Featured Freeware

When Google, Yahoo, or any other major search engine overwhelms you with so many matches it offers more results than dollars in the national debt, ChunkIt might be the plug-in for you. Available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, it "chunks" up your search returns, providing snippets of relevant text.

The add-on splits your browser tab into two vertical sections, the left side with the ChunkIt results and the right with unchunked returns. Clicking on the text of a ChunkIt result loads the text in the right pane, highlights the relevant bit in yellow, and scrolls directly to it. … Read more

You can quickly toggle important security settings with this efficient tool, but broken English throughout Cerberus Security Guard may hamper your comprehension. The basic interface of text, tabs, and radio buttons won't win any design awards, so advanced users will quickly figure out all settings. Novices will appreciate that the program's settings are explained in mouse-over dialog boxes. However, some of the dialog boxes read as though a poor English translation program was used.

While many of the settings can be altered through your operating system controls, Cerberus Security Guard gathers the controls into one location. Simple tabs … Read more

Turn almost any savable file into a PDF using Print2PDF. Like similar programs, this useful utility installs as a print driver, allowing the user to specify settings such as fonts and image-compression quality inside the print dialog of the other applications.

Users can encrypt, watermark, or sign a document, and can configure user permissions to print, copy, or change the file. During tests, the output quality and conversion speed both proved quite satisfactory. If you're looking to convert documents into the PDF format, this tool will likely have all the options you need.

Newer features include support for prepress … Read more

It adds new functionality to your mouse, there's little to learn, and it's free. AltMove Manager is a mouse and desktop enhancement manager that can move and resize windows that are locked, grab a screenshot, and magnify a window under the mouse. You can easily add a few others through the Actions menu.

As an executable, the app doesn't need to be installed--just run the executable for the shortcuts to be in place. The regular settings include some standard program options for running the executable at start-up and keeping it on top. Advanced settings let you move … Read more

Stanza is a free application that lets you read electronic books on your iPhone. It's an excellent value, albeit with a no-frills approach that stops short of handling DRM-protected content and docs with heavy formatting or images.

Stanza provides a comfortable, customizable reading experience. You can quickly change text size via a slider in the settings, or using pinch and reverse pinch, adjust line and margin spacing, and choose from many different fonts. You can even pick your own text and background colors, in case you want old-school, CRT-style green on black. You can flip through chapters, rotate portrait … Read more

If you're in the market for a remix of Internet Explorer--perhaps you need it to work on an internal office network--an interesting alternative is SlimBrowser, whose name belies its feature set. SlimBrowser's tabbed interface allows you to look at multiple Web sites all at once. It looks and feels more or less like its more popular competitors, so the learning curve isn't as steep as you might think.

The basics are all present and accounted for: effective pop-up blocker, more than 100 skins that don't require restarting, and support for most of IE's toolbars and … Read more

This robust freeware displays system activity with more detail than many expensive programs. System Explorer's tight multitabbed interface logically arranges and displays more information than most experienced users would need. The program could use a Help manual, but at least there's expert user knowledge online.

Operating System Explorer is primarily a point-and-click affair. The application loads all the information it collects when you start it. Fourteen tabs logically spread the information into manageable portions. With a click, users can monitor tasks, processes, performance, history, windows, connections, and opened files. Each tab includes detailed information about the items included. … Read more

With plenty of affordable products in their library to help out those who are serious about Web development, Blumentals Software now has an even more impressively priced product: a package of CSS tools that's absolutely free. The freeware CSS Toolbox includes a handful of helpful tools that should save time for anyone who works with CSS.

The CSS Editor comes with syntax highlighting and simplified auto-complete; the CSS Formatter/Beautifier helps you reformat and prettify your code; the CSS Checker tracks down errors and makes your code old-browser-friendly; and the CSS Compressor makes your code load faster, reducing its … Read more

If you're looking for a convenient, uncomplicated, and stable synchronization tool, you could do much, much worse than Microsoft's SyncToy. Part of the Windows XP PowerToys add-ons, this tool makes it easy to keep folder contents identical on one machine or across a network.

The first time you run it, SyncToy will guide you through creating a pair of linked folders. Labeled as Left and Right, it will then ask you to choose from one of five synchronization methods. Echo works like a standard one-way sync, copying all files from Left to Right. Synchronize is bidirectional; Contribute works … Read more