Windows 2000-XP-Vista

VLC tends to get all the video player love on the Internet. I've never been that impressed with VLC. It's certainly a "good enough" freeware video player, but its outstanding feature seems to be that it is the best known freeware video player. SMPlayer is an alternative video player that runs on Windows XP or later and on most modern versions of Linux. Like VLC, it's freeware and plays just about any video file you can throw at it. However, it as one feature that makes it my favorite: it remembers the settings for every video file you play. Not just the current location in the video file so it can resume where you left off, but all the setting changes you may have made for that specific video -- for example, the volume, subtitle color, which audio track you are using, what filters you have on, etc. This is great if you have to interrupt watching a video and come back to it hours or days later, especially if you had to watch other videos that needed different settings during those hours or days.

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.

Full backups of your computer system are an excellent precaution as disks and entite computer systems eventually fail. Unfortunately, they are a pain in the ass to perform and often a pain in the ass to restore from when your disk or computer fails and has to be replaced. There probably isn't any software -- free or commercial -- that can make the process truly painless. The latest version (2.5) of EASEUS Todo Backup Free comes close -- and as the name implies, it's free.

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.

Early versions of Microsoft Office used a multi-document interface. That is, if you had multiple documents open in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint you could switch between them using a tab bar within the Microsoft Office Application. Microsoft research apparently found that this confused new users who looked to their taskbar to switch between documents, so starting with Office 2003 Microsoft changed things so each document opened in a separate instance of the application and you switched between documents using the taskbar.

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.

I've used Winamp or Windows Media Player on my PC since the Dark Ages simply because they were familiar and were good enough. My wife is a bit more picky about sound quality (and has far better speakers to be picky with) and has recently changed to foobar2000 as the very nice-sounding application that came with her sound card has not been updated in years. foobar2000 recently released a version 1.0 and my wife thought it sounded better on her system than any other audio player she tried, including a number of commercial players.

As I find the Windows Start Menu too crowded for easy use, I've been using True Launch Bar and Powerpro on Windows XP to modify the taskbar to start programs the way I like. Unfortunately, the Windows 7 task bar works much differently than in any other version of windows and my old reliables just don't work very well on my new Windows 7 box. After looking around, I found a freeware program that both looks nice and does the basic job I need done, even if it does not have all the bells and whistles I'm used to: 7stacks.

While extra spaces usually aren't a problem when you are entering data by hand in Microsoft Excel, they often worm their way into data that import from other formats. Once in your spreadsheet they can be hard to find and they will often foul up your spreadsheet to the point it doesn't print -- or even work -- correctly. Manually finding these extra spaces at the beginning and/or end of items is a time-consuming and error-prone process.