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So many tasks, so little time. If that sounds like your day–or your life–then you may need an organizer to help you prioritize and keep on track. iGTD may be the tool for you.

iGTD takes the getting things done methodology and runs with it. The thought is that if you have a bunch of tasks to complete, you'll never get anything done until you write them down. Once you're recorded them somewhere, you are now free to finish them, instead of wasting mental bandwidth on keeping track of them.

With the ability to organize and categorize your tasks by projects and contexts, you can focus on tasks that have common locations and resources, and bang them out more quickly than if you just run down a list of unrelated items. Along with creating new tasks manually, you can drag and drop web links or email messages into iGTD to create new tasks.

To speed things along, iGTD has great keyboard support, one of the places where Windows users generally have the advantage over Macintosh adherents.

iGTD is a Mac application and requires OS X 10.4 or better.

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The Acoo Browser is a full-featured Web browser based on the Internet Explorer engine. Along with the standard tabbed browser windows and configurable toolbars, Acoo Browser supports individual windows for each of your current websites. Drag them around on your screen in ways that tabbed browsing doesn't allow, and you can see what you need to see in each of your current windows. Various included junk filters help keep pop-up windows, ads, and ActiveX controls out of your way, making your browsing less cluttered and more secure.

For your inner nerd, the Acoo Browser allows you to view a page's source code complete with syntax highlighted markup. It includes a web page analyzer that helps you to analyzer the pieces of a selected page, including images and scripts.

You can group sites together so that you can open them all at once, which can be handy when you need to check the news, weather, and latest blog postings all at the same time. No more digging around first thing in the morning to find your "must read" sites before your coffee's had a chance to kick-in.

A built-in RSS reader means that you can browse your favorite feeds from inside your browser, without needing a separate newsreader app.

Acoo Browser is a Windows app and will run under Win98 or later and requires at least version 5 of IE.

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How much junk is on your system's hard drive? Temporary files, cached web pages, odds-and-ends, it all adds up. Searching for these guys individually is a real waste of time, yet you need to get rid of them so that you can use your system to actually get something done.

DiskSweeper Free can help you to clean house. Configurable by the user, you can specify paths to look in for this detritus. With a set of pre-configured filters, many of your dusty leftovers can be deleted automatically. You can also modify or create new filters, allowing you to fine-tune your deletions. You may have a bunch of PDF files cluttering-up temp directories, but other PDFs that you need to hang on to. Set up the filters to look in just the locations you're interested in, and your real files will be safe while the junk goes away.

You always have the final say in what stays and what goes, since everything that's deleted is really just moved to the Recycle bin. It's easy to move stuff back out if you've been overzealous in your clean-up.

DiskSweeper Free runs under Windows 2000 and later.

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Did you ever try to remove a part of Windows? How successful were you?

nLite is a Windows Installation Customizer that will let you remove the bits you don't want. Never use Outlook Express? Why not get rid of it. MSN Explorer not something you want? Hasta la vista, baby!

While nLite lets you customize Windows the way you want it, the real excitement comes with the second installation. Get your system configured just the way you want it, with all the stuff you want, and none of what you don't, and then you can create a bootable image of that installation. Now you can–with appropriate licenses, of course–deploy your custom-configured version of
Windows on all your machines, so that they will all work just the way you want them to. Your image install can run unattended, so when working with multiple machines you don't have to sit there to babysit the Enter key for each of them.

nLite requires Windows 2000 or later and version 2 of the .NET Framework.

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Everybody's got a digital camera. And almost everybody's got a website–or a blog, or a photo-sharing account. But not everybody can shell out six bills to buy the name-brand image editor.

Active Pixels is a free paint program and image editor. It supports over a hundred different graphics formats, so there probably isn't a file it can't open. Like Photoshop, it uses layers, allowing you to precisely edit your images. It includes dozens of filters, to let you apply just the right effects to your pictures. It uses floating palettes and toolbars, just like the high-priced app, so if you've used the Adobe product, you're already familiar with how things work and where to find them.

