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How much of your hard drive space is taken up with duplicate files? Sure, they were all important when you created them, but now you've got three identical copies of that report you created, and you don't even know where they all are. Is that really the kind of clutter you need?

There are several tools out there that will help you to discover duplicates on your system, but Duplicate Files Searcher goes one better. Not only does it work on your local hard drive, but you can also use it to check for duplicates on removable media like CDs, DVDs, and even USB drives. In addition, you can also search mounted network drives, which can help you find stuff you've left on your network share as well.

Duplicate Files Searcher does a byte-by-byte compare of your files, so you know that you're identifying actual duplicates, and not just documents with the same name and different content. You don't want to clobber all your incremental backups, after all.

Duplicate Files Searcher is a Java app, so it'll run on just about anything.

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Everybody has their own way they want to work. You've got your favorite apps, and you want them laid-out just so. When things are set up right, you just blast through your work and get things done. Change just one of those, though, maybe a window in the wrong location, and you're a fish out of water. Drag them all back where they belong, and you're on your way.

Not so easy, though, is when the icons in the Windows Taskbar get shuffled around. Those guys have a mind of their own, and no amount of coaxing will get them to move to where you want them.

Taskbar Shuffle is a slick little tool that lets you re-order the icons in your Windows taskbar. Click on an icon, and drag it to the left, or drag it to the right, and pretty soon you're back in business. It also lets you rearrange icons in the System Tray. Now you can finally make you machine look the way it needs to for you to get your work done.

Taskbar Shuffle is a Windows application. It runs on just about any 32-bit version, from lowly Win95 on up to Vista.

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Every time you type a letter, it's the same old thing. Get to the end and you've got to type the closing and signature, complete with all the tabs, returns, and all. It's the same thing every time, but here you go , typing it all out again. There's got to be an easier way, right?

Texter is a text snippet macro tool that takes the tedium out of having to type the same stuff over and over again. Instead of typing "Sincerely, [Enter][Enter][Enter]Mr. Joe Blow", create the hotstring "sinc", for example, and whenever you type that string, Texter will automatically expand it out for you. You can how your replacement is triggered—type your hotstring followed by [Enter], [Tab], or [Space], or even have it triggered automatically as an "instant replacement". Texter can also function as an AutoCorrect tool, so that the stuff you always type wrong will always be corrected for you on the fly. It even supports its own scripting language, so you can send keystrokes, like [Enter] to your applications.

Texter is a free Windows application.

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IdleBackup is an easy to configure, easy to use system backup tool. Allowing for both full and incremental backups, you select the data to archive by means of a "tree" control with checkboxes—select the branches to back up, deselect what you don't want to record. You can create a backup manually, or set it to work automatically—an "idle backup"—when the system doesn't see any keyboard or mouse activity for a predefined period of time.

You can back data up to a local drive, network volume, or even removable media like USB thumb drives.

IdleBackup comes with a regular Windows installer routine, but if you want, you can use just the executable—great if you're cramped for space, or need to run the app from removable media.

IdleBackup is a Windows tool. It requires Windows 2000 or later.

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You're reading along in a document or web page and come across some numbers. You want to do a quickie calculation, but now you're stuck—do you start-up the ten-key sitting on your desk—you do still have a desktop calculator, right—or do you fire-up Excel? Neither of those is a particularly satisfying option. Wouldn't it be nice to have an on-screen calculator that would let you do that quick calculation without making a major production of it?

Calq is just such a tool. You can start Calq up when you need it, or add it to your start up items and call it up with a hotkey combination. Either way, you get a calculator that overlays the windows on your screen and lets you do calculations through the keyboard. It's so unobtrusive that once you're done using it, it even puts itself away—after several seconds of inactivity, it hides itself, just waiting for you to call it up again.

Calq is available for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version requires OS X version 10.4 or later. The Windows version wants XP or Vista.

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Has this ever happened to you? You've got your desktop icons all laid out just the way you want them. Maybe it's applications over here, and documents over there, or work and personal, or whatever arrangement makes you feel like you're really gonna' get some work done. And then you change the resolution on your screen.

