Free Download A Day

No matter how big your display is, it never seems like there's quite enough room. Whether it's making your windows a bit bigger, or squeezing yet another application onto the desktop, space seems to always be at a premium. Maybe you can grab a little extra room with the aptly named TaskBar Hider.

This tool has a single purpose in life: to let help you hide the Windows Taskbar. Fire it up, hit the hotkey (default is [Win] + X) and you will toggle the Taskbar's visibility—if it's on, you can make it go away, and vice versa. Set it up to run automatically on startup and it will always be available to you. Or, since it has a command line interface also, it's fully scriptable in batch files or other scripts, allowing you to toggle its appearance automatically.

TaskBar Hider is a free download. It's a Windows application.

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We're all in favor of any tool that helps us to work more quickly and efficiently. When you open several documents at once, you typically drag them around the Desktop to put them in just the right location for doing what you need to. Put this application on the right side of the screen, but this one goes at the bottom. You have all kinds of control over this stuff, and it's good. But when it comes to the buttons on your Windows Taskbar, you're at the mercy of your machine. Didn't open those apps in the same order this time as last? You're out of luck.

Taskbar Shuffle is a tool that lets you rearrange the order of the buttons on the Taskbar. A simple drag and drop functionality lets you re-order how those buttons sit on the Taskbar. And with this tool, you can rearrange the icons in your System Tray as well. Finally you've got the control you need to really get some work done.

Taskbar Shuffle is a free download. It's a Windows application, with support for both 32- and 64-bit platforms.

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You've got stuff stored all over your hard drive. But just how much is there, and where is it all located? That's not so easy to answer. But just because you don't know doesn't mean you can't know.

Folder Size is a tool that can help you figure out exactly how much data you've got squirreled away. Just point it at a folder or an entire drive and it will scan the target and let you know what it finds. Get your info as text, or for a different look, try a bar chart of a pie chart. It reports not only how big your folder is in terms of bytes of file size, but also gives you the number of files in there, and even percentages (does this folder contain 5% of your space? 50%?). It's smart enough to work with all kinds of media, including USB drives, optical drives, and more, as well as your hard drive. And scans are easy, since Folder Size inserts itself into Windows Explorer's context menu, which means right-clicking on a folder will start the process for you.

You can grab a copy of Folder Size for free. It's a Windows application and runs under Win98 and later.

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Seems like every day there's something new out there. Take archive files for example: back in the day there were ZIPs and TARs, and even the odd SIT. But now you look around and find something with a RAR extension on it. So what are you going to do with this thing?

RarMonkey is here to help you out. This application is designed specifically to extract the goodies bundled up inside a RAR archive—in fact, it doesn't even allow you the option of creating new ones. But it does integrate into Windows Explorer, so a double click on that file will automatically start the extraction process. You tell it where to extract the files from your archive, and if you're dealing with several of them at a time, it can even create appropriate subfolders to keep track of all those files. Password protected archives are no problem, and you can even direct it to use the same password on multiple archives if you have a bunch of them from the same place.

RarMonkey is a free download. It's a Windows application.

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Every time you start Windows, it starts up a bunch of programs for you. While some of those are necessary for your computer to function, you have no doubt added several of your own favorites to that startup routine. Maybe you like to have your email client open when you start, or perhaps there are remote network volumes that need to be mounted. While you don't have tons of control over when and how these apps are started, you might be able to speed things up if you were able to order these items and tell your system in which order you'd like to have them run.

Oolauncher is a tool that gives you more control over the apps that run at startup. It goes out and scours the System Registry and other locations for those on-start apps and lets you decide how to run them. Put things in the order that makes more sense to you, as well as assigning priorities to various apps. You can tweak window styles so that your applications will come up minimized, maximized, or even hidden.

A free download, Oolauncher is a Windows application.

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Maybe you just went out and spent a mint on a fancy new computer. Or perhaps you're trying to figure out whether your older system still has the horsepower to take care of business. Either way, the question remains: what can my machine do?

One way to answer this question is with HeavyLoad. This tool lets you put your machine through its paces, and it'll tell you how it did. It's designed to push your system to see what it's really capable of. It has routines to work your machine's CPU, memory, disk storage speed and space, video display, and even pushes Windows itself to see how your current configuration stacks up. Maybe you'll find you don't need to upgrade your system, or this might be just the excuse (or reason) you need to spring for that new computer.

HeavyLoad is a free download. It's a Windows application and should run just fine on systems using XP and later.

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Lots of products work pretty well straight out of the box. When you get a new toaster or shower head, you pretty much get what you get, and you know how to use it without messing with it. Your computer probably worked pretty well straight out of the box as well. But that computer is orders of magnitude more complex than that kitchen appliance, and there are ways it can be tweaked to make it work better for you.

Fresh UI is a tool you can use to make your Windows system look and feel more the way you would like it to. It allows you to customize the interface, so that colors and locations work better for you. You can also optimize many system and hardware settings, making your machine run like not just a well-oiled machine, but like your well-oiled machine. Your toaster never had it so good.

Fresh UI is a Windows application. You should be able to use it to tweak your computer, whether it's an old timer running Windows 95, or some cutting edge brand new Windows 7 box.

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All good things must come to an end. And sometimes the less-than-good things have to go as well. Like that application you installed on your Windows machine. Maybe it doesn't do quite what you thought it would, or maybe you found something better. Usually it's relatively easy to uninstall an app, but that doesn't mean it's tons of fun. Open up the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel, find your app, and send it packing. There are those programs, however, that don't play as nice and drop their uninstaller in the application directory instead. Don't you suppose there might be an easier way to handle this?

Menu Uninstaller is a tool that makes it easier to get rid of programs you don't want hanging around your system any more. Instead of having to navigate through multiple layers of directory structure, with this app installed all you need to do is to right click on your application's icon. You will see an Uninstall option in the context menu that lets you uninstall the app from right there. It'll dig through the mess to find the right uninstaller stuff, confirm that it's removing the right application, and then get rid of it for you.

Menu Uninstaller is a free Windows application. It is compatible with systems running WinXP and later.

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Backing up your machine is an important thing to do, and really shouldn't be avoided. Unless it's too much trouble. Or too complicated. Or any of several other often-used reasons. And they're all good, until your system chokes and you need that backup. At that point, most of the excuses aren't worth so much to you—certainly not worth as much as having your data back.

Bvckup may be the solution you're looking for. It's got a small footprint, is easy to set up, and keeps an eye on things. It only backs up files that have changed since the last check, so you aren't creating huge archives containing mostly redundant data. It's smart enough to grab not only the files it encounters, but also the various timestamps, attributes, and ownership information necessary to keep your NTFS file system humming along if you should ever need to restore from your backups. After all, that's the real test: what good is the backup that you can't use to make your system right again?

You can grab a copy of Bvckup for free. It runs on systems under Windows XP and later.

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How much space is left on that hard drive? The last thing you want to have happen as you're downloading some big file or building the next version of your killer app is to be unceremoniously told that you are out of disk space, thank you very much. Sure, you can keep track of how much room you've got left, but that means opening a window or three and digging through stuff to see just what's available to you.

Tray Disk Free is a tool that lets you know at all times just how much disk space you've got free on your system. It sits there in the System Tray keeping an eye on things, so you won't have an "oops" moment when you try to cram a gigabyte of data into a megabyte of space. It displays free space both numerically and with a little bar graph, so you can see at a glance whether you've got a lot of space or just a little. Now you'll know when it's time to do a little tidying up, or maybe go ahead and spring for that bigger hard drive you've been eyeing.

Tray Disk Free is a free download for Windows.

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