Featured Freeware

Where the built-in and sluggish Windows Add or Remove Programs option fails, freeware Revo Uninstaller picks up the slack. Revo is robust and fully loaded, making even the most insidious Registry-altering program breathtakingly simple to eradicate.

Four levels of removal balance against your comfort level mucking about in the Registry, but Revo does all the hard work, ferreting out Registry keys and letting you opt out of deleting them. The main view can be adjusted, and the context menu offers up a list of choices, from fundamentals like Uninstall and Remove from list, to Search Google, Show the installation directory, … Read more

KeyboardLink is a great little tool for turning your standard Windows keyboard into both a program launcher and a program controller. The app is open source and uses a scant 3MB of RAM. Getting started requires configuring the activation keys, called the master keys, in the program's General features tab. People can set one or two master keys, an important feature that prevents you from accidentally launching a program. Basic capabilities, such as running the app when Windows starts, also live in the General tab.

Other tabs allow customization of your media player and major software programs such as … Read more

Ever wonder if your PC is keeping secrets from you? Wonder no more. The utility What's Running reveals all your system's active processes, services, drivers, and connections.

It's like Windows Task Manager, except far more informative. The cramped multipane interface is a bit hard to read, but even it has its good points: it lists processes in a parent-child hierarchy, not a bad way to accidentally spot malware. It also lets you choose which columns of information to display, and it makes stopping or prioritizing processes as simple as a mouse click--a right-click, to be precise. It … Read more

These well-crafted, standalone newsreaders makes an ideal choice for both novices who've never heard of an RSS feed and advanced users looking to put some oomph and flexibility into their reading habits. As the desktop clients for the online NewsGator, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macs both can synchronize bi-directionally with their Web-based counterpart, making it easy to get your feeds wherever and whenever you need them.

Other useful features include a built-in Web browser that's built on Internet Explorer--sorry Firefox and Opera fans, tabbed browsing for when you need to open multiple feeds' Web pages, Watch … Read more

If you can't stand the native operating system on your portable MP3 player, you can make it rock out with Rockbox. Open-source Rockbox is firmware that represents the first step for audiophiles regaining control over how they interact with their portable devices.

Compatible with more than two dozen MP3 players, including most iPods, iRivers, and Archoses, Rockbox comes with a detailed and lengthy installation and usage guide. The last time I tried out the auto-installer I found it easier to install Rockbox by hand. Reading the manual thoroughly is a must, given the complexity and potential risk to your … Read more

Possibly the best piece of software that Microsoft has published in ages, WorldWide Telescope lets users explore the universe with impressive content from the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and other famed ground- and space-based telescopes. Colorful nebulae, distant galaxies, black holes, and radiation clouds are all accessible from your desktop with a few clicks.

You can move around the sky by clicking with your left mouse and dragging the screen. Seven tabs help you navigate: Explore, Guided Tours, Search, Community, Telescope, View, and Settings. There are multiple mouse and keyboard commands … Read more

XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter that can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still images all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata EXIF and IPTC formats are also supported, ensuring that you don't lose any location or shooting data. There are also tools for taking screenshots.

In addition, you'll find tools for capturing screenshots and creating basic slide shows, as well as a simple audio player. The utility for generating Web galleries has been … Read more

iDump offers freeware fans a quick and slightly dirty way to copy music from an iPod to a Windows machine. Of course, by "dirty" I mean "unclean," as in, iDump runs a bit unstable.

Regardless, the app shows you the song's iPod path, cracking Apple's unusual file-saving protocol. A main window tab takes you to output options, and from there you just have to choose your songs and hit Copy. Clicking once on a song selects it, and there's also a smart feature that plays the song you've selected in iTunes.

The … Read more

If you dislike that achy, bloated feeling that other HTML editors can give your computer, KompoZer and its portable edition might be the freeware cure you're looking for. An open-source Web-development tool built on the NVU architecture, KompoZer aims to improve upon the NVU's bugginess.

It does a fairly admirable job of that, while not being bloatware. Major editing buttons live on the top three-tier toolbar, including a one-click Publishing icon as well as one-clicks for Image insertion and Table and Form creation. Font tweaks like Size and Style live in toolbars just below that, making for easy … Read more