This program checks for deadlinks and duplicated bookmarks in your web browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer or Opera) and lists the results. You can then choose to leave, amend or delete any bookmark. It can also backup your bookmarks, retaining their hierarchical layout. You may not verify your bookmarks often but when you need to, try using this program.

Currently my favorite Windows compression tool. It's interface and operation is similar to Winzip but it's skinable! It's buttons toolbar can be changed (I like the Prisma skin). It supports many compression formats internally, including Nix archives (tar, gz, bz2). NOTE: From version 7 it is Shareware at US$19.95 for a single user.

Once I was alerted to spyware (and not-so-innocent adware), I searched the net for a free non-adware download manager. After trying quite a few I finally settled on this little gem. Your downloads will probably complete faster and, in most cases, you can resume interrupted downloads. By the way, it was Steve Gibson's website http://grc.com/ which first alerted me to spyware.

This is a text based, as opposed to a WYSIWYG based, HTML editor. It highlights various elements of HTML code and many other languages in different colours. Apart from a number of default markup/programming/scripting languages, it recognizes many more through the use of plugins. Keyword help can also be added for many languages. Program settings and menus are highly configurable. A great aid for programming, especially with the long list of available plugins which further extend HTML-Kit's functionailty. The built-in webpage preview, which can be linked to various interpreters, is very handy for checking changes before saving them.

Replace Notepad immediately with this text editor. It's simply a no brainer! Even if the only additional function you use is the CTRL+F find hotkey function, it's already sped up your work. Under Win9x just: 1/ Locate your existing notepad.exe in your Windows directory. 2/ Rename it to msnotepad.exe . 3/ Copy metapad.exe to your Windows directory and rename it to notepad.exe . Here endeth the lesson :)

Stable and extensible email client which supports POP3, SMTP and IMAP. Does not suffer from viruses which target Outlooks' and Eudora's addressbooks ;-) Once one of the most widely used Windows email clients but partially due to the strategy of it's somewhat eccentric publisher/developer, it has lost significant market share. After a long delayed launch of the version 4 series and early hiccups, it is now more stable and new features are gradually being added.

If there was a prize for the smallest POP3/SMTP Win32 email client then this program would probably win it! You can download a simple installer package or a zip file which you unpack manually to any directory (which is what I do) and it's settings are stored in an .ini file. This won't be your main email client as it's purpose is for checking and not saving emails (it can save viewed email to a text file/s). After querying your ISP's POP3 server, if it finds any emails it then lists header details eg. sender, subject, date, size and number of attachments. You can then leave the emails, view or delete them. You can send text only emails. It now has partial MIME (attachment) decoding support but you may have to use a seperate decoder/encoder program like UUD32 or Wincode to extract attachments.

Network based 3D tank game. See my Games page for more details.

Image viewer par excellence. Includes a 'PlugIns' facility which can be used to extend Irfanview's capabilities. Available plugins include VCD & MP3 file players etc. Easy to use program with some neat features. I particularly like it's flexible thumbnail image handling which includes an option to create a HTML thumbnail page.

Exodus is a popular Windows Jabber client http://www.jabber.org/ which natively uses the XMPP protocol for IM. Communicating with other IM platforms eg. AIM, ICQ, MSN & Yahoo is unreliable (same applies to all Jabber clients) due to efforts by those IM platforms to make interoperability difficult (big shame)! I can regularly connect with MSN IM client users though. At the moment Exodus does not include the ability to encrypt messages using PGP/GnuPG. A few plugins are available including one which can locally backup your contacts and one that can launch NetMeeting.

Displays your local (LAN) IP name & address and your internet (WAN) IP name & address. For internet users connecting using a directly attached modem then in Win9x you can just use the included winipcfg program. The benefit of this little program is when you have a home network connected to the internet through a broadband router or internet sharing device. IP2 will quickly detect the IP name and address assigned by your ISP to your router or sharing device. Very useful when you have a dynamic IP address and quicker than checking your router's user interface.

The successor to 'Internet Junkbuster Proxy', Privoxy is a proxy server that can be configured to block banner ads, cookies, specific Javascript actions etc. It's settings are contained within a few text files which can be edited directly or remotely via a web browser. I always use this and Internet Sweeper when browsing the web.

