1.2

Soluto is an unusual program. This "Anti-Frustration Software" analyzes your system and compares its findings with an online knowledge base that proposes solutions to various performance bottlenecks. It focuses on three areas: Chop Boot, which reduces your startup time; Lighten Web Browser, which shows you how to speed up your surfing by optimizing your Web browser; and Heal Crashes, which tries to fix any problems causing programs to crash.

Installing Soluto requires a reboot, during which it analyzes your system's boot process and looks for improvements. Soluto's animated graphics and flow-based layout give it a feel … Read more

At first, 360Amigo System Speedup Free seemed to be of the more-tease-than-tool school of free system cleaners, and certainly its developers would like you to buy their premium package. But the free tool proved to be a good performer that will help many users keep their PCs running smooth and safe.

As with so many freeware versions of premium system utilities, 360Amigo's interface is stylish and heavy on the graphics and captions that explain what each feature does. The program consists of a system cleaner and a system optimizer, with a number of extra utilities, though some of the … Read more

We are constantly installing and uninstalling software, and as we're sure you can imagine, that leaves us with a whole lot of empty folders and other junk on our computer. For that reason, we were quite excited about trying FMS Empty Folder Remover. This utility promises to scan your machine for empty folders and then delete them, tidying up your hard drive after multiple installations and uninstallations.

The program's interface is bare bones and not entirely intuitive. We clicked the Open Folder button since it seemed like the most logical starting place, and an Explorer window opened that … Read more

SMRecorder is a simple desktop audio/video recorder that not only captures desktop video and audio but also camera and microphone inputs. You can add onscreen annotation and narration to create clips for presentations, tutorials, and embedded media. It's freeware, too.

During the installation process, we were given the choice between standard and custom installation options. We chose the custom option, which let us deselect some extras like toolbars that we didn't want. SMRecorder's main interface is more or less a minimized media player, with six buttons and a counter. Three buttons access recording tasks, and start, … Read more

Fun fonts can liven up presentations, newsletters, art projects, and all kinds of other documents. Cartoon Font Pack is a set of 22 fonts inspired by cartoons and comic strips. If you like the look of fonts that resemble text written by hand, Cartoon Font Pack is a fun option that's suitable for a variety of applications.

Since Cartoon Font Pack is really just a folder containing the various fonts, it helps to have some knowledge of how to install new fonts in Windows. This isn't a difficult process, however, and we installed the fonts in Cartoon Font … Read more

Students, conference attendees, lawyers, and anyone who has to transcribe recorded audio should try Listen N Write, a free tool designed specifically for transcription. It doesn't use speech recognition or automatic transcription, and Microsoft Anna doesn't speak your text files out loud. It's simply a media player bundled with a text editor, but a media player with subtle but clever differences that make it a great tool for playing back recorded lectures and speeches (for example) and writing down what you hear. To begin with, the Skip arrows move the recording forward or back just a few … Read more

Passwords are the computer user's eternal paradox. If you make a password easy enough to remember, it's likely not very secure. If it's a strong password, you'll be prone to forgetting it--unless you write it on a notepad next to your computer, which again compromises your security. Random Password Generator is an extremely easy-to-use program that can help you create strong passwords and keep them stored securely.

When we first launched Random Password Generator we were prompted to create a master password that would protect the password manager from prying eyes. The program has an intuitive … Read more

Excel is capable of doing all kinds of useful things, if you have the time and know-how to take advantage of its features. If you'd like to use Excel--or OpenOffice, or Google Docs--to keep track of employee timesheets but you don't want to mess around creating templates on your own, try Simple Employee Timesheet Template. This simple set of templates makes it easy to track your hours either weekly or biweekly in three of the most popular spreadsheet programs.

Simple Employee Timesheet Template is a set of four templates: weekly and biweekly timesheets that track partial hours as … Read more

So you're in business, and you've got a PC and a scanner. You're dutifully scanning and saving all your business documents (hopefully not jumbled together in your scanner's default archive). Simple Doc Organizer Free Edition is a free document organizing utility designed specifically for small- and medium-size businesses. It makes it easy to store and find your scanned, saved, or imported documents.

We downloaded and extracted the program's zipped installer, which then downloads and installs the program files. We also had to disable our User Account Control settings, which required a reboot. A Configure Wizard … Read more