Featured Freeware

This free IE add-on captures JPEG images of bookmarked sites in the event that the tagged site changes or disappears. InternetScrap introduces a toolbar to your Internet Explorer window that contains only two buttons--not a great use of space, but the feature is pretty neat.

The first button on the toolbar lets you manage bookmarked Web pages, which the plug-in calls "scraps." The settings menu lets you opt to scrap an entire Web page or just the visible area. A slide bar is available for manipulating the scrap resolution, or you can use one of the preset options. … Read more

This simple program will sound an alarm through your laptop's speakers when certain activities occur, helping to thwart laptop theft. Laptop Alarm's four-check-box interface takes seconds to set. An option pop-up is as easily set to control mouse sensitivity and set a program password.

Operating Laptop Alarm is a snap. Users merely run the executable and set the alarm to sound if the laptop loses power the system is shut down or logged off, if the USB mouse is unplugged, or if the mouse moved. Testers found the program accurate with no false alarms. There's no method … Read more

USB drives are simple to carry, but easy to misplace, and that can be risky when it comes to sensitive information. Rohos Mini Drive is a freeware app that safeguards personal documents by creating a password-protected partition on your flash drive. The download actually installs two programs: one, Rohos Mini Drive, is the partition manager that self-installs as a portable app on the drive when you create the partition; the second, Rohos Disk Browser, is a portable file manager, which can be useful when the encrypted partition can't be read by the host computer.

Operating Rohos Mini Drive is … Read more

The Filter is a multijukebox plug-in for Windows and Mac that uses artificial intelligence and the All Music Guide database to create custom iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player playlists based on a variety of user inputs, such as a few songs of your choice, specific artists, or music genres. It also works for video, including movies, TV shows, and Web-only videos.

Upon start-up, The Filter scans your entire music library, which takes considerable time if you have more than 10,000 tracks. It compares the metadata for those files against the All Media Guide database, as well as your … Read more

Lockdown is a donation-ware application that can help you secure your Mac against physical tampering. It disables your Mac to would-be intruders by sounding an alarm whenever a variety of user-specified triggers is set off, including your Macs motion sensor. It also can lockdown the keyboard, mouse, and other external devices, or--for MacBooks--your lid, trackpad, or MagSafe adapter.

Lockdown sounds a loud alarm and prevents your Mac from being put to sleep or muted, and it can also take and e-mail a picture using your iSight camera. Lockdown is most effective by far when combined with an Apple Remote, which … Read more

Remove the detritus of Windows with this very helpful freeware. Baku's interface is a lesson in clean, efficient design, and cleaning up your computer is easily completed using the three wizards to remove unwanted files, invalid Registry keys, and Most Recently Used lists.

This flexible program lets you search for specific junk file types and easily exclude folders or drives from the scan. Results can be sorted a number of ways, with buttons to select (or deselect) all items for deletion. One oddity: Instead of going back to the main interface Baku completely closes if you cancel a search. … Read more

They wouldn't want you to believe it, but there's more to powered-up desktop indexing and searching than Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. Copernic's Desktop Search tool makes it fast and easy to find documents, e-mails, and other files on local drives. Like other desktop search tools, it creates a searchable index of all the data on a computer's drives, and updates it every time a file is added, removed, or modified.

A left-side search column allows simple keyword queries and more refined searches based on file size, date, file type, or folder. Easy-to-read icons at the top … Read more

Despite a cluttered interface, SuperStorm proved simple to use, letting you quickly and securely store data files in a password-protected form embedded within media files.

It may look confusing to some at first. Its interface is cluttered with buttons, a number of fields, and some amateurish graphics. The appearance is a bit deceptive, because what looks somewhat childishly designed actually works pretty well and is easy to use. Selecting a data file and a media file in which to embed it was a simple matter of dragging an item into the built-in file browser to the selected graphic. Clicking Execute … Read more

If you don't want to spend a lot of time checking your RSS newsreader for updated feeds, you can do it on the fly with this application, which places a headline ticker at the top of the currently active window in addition to offering the standard reader.

Titlebar Ticker places a relatively unobtrusive bar at the top of your active windows frame that clearly indicates when fresh content arrives. A neat mouseover feature opens a second tier with the news source name, navigation arrows to move to another news feed, and an icon for opening a drop-down list of … Read more