Welcome to another edition of my weekly top-ten list. This week featuring: Windows freeware! Startup Control Panel by Mike Lin This puppy is number one, and with good reason--it's just that good! Actually, Startup Control Panel doesn't really do anything that you yourself can't do without it. But what it does do it does quick, thus saving you time digging in your Windows registry. Your system will be safer too--imagine the power going out while the registry editor has about fifteen branches open. We've all been there. Install something new then not like it. Okay, fine. I'll just uninstall, right? You do, but ever since your system seems slower and maybe startup takes longer. You fire up regedit to find two thirds of the uninstalled proggy is still there! You start deleteing. And deleting. But you have to remember to hunt down all of it to keep it from running at startup. But with Windows having so many different 'startup' keys, you might miss one. Adobe, Logitech, Nero, and many more all love adding to system startup. Startup Control Panel can turn off or delete any of them with one click. To me, any Windows installation should be considered incomplete without it! Grab it at: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml Also by Mike Lin: Binary and Clipomatic. Home: http://www.mlin.net/ In alphabetical order, here are the rest. There's nine of them, trust me. (Hey, I wouldn't cheat ya!) CPU-Z More than just a processor identifier, CPU-Z also gives you info on BIOS, memory and motherboard. To me it's especially useful since Intel's own processor indentifying program is one of the most worthless things I ever installed. Heck, Intel's is even worse than Java! Also see PC Wizard! Home: http://www.cpuid.com/ FileZilla Let me get the only two bad things out of the way. First, and most imortant is the name. When I see 'zilla' tacked onto the end of anything, I think of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird. When I see 'file' prefixed before anything I think of a P2P sharing program. Even though the 'Z' is capitalized I still say this thing has the wrong name. FileZilla rocks the freeware wasteland! Home: http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/ Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/ Notepad++ Editing is a much more personal experience than using other applications. And, there's almost as many editors as personalities too. The one feature that makes Notepad++ stand out though is 'Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting.' Place caret/cursor near an opening bracket and the coreponding closing one changes color! Hey, why didn't you think of that? This really helps me out for JavaScript and PHP. Notepad++ is goodly! Home: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/ Resource Hacker (ResHack) It's almost fun to extract goodies out of executable files with this thing. Note: it was pointed out to me once that using such a utility on commercial (non GPLed) programs would surely be a violation of their license agreement. Duh! Home: http://angusj.com/resourcehacker/ Restoration Oh sure, you could go out and buy an undelete utility, but that's just dumb! Home: http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html Shareaza Simply the undisputed file sharing champion! Home: http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/ Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/shareaza/ Spybot - Search & Destroy (Spybot-S&D) Do I really need to say anything here? Home: http://www.safer-networking.org/ Web Album Generator I use this anytime I want an album with thumbnails on a non-PHP site. Also see Araneae! Home: http://www.ornj.net/software/webalbum/ XnView The best image/media browser/viewer. This knocks IrfanView off my list, and looks a heck-of-a-lot better doing it! Home: http://www.xnview.com/ Now that my friends was another real-deal, quote-of-the-week, top-ten, nominee!