Free Download A Day

CaptureNet bills itself as "the Swiss Army knife of PC tools." A quick look at its features lends credence to that claim.

Small in size, and requiring no installer, it does about a zillion things. Along with sort-of-standard things like showing a calendar and letting you create virtual Post-Its, it shreds files so that deleted files are really deleted, and lets you dump your browser's cookies and temp files. Need to check out the current phase of the moon? You're covered for that too. On-screen reminders, count down- and count up timers, and a world clock will keep you on schedule no matter how hectic your schedule and your life are. System tools give you a hand, with a quick launch tool, font manager, and even a backup expert.

CaptureNet is a Windows application. The free version runs under Win2k, Windows 2003, and WinXP.

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Everybody really should have antivirus software on their computer. The commercial apps aren't terribly expensive, and there are several good free tools as well. If for some reason you aren't able to put an antivirus tool on your system, or if you want to double-check a suspicious file, you might want to take a look at NoVirusThanks, a free online virus checking service.

To check a file with NoVirusThanks, you just upload the file and they will check it for you automatically. You can enter the full path to your file manually, or use the Browse button to find your file. Just upload it and wait for the results.

NoVirusThanks will check for any nasties in your uploaded file, and then generate a report containing the results. Not only does it list those results on-screen for you, but it also gives you a private URL for a saved copy of the report.

There is a size limit of 20MB for uploaded files. You probably don't want to depend on a service like this as your primary method of virus protection, but it could come in handy if you need a little extra help with potential viruses on your system.

NoVirusThanks is a free online service. It should work with most recent web browsers.

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You can't get through a day on your computer without using applications that are part of a productivity suite. Without a word processor, spreadsheet, and other apps, your computer would be pretty much just a glorified boat anchor. Unfortunately, buying a package of tools like this can cost you a pretty penny.

There are free productivity tools that you can add to your system. Here's one you can use that doesn't even require installation. ajaxWindows is an online productivity tool. Instead of downloading anything, you literally log in and use all of the features it has to offer online. You can create and edit files in formats that are compatible with industry standards, like Microsoft Office. That means that you can share your documents with others, but without having to share your bank account with Redmond. And they've probably got enough money already anyway. Access your files while you're away from the office, so you'll never have to worry again about whether you've got the latest version of that important proposal on your laptop or USB drive when you're on the road.

ajaxWindows is a free online service. It requires Firefox 2 or later, or IE 6 or better.

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Have you ever wanted to be in two places at one time? You're sitting at your desk, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you're called upon to give a hand to somebody stationed at the other end of the building, or somewhere across the country, or maybe even around the world. If the help you're being called on for is on the computer, it can bring up a whole set of challenges.

Whether it's a support situation, or maybe you're training somebody, it can often be much easier to show somebody what to do than to try to explain to them what needs to be done. If you were sitting next to the person, it would be a trivial matter to just grab the mouse, click the button, and show your charge what to do. You can do the same thing with RoyalTS.

RoyalTS is a free application that uses Windows Remote Desktop Protocol. With it installed, you can demonstrate how to do things, or even just take over and get the job done yourself. Not only useful in training situations, you can now oversee a bunch of "headless" servers as well. When you can tweak their behavior from you desktop, you don't need to have monitors and keyboards on those remote systems. You'll save tons of money in hardware, as well as increasing your productivity, when you don't have to run back to the server room every time you need to adjust how things are running.

RoyalTS is a free Windows application.

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Make this holiday season extra special with Free Christmas Printables. Keep the kids entertained with printable Christmas coloring pages. Make your gifts even more festive with free printable gift tags. Grab a free printable recipe card or two for your favorite holiday dishes. Take your holiday correspondence up a notch with free Christmas letterhead. (Works great for letters to Santa, too!) Download some free Christmas- and Hanukkah theme fax cover sheets for your festive holiday faxes. And finally, you can download some free printable letters from Santa Claus. Great for the kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, or kids of any age–whether they've been naughty or nice.

All of these Christmas printables are available for free, so download all you want. And have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyous Kwanzaa, and a Festive Solstice!

