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Ever try to find a specific file on your system? Sure, there are a few that you know where to look for, but as hard drives get bigger and bigger, there's more places for them to hide.

You learned a long time ago that its easier to let Windows Explorer search for files instead of your trying to find them manually, but with any decent sized system, it can still take a fair amount of time to have the system look for you.

Index Your Files takes a different approach to this whole process. Rather than just starting from scratch for each new search, it actually indexes your hard drive. That means that when you need a particular file or document, all that Index Your Files needs to do is to look in its index, rather than spending several minutes thrashing around on your hard drive. It can index your files while you go about your business, updating that index regularly to take into account new or changed files. The resulting index is kept to a reasonable size, so that it doesn't speed up your searches at the cost of making everything else on your system run that much slower.

Index Your Files is small itself, so it doesn't take up a huge amount of space. There's only one executable file, so you don't clutter up your system with a bunch of DLLs and other overhead. It doesn't touch the Registry, and can even run on a CD-ROM or USB thumb drive so that you can take it with you.

Index Your Files runs on any modern Windows system, from lowly Win95 up to the latest version of Vista.

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Want a free computer? Don't we all. We can't promise you that, but here's the next best thing: Userful (Free 2-User Edition).

If you've got two monitors on your machine (or can add a second one via a dual-head video card), you can treat your one box like it's two. Install Userful (Free 2-User Edition), add a USB keyboard and mouse, and it's like you've got two separate systems. Still busy on the computer, but the kids need it for homework (or online chatting)? Now you both work at the same time.

Userful (Free 2-User Edition) is a Linux app and runs on many distros that use the 2.6 kernel (check the website for the official list), and requires a Pentium III-class x86 machine running at 450MHz or better. Download the LiveCD version and give it a try on your Windows system as well.

Download Userful (Free 2-User Edition)

sed (Stream EDitor) is a utility that Linux and other *NIX users know all about. Not really an editor, sed is a tool for building filters and automating things dealing with text in files and commands. Reading in lines from text files or the command line, sed applies its magic to transform that text. Have a file where you need to replace all instances of "foo" with "bar"? sed is the go-to tool.

Unfortunately, the Wise Ones in Redmond didn't see fit to add this functionality to Windows. With sed for Windows, you can have the flexibility that all those really geeky guys and gals have, but without having to go out and build your own system from scratch.

The real power of sed comes in its use of regular expressions. When you do a search and replace in Word, you have to be pretty specific in terms of what you're looking for; with regular expressions, the sky's the limit. You can look for text that's there, or even text that's not there, and mold it to your will. Change a word only when it's at the beginning of the line, or the end, or when it follows three (but not four) digits—that sort of thing.

sed for Windows will run on any 32-bit version of Windows, from Win95 up through Vista.

Download sed for Windows

Did you ever want—or need—to be in two places at once? Hey, you could get twice as much work done, or at least only be half as far behind. But seriously, multitasking is rapidly becoming a way of life: so much to do, so little time.

We can't promise to give you the secret behind bi-location, but we can suggest the next best thing: LogMeIn Free. A "remote control" tool, LogMeIn Free allows you to run one computer from another one. Need to check email at work, but you're at home? No problem. Need grandma's email address from your home system, but you're at work? It's done.

Installation is simple; you just install the software on the machine you want to control from afar, and leave that box running. Now you can access it from anywhere in the world. On a business trip and need that file you left at the office? Just go grab it.

LogMeIn Free is available for both Windows and Mac systems.

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Copying files. We all do it a zillion times a day. When we copy one or two files at a time, we don't really think about it. When there's a bunch, though, it isn't always a walk in the park. Copying multiple large-sized files can take some serious time. Want to save some time in your busy day? Maybe you should take a look at TeraCopy.

TeraCopy is a tool that does nothing but copy files. Like most single-purpose tools, it does it fast. Optimized for file transfers, TeraCopy dynamically adjusts its buffers to make sure that you're getting the maximum throughput in your copying process. You can pause and resume transfers, so if you need to get something else done at the same time, you aren't at the mercy of shrinking system resources. With smart error recovery, TeraCopy will retry several times when it hits a file that isn't going smoothly. Best of all, it knows when to quit; if it can't transfer a particular file, it will skip it and continue with copying the rest of them. With Windows, if you try to copy a directory full of files and one of them has a problem, it just kills the whole copy process. That advantage itself is more than worth the price of admission.

