PC Tools I use

Undeleting, Anti-virus/spyware, Registry Cleaning…

Real and Quicktime Alternatives

Realplayer and Apple’s Quicktime both take over your computer and eventually you come across a site that makes you want to install them…

There are free alternatives:

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm 

They both come with a program called “Media Player Classic” which I use as a replacement to Windows Media Player.  You can download the Lite versions which don’t come with this, but I think it’s a great little video player which is much more stable and speedy.

The Font Thing

Having lots of fonts installed in windows can slow down the loading of applications.

This is the best font manager I’ve ever come across.  It can view all fonts on your computer and install/uninstall the ones you want.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

My favourite features are that it can “Load” fonts, which means they’re only installed until you reboot and “Collections”… which great way to group together similar fonts.

stickies – virtual post-it’s

I know windows offers it’s own version of these, but I think that Zhorn’s equivalent can’t be beaten.  They’re just so damn handy with a great management system.

http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/index.html

for good keyboard shortcuts: download this sticky I made

Speedy little pdf reader.

Pdfs are great, but Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is a joke.

This little piece of software opens in a flash and should handle most pdfs you throw at it:

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/download.html

It’s only 1MB!

Want to make your own pdfs? I use both PDFCreator and Pdf995.  They act like printers, so anything that can print can output to pdf.