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As I mentioned in my review of JP Software's freeware Take Command Console LE in February 2010, I used to use their old 4DOS program back in the days of DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 9x. 4DOS was the DOS Command Line on steroids: adding many features to the fairly primitive DOS command line.

EPUB is a standard format for ebooks used by many programs and devices (like the Barnes & Noble NOOK). There are millions of books available in epub format -- many of them free from Google Books, Project Gutenburg, and many other locations. Until now you had to download them and read them in a special program. If you have an ebook reader, this probably is not an issue as you probably want to transfer the epub file to your ebook reader so you would have to download it. However if you are going to be reading the ebook on your computer, it would be nice to be able to read it in your browser like you can PDF files. If you use Firefox (version 3 or 4) and install the EPUBReader extension.

While the recoding companies would like people to think that they have to pay -- and often pay through the nose -- for music, there are still a number of ways to legally get music free via the Internet. There are thousands of Internet Radio stations for example, and it is perfectly legal (at least in the US) to record music from radio stations -- over the air or over the Internet. There are a large number of good payware programs for recording music from Internet radio stations. Most of them look better than streamWriter in the interface department, but few have useful features beyond those provided by the free streamWriter.

Dexpot is a deceptively simple virtual desktop program with many powerful features "hidden" beneath its surface for power uses. At its most basic, it creates up to twenty virtual desktops and allows you to move open programs between them and switch between desktops. This lets you, say have work projects open on one desktop, email on another, and your web browser and instant messenger programs on a third and switch between them based on what you are doing at the moment (or whether your boss is in the room).

Windows 7 Home Premium does not include file level encryption. This is limited to the more expensive (Professional and up) versions of Windows 7. While there are a number of freeware file encryption programs, I wanted one that worked as an Explorer extension for convenience and had both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. After looking around a bit, I discovered that Windows 7 and 64-bit support was still fairly rare. Fortunately, one of the better file encryption program, AxCrypt, had a beta version with Windows 7 and 64-bit support.