And speaking of price, did we mention that TeraCopy is free? Hey, you can't beat that!

TeraCopy is available for Window XP and Vista.

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How would you like a free website with a free domain name? What if it was hosted for free? It's yours with Microsoft Office Live Basics.

Microsoft Office Live Basics is a free service that helps you to get up and running with your own business website, with an unbeatable price. Along with your own domain name, you get design tools to create your site, web hosting to make it available to the world, and up to 500MB of storage space (that's a lot of pages). Add to that website statistics tracking, so you can see who is visiting you, and up to 25 email addresses (each with 5GB of storage—that's a whole lot of email messages), and you'll be a presence online in no time. You also get a $50 credit toward online search advertising, so you can make sure the world knows about you.

Of course, Microsoft would be more than happy to help you upgrade to one of their paid services, but for a start, it's not too bad.

Microsoft Office Live Basics is for Windows users, and requires Windows XP or better and Internet Explorer version 6.

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Got a new app you want to try on for size? How about a new operating system? Unless you've got a closet full of computers, it's a non-trivial undertaking to set up a new system, to say nothing of the havoc the process will wreak on your current setup.

VirtualBox allows you to create "virtual machines"—a system that lives inside of another system. This allows you to do things like try a new operating system on for size without breaking the one you already have installed. Suppose you're running an XP system, but need to do something on a Win2k or even Win98 system. You don't want to throw away your XP stuff, so you go ahead and create a virtual machine. You can now run your down-rev application without impacting the "real" operating system on your machine. Want to try Vista on for size? It works the other direction, too: create another virtual machine and install it there.

VirtualBox runs on most x86 systems under Windows and many flavors of Linux.

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It's not a complicated task: arrange this list in alphabetical order. It's repetitive, it's clearly defined, it should be easy to do. Computers like to do these types of things, and there are plenty of tools that allow you to do so. Unfortunately, the time you most need this functionality may be the time when it's not available to you. Sure, you can use Word or some other high-powered tool to sort a list or lines of text, but two of the places that you may spend a good deal of your life—Notepad for Windows users, and TextEdit on your Mac—don't have any provision for this type of organizing.

The Alphabetizer is a free online service that alphabetizes your list. Enter your data, either one item per line, or choose a delimiter if you've got a list of terms with commas between them. You can choose whether or not to ignore case, so that "a" and "A" will both float to the top. If you want to, you can force your results to all lower case, or you can capitalize the initial letter. Strip HTML markup from your text so that you're not sorting a bunch of tags. Reverse the order to sort from "z" to "a". You can even number or letter your results.

The Alphabetizer is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers, so it'll run on just about any platform.

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How many different IM accounts do you have? AIM, ICQ, MSN–the list does go on. Each of these has their own proprietary client, so keeping track of all of them can become a real nightmare. It'd be nice if one size would fit all.

Enter Pidgin, the free, multi-protocol instant messaging client that allows you to access all of your accounts at once. Chat with all your buddies at once, without having to run half a dozen apps on your desktop at a time. Along with allowing you to exchange garden variety instant messages, Pidgin also supports file transfer, away messages, and many other features of their respective networks.

Pidgin runs on Linux (and other *NIX systems), as well as Windows. Mac users will want to check out Adium for similar functionality for their OS X machines.

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Sometimes you want all the bells and whistles. Email clients are famous for doing everything—formatted text, images, and on and on. That's great when appearance is everything, but sometimes you need substance over form. Back in the day, email was all about text. It was easy to get your words out there, and everybody understood.

As a rule, those fancy email programs are pretty complicated beasts. They don't often provide you with an application programming interface (API), so there's really way to get them to talk to other programs. Suppose you've written several batch files to take care of some housekeeping activity in the background on your system, or more likely on some remote server you're interested in. When that script runs, you may be interested in the results—did it run? was it successful? were any errors encountered?

In the land of UNIX, you've got the mail command to send these script-created messages; Windows doesn't have that flexibility. With Bmail, you can grab output from scripts, batch files, and other programs and create and send email messages based on those results. Website down? Send an email. Backup complete? Send an email. You get the idea.

Bmail is a free command line SMTP mail sender. With a generous number of command line arguments, you can create and send the message you need, automatically. Pipes, redirection, and files can all be used in generating and sending your messages. By adding the mpack utility, you can even include MIME encoded attachments. How cool is that?

Bmail runs on most Win32 systems.

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