How connected are you? With email, voicemail, IM, video conferencing, fax, and more, it's pretty much impossible to be "off the grid". It's not easy, though, to keep track of all the ways that you are connected, especially if you're not really the local propeller-head.

VoxOx is a tool that can help you tame the world of communication and connectedness. Rather than having to keep track of which network your IM contacts belong to, for example, you can use VoxOx's integrated instant messaging client—one size fits all. Send and receive SMS text messages directly from your computer. Use the built-in email client. It boasts a contact manager that will let you import contacts from all your networks, so you'll never be far from your people.

VoxOx is a free application. You can grab the Windows version—it runs on any Win32 platform, from Windows 95 up through Vista—or the Mac version, which requires OS X 10.5+. There's also a Linux version on the horizon.

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Digital photography is a great idea. Instead of having to buy, store, and process film, you store your images electronically. It's easy to tweak them, to correct colors, fix exposure problems, get rid of the dreaded red eye, and much more. The down side of this is that now you have to maintain all those digital images.

As you know from working on your system, it's easier to deal with files and folders when they have good, descriptive names. The names given to digital images by default are anything but useful. It's easy enough to rename images in Finder, but it would be nice to have a tool specifically for organizing your pictures.

shootShifter will help you to rename your pictures, but it also allows you to tweak the time stamps on those files. Now you can organize your images in order by time, with you controlling that time. While that can be helpful to rearrange your images, it will really come in handy when you add somebody else's pictures to your collection. Now you can synchronize the timing on all of those images, to make it even easier to organize them.

shootShifter is a Mac application. It runs under OS X, and requires version 10.4 or better. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it'll run on your PowerPC or your Intel box,

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Where would we be without web browsers? With all the time we spend online, this may well be the most-used application on your system. So how much thought do you give to which browser you use? Is it just the one that came with your system, or have you made a conscious choice about the browser you employ?

Slim Browser is a free web browser that has a unique set of features. It's got a tabbed interface, so you don't have to worry about a desktop full of individual windows. It's got a form filler and password manager, making it easier to revisit sites you have accounts with. You can even auto login to selected sites. It has a popup blocker, and you can turn Flash on- and off on the fly, making it easier to load the pages you're interested in. It can render RSS feeds as "regular" web pages, so you don't need to rely on a dedicated newsreader.

If you're running an older machine, you're in luck. The system minimums are pretty low here—Slim Browser will run on any Win32 platform, from Windows 95 (with some reduced functionality) up through Vista. You also need to have IE version 5 or better installed on your system.

Slim Browser is a free download.

Download Slim Browser

Are you addicted to crossword puzzles? Whether you're a kid just learning the ropes, or a veteran who insists on doing the Sunday New York Times puzzle in ink, you just can't get enough of your favorite word puzzles. But have you ever tried creating your own crossword puzzle?

It looks like just trying to hook all those words together by brute force may be too much to ask for, unless you're an experienced editor. If only there were a tool to help out here.

EclipseCrossword may be the answer. Instead of having to wrack your brain to make all the pieces fit together, all you need to do is to choose your words and supply the clues, and EclipseCrossword does the heavy lifting. Whether you're building a simple puzzle for your kids—turn spelling practice into game time—or something more complicated for your favorite adult puzzle-solver, it's easy to build your own crossword puzzle.

EclipseCrossword is a free Windows application.

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If your life is ruled by little dribs and drabs of information, you may be a candidate for a note taking system. Rather than keeping track of a pile of little scraps of paper, or a pile of Post-Its, you want a tool that will help you to corral all of your thoughts, ideas, and important bits of data.

NoteLens is an app that can give you a hand. Rather than having to keep track of a bunch of individual text files, NoteLens lets you keep all the notes on your computer in one file. It's fully searchable, so you'll always be able to find that important thought you had last week—or last year—no matter how much data you've got stored away. You can assign categories to your notes if you like, and even import all the little text files from your current current system. It will sync with your notes in Outlook, so you won't have to re-enter all of those either.

NoteLens is a free Windows application. It runs under Windows 98 or later, and it requires the .NET Framework.

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