The "save for web" option allows you to save your images with the best compromise between quality and size, so your visitors can see the best possible image in the shortest possible time.

You can export your images to use as icons, too. Just double-click Grandma and up comes your web browser.

One of our favorite features is the unlimited undo/redo, which allows you to repair your errors–no matter how many times you make them.

Active Pixels runs under Windows.

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There are bunches of tools out there that will let you create an image of a hard drive. SelfImage will let you create an image of a partition that is currently in use. Many disk imaging apps, like Ghost, require that you boot from a floppy or a CD rather than from the hard drive if you're going to make a copy of that drive, but not SelfImage.

Creating an image is as simple as choosing the input drive or partition, selecting your compression scheme, and telling it where to put the resulting image. Restoring is no more complicated: just point to the drive you want to restore to, and you're good to go. The restore destination can even be mounted, as long as it doesn't have any currently-open files.

SelfImage is a Windows app and will run on any Win32 platform from Windows 95 OSR2 on.

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Math got you down? Kids having problems with their homework? Are you having problems with their homework? Maybe you need to do some math drills.

Math Drills is about a zillion free math worksheets–over 6,000 in reality. If you can imagine it, they probably have a worksheet for it. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division to be sure. How about integers, decimals, and fractions? Base ten blocks, order of operations, geometry and algebra. They've even got themes for different holidays–who know that St. Patrick's Day had so many math tie-ins?

These worksheets are great for teachers to supplement classroom instruction; for parents to give their young students extra practice. Use them over the summer to keep from getting "rusty".

Worksheets come with instructions and (importantly) with answers! They are all available as .pdf documents, so anybody can use them regardless of the platform you're running.

All the worksheets are free to download and use as long as they are "…helping you or someone else learn."

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Macs allow to you to burn CDs and DVDs out of the box. There just isn't maybe all the flexibility you'd like built-in to that process. An aftermarket tool like Burn may help you to make your Mac that much more useful to you.

Along with garden variety data- and music discs, Burn lets you build hybrid CDs, with an HFS+ filesystem for your Mac-specific pieces, and a Joliet filesystem for the Windows bits. You can burn standard audio discs to CDs or create MP3 discs that can be saved to CD or DVD media. You can burn standard disc images for .dmg, .img, .iso formats and more.

Burn uses the standard DiscBurning.framework that's also used by Finder and iTunes, so if you're having problems burning with those two apps, you probably will still have problems with Burn.

Burn is a Mac app that requires OS X 10.4+ for all of its features, although a significant subset is available under 10.3.9.

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Has Windows ever told you you can't do something? Of course it has! It's a complex beast, with many parts and pieces working closely together in harmony. Most of the time.

One of our least pleasant experiences is where it tells us we can't delete a file because there's a program out there that's still using it. While this may be generally true, there are going to be times when there is no other program using that file, thank you very much. Sometimes there really is another program out there that we've just forgotten about, or there may be a zombie process that's still running after an app shut down incorrectly and incompletely.

Unlocker can help take care of these types or problems. Whether it's a runaway process, a DLL that won't unload, a locked file handle, or some other problem, Unlocker can help kill the process or unlock the file so that you can make Windows bend to your will–or at least do what you're trying to do.

Unlocker is a Windows app that runs on Win2000 and later.

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So here you are with a desktop full of .pdf files. That may be okay if you're looking at them yourself, but it's not so helpful if you need to email those dozen files to somebody else. Wouldn't it be nice if you could glue all those files together into one big file? Maybe the aptly-named PDF Merge Thing can take care of you.

PDF Merge Thing takes individual .pdf files and combines them into one big .pdf file. It's easy to just drag and drop your individual files into the application's main window. You can rearrange the files so the resulting combined file will have all the pieces in the right order.

The default behavior for PDF Merge Thing is to print this new document. Using the Mac's ability to "print" to a .pdf file, you can print your resulting document to a new .pdf document, and now you have one file where there were dozens before. Now you have a much easier to handle single document to upload, archive, or email.

PDF Merge Thing is an application for Macintosh systems and runs under OS X 10.2 or later.

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