Freebies

Magazine-subscription service TradePub is offering a free one-year subscription to PC Magazine. All you have to do is complete a form and wait up to 12 weeks for your first issue to arrive (assuming you meet the publisher's "demographic and geographic requirements," that is).

What's the catch? Well, you're divulging your personal information, of course, including your e-mail address, but TradePub says simply that "you are giving us permission to contact you via email about your subscription and concerning customer service requests." Sounds pretty harmless. Will you end up receiving newsletters, promotional offers, … Read more

Sure, you can safeguard your PC with various freeware security apps, but there's something to be said for having a single program that protects you from viruses, spyware, phishing, hackers, and so on. Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare 2.0 is such a program, and Amazon has it on sale for $30--minus a $30 mail-in rebate. Shipping is free, bringing the grand total to zero dollars.

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 (wow, what an embarrassingly bad name) combines real-time anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-phishing tools with a managed firewall, a data backup utility, and system optimization. You can protect … Read more

It's spring: Time to clean out the junk. I'm not talking about old photos and Word documents, but rather the system-sapping stuff that Windows accumulates over time: temporary system files, unnecessary Registry entries, unwanted Web histories, and the like. Freeware favorite CCleaner promises to kick all that crapola to the curb, leaving your system cleaner and, theoretically, faster.

CCleaner scans your machine for temp files and other clutter, then shows you what it found and gives you the option of deleting it all. (Alas, there's no undelete option, so proceed at your own risk.) You can then … Read more

Need a few sheets of graph paper? How about blank sheets of music? Dot paper? College-ruled? Before you run to the local office-supply store and pay for more than you need, head to the aptly named Printable Paper site. It's home to hundreds of paper templates you can download and print free of charge.

The PDF-formatted templates are divided into 10 different categories, including graph, lined, music, legal, and ledger. Within each category you'll find multiple selections. Music paper, for example, is available with anywhere from four to 16 staves in both portrait and landscape orientations. The only … Read more

Remember Giveaway of the Day, the site that offers one commercial software program free of charge every day? They've got a gem today: Aplus DVD Ripper (Windows), which lets you back up your movies to your PC and/or convert them for viewing on your iPod, Zune, cell phone, or other portable device. It normally sells for $39.99.

Remember, there's a catch: You have only until midnight tonight (ET) to download and install the program. After that, it's gone (though GotD does occasionally repeat its giveaways). But that's the one and only catch, so if … Read more

Tired of waiting an eternity for your computer to boot? Malware could be the culprit, so make sure to run anti-spyware software. But another cause of slow booting is all the software that's trying to run the moment Windows starts. Startup Delayer takes a clever approach to this by letting you delay selected programs.

For example, I need my anti-virus and desktop-search programs to run right away, but Adobe Reader Speed Launcher? iTunesHelper? LightScribe Control Panel? They can wait. Using Startup Delayer, I can configure programs like those to run at, say, 2-minute intervals, starting a full 15 minutes … Read more

The more programs you have installed on your PC, the harder it becomes to find the one you want. That's why I've fallen in love with Launchy, a simple application launcher that saves you having to slog through your Start menu.

To use Launchy, you simply press Alt-Space on your keyboard, then type the first few letters of the program you want. For example, to launch Google Picasa, you'd type "pic" and then press Enter. (You may need another keystroke or two if other programs on your PC start with the same letters.)

Launchy also … Read more

Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch? Giveaway of the Day gives you a different commercial software application, free of charge, every day. Yes, there's a catch, but it's a simple one: each program is made available for only 24 hours, and you have to install it the day you download it.

Let me clarify that: The software doesn't expire after 24 hours. Rather, you have a one-day window in which to download it and install it. But once that's done, it's yours to keep forever (or at least until you … Read more

A perennial Cheapskate favorite, LogMeIn Free lets you connect to your PC from any other PC. This comes in impossibly handy when you're working offsite and need to access files, run programs, check your e-mail, and so on. It's like sitting at your PC when you're not actually sitting at your PC.

All you do is download and install the free LogMeIn utility on your primary PC; it runs quietly in the background until needed. When you want to connect to your system from somewhere else, just fire up that PC's browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, … Read more