Whether you're coding a new app or looking at a web page, sometimes you need to see what it looks like at a different screen resolution. Now you've done it. Your carefully arranged desktop icons are totally trashed. Windows has been very helpful and rearranged them all for you. Only, now you can't find anything. What makes perfect sense to the O/S makes no sense to you. Despair sets in.

DeskSave is a tool that keeps you from being the victim of Windows' helpfulness. Once you get your desktop configured the way you want, you can save that layout. Now when you have to change your screen, when you restore the original resolution, you get your layout back. If you regularly jump from one size to another, you can save multiple arrangements, so that things always look the way you want them to. No more despair!

DeskSave is a Windows tool. It runs on systems using Win98 or later.

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You're having a super productive day. You're coding like a demon, or you're banging out the blog posts, or letters to Santa or whatever. You're almost done. "Just this one little tweak," you say. Two hours later not only doesn't your tweak work but you can't get back to your original, because it went away several Saves ago. Oops!

AutoVer is a real time backup system. Never again will you have to worry about clobbering your only copy of some important document because of a bad edit. You can use it to make a full backup copy of any document each time you save it, or you can just grab changes, making it act more like a version control system.

AutoVer runs in the System Tray, so it's always there and you never have to remember to turn it on. You can configure it to watch or ignore certain files—temp files, the Windows directory tree, etc.—that change often, so you don't have a zillion copies of all the .TMP files that you really don't care about anyway.

AutoVer is a Windows tool. It requires Windows 2000 or later, and .NET Framework version 2.

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They may not be glamorous, but FTP programs are vital to getting through the day. Whether it's uploading new web pages, posting downloads, or sending that huge spreadsheet to headquarters, you've really got to use a dedicated tool. Sure, if you're gutsy enough-or nerdy enough—you can do all that from the command prompt, but who needs that kind of grief, right?

Core FTP LE is a free FTP client. With an easy-to-understand GUI, it helps you get your work done, instead of becoming a job in its own right. Along with standard quick-and-dirty FTP transfers, Core FTP LE supports secure SFTP as well. With regular FTP, all your data, including passwords, travels out in the open across the Internet; with SFTP, everything is secure, so you don't have to worry about who's looking at your data as it moves up the wire. It's even HIPAA compliant, so you know that your data is secure.

Core FTP LE is free for personal and educational use. It's a Windows application and runs under Win98 or later.

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We've all been there: the only copy you have of some critical file is all messed up. The diskette is munched, the CD is scratched, the hard drive has crashed. You know that there is bound to be some lost data, but you also know that there's a lot of data that is just fine, thank you. Your trusty operating system, however, thinks it knows better. Problems with that track? Can't read that cluster? No need to bail out here.

Unstoppable Copier is a utility for Windows and Linux that will do its dead-level best to read whatever you throw at it. It takes whatever pieces of a file it can get its hands on and try to knit them back together, You can control just how deep you want to go here, from a "take forever and get me everything you can" approach, or dial it back and just skip the unreadable files, with all levels in between.

While half of a binary file may not be of much use to you—depending, of course, on what it is—certainly half a text file is better than nothing.

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While it sounds like a cry for help, EndItAll 2 is a tool that lets you shut down other apps all in one place.

You've been there before. You download a new tool, or stick-in the CD to install the latest version of WhizBang 3000, your favorite program. Up comes the window reminding you that you have to shut down all other apps running on your system. This leads to five minutes worth of digging around and trying to shut down all the other stuff you've got running. Some of them go willingly; others require the time-honored three-finger salute.

With EndItAll 2, you can bring up a list of all your currently-running apps, and
you can choose which ones you want to terminate. Close the well-behaved ones, and kill the ones that don't want to cooperate. Don't worry, though—you can't shut down any system-critical apps, so you won't accidentally crash your machine while taking care of business.

You can also script your shutdown, making it handy to perform unattended backups or system maintenance when you're not sitting at the console.

EndItAll 2 is a free Windows app and runs on just about any 32-bit Windows platform from Win95 on up.

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