our friends are always showing off with their nifty Macs. We can even the score a little because the Mac folder icons are included in the ’skins’ bundle.

After you download and install the main program, download the ’skins’ file and put it under the main ‘icolor’ folder. It installs itself to your autorun directory but you’ll want to get things going right away so click on the icolor.exe folder and it will bring up a small interface so you can select which ’skin’ you want. Then you’re ready to go!

http://icolorfolder.sourceforge.net/download_icolorfolder_page.htm

Yankee Clipboard (YC) delivers an amazing freeware value. It’s better than many of the shareware products that are out there. I’ve tried every clipboard product I can find and the YC’s features top them all. Another important characteristic I look at, especially with clipboards, is the amount of resources they take to run. YC is very efficient. Even when I’ve been doing a lot and I have not “cleared” the clipboard file it is still one of the least resource intensive processes on my machine. There are several things you can do with the YC that you normally have to pay for.

• It stores rich text formats and pictures of all kinds and even URLs.

• It has the ability to strip crap off text. For example, when you send an email and several people forward it. If it is routed by a UNIX server you get all those > characters that indicate the text has been sent forward. YC can clip those characters off so when you paste they are not there.

• You can initiate either your screen saver or a calendar (nice 3 month view) from the icon in the task bar.

• You can store text that is frequently pasted in their ‘boiler plate’ field so it is always available from the main window. I’ve stored information like my email addresses, phone numbers, and even credit card information in it.

Basically, it’s a great clipboard manager. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t pull up a list of your recent clips from the icon in the system tray. You can accomplish it with a hot key ‘control+alt+v’ so the capability is there. It could be that I just don’t know how to do it, maybe I’ve missed something. Regardless, I have no problem recommending YC and identifying it as the best clipboard tool I’ve used. I may get a lot of feedback because most people use clipboards and we all get used to the products we use and love them. I’ve tried several including Ditto and Clipomatic and I’ll try others if my readers think they merit consideration. So leave me a comment, let’s have them!

The bottom line is, for now anyway, I’m recommending the Yankee Clipboard as a ‘best of breed’ clipboard manager. You can download it at the link below.

http://www.intelexual.com/products/YC3/download/