Actually, the article is called The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities from a site called Tech Support Alert, but of course there are a few of my personal favorites that are not on the list. Therefore it can't possibly be the best, right?

However, there are a handful of gems there and some things I may check out. One of my recent favorites is a little utility called SlickRun which hijacks your Win+Q hotkey and produces a floating entry box on your screen where you can type in the name of a program to run (assuming it's installed on your computer, of course). Ever since I've installed this I've stopped using the cluttered up start menu (more like "end" menu).

An oldie that I've been using for awhile is Picasa by Google. It's a photo/pic management utility that allows you to organize, label, and favoritize your photos. I also use it to manage my electronic records (I scan everything), which I'll have to blog about sometime. It also integrates nicely with Google's PicasaWeb service, which is their own little version of Flickr, except PicasaWeb could use (quite) a bit of refinement still and they don't eschew the use of vowels.

The one thing which I've installed because of this list is Gadwin PrintScreen. Sweet. I had been previously using AnalogX Capture, but I like how Gadwin allows me to use the PrintScreen key (duh) while Capture requires a different key combination (and will not use the Win key).