Xnews is very configurable and is simply installed by unpacking a zip file into a directory (it's settings are stored in an .ini file and not the registry). A few upgrades ago it began to occassionally crash my system, requiring a reboot. This problem may be unique to my setup so YMMV! If you encounter problems, try Free Agent http://www.forteinc.com/ instead.

Ad-aware checks your PC for various spyware programs and can then remove them, including any related entries in the Windows registry. Plus & Pro versions are available which include the Ad-watch program for realtime spyware monitoring of your system.

Removes all traces of your web browsing eg. history, cache (including contents of index.dat!), cookies etc. Can also clean Windows temp dir, recent documents list etc. A must have for privacy minded people. This is the last free version as the rights have been sold to Aladdin Systems http://www.aladdinsys.com/ who continue it's development under the name iClean and sell it for US$29.99.

GnuPG is a popular implementation of OpenPGP http://www.openpgp.org/ . If you want encrypted email communications then look no further! For those of you that balk at using the command-line (or want to increase your productivity!), many GUI frontends/plugins have been created for various platforms and email clients but I suggest that you create your private key directly within GnuPG. I recommend that you generate encryption keys of not less than 2048 bits.

Recommended to anyone using GnuPG with Windows. Integration with Windows Explorer is also available by installing winptee. It's then easy to encrypt, decrypt and securely wipe files all within Explorer.

No longer maintained. In early 2002 I had some involvement in testing and feeding back the results to the developer. His response was good and Pegasus Mail (up to and including version 4.01) supports S/MIME. Ironically, although PMail's developer has plans to add support for S/MIME in the version 4 series (not added as of version 4.12a), due to code changes in the way that PMail handles plugins (extensions) after version 4.01, compatibility with this plugin has been broken! Therefore PMail currently has no support for S/MIME, Doh!!

Software firewall that allows, warns about, or blocks, incoming and outgoing network traffic. Has 3 modes; 1/ disables all network activity, 2/ disables all network activity except for manually permitted traffic or where a filter (rule) had been previously set, 3/ allows all network activity except for traffic matching a previously set rule. An invaluable piece of software and recommended even for those using a NAT router. NOTE: If you have Tiny Personal Firewall (TPF) installed, Kerio Personal Firewall can copy it's rules and other settings and offer to uninstall TPF (this worked flawlessly for me with TPF ver. 2.0.15a).

A realtime physical memory management program. In Win9x/ME, if you have many programs open or Windows has been running programs for a few hours, this utility will help you to continue working without having to reboot. It doesn't prevent the inevitable need to reboot Win9x/ME, it just helps to reduce the frequency! There are quite a few similiar programs around (RAMpage http://www.jfitz.com/software/RAMpage/ also works well) but this one is fairly small and works for me :) Check out their website for other neat, free programs.

This little program can read and monitor voltages, temperatures and fan speeds from certain hardware monitoring chips which are present on many PC's motherboards. Various alerting options can be set including calling an external program (eg. an SMTP commandline mailer) so that you are notified if any of the items MBProbe monitors, fall outside defined ranges. Apart from alerting, it can also suspend or shutdown Windows.

Another of Robin Keir's simple and compact programs. This one connects to time servers that support the NTP protocol and synchronizes your computer's clock. I used to use ClockAlign http://www.mrtech.com/ which additionally supports the newer SNTP protocol but prefer Neutron's simpler GUI and smaller size.

Useful tool to help clean up the Windows registry without having to use regedit BUT only recommended to those users who regularly edit their registry. It backs-up changes so in most cases, if mistakes are made, it should be possible to restore the registry to it's previous state. Ver. 4.3 is the last standalone version, as RegCleaner's functionality has been incorporated into jv16 PowerTools.

Displays details about your CPU, motherboard and system, including bus/clock's speeds, multiplier setting, bios and chipset info etc. Commonly used by overclockers but also useful as a quick way to confirm various system components without having to take off the case. Initially I used it to check speeds before and after upgrading a CPU. 3.1a version also supports Linux and FreeBSD.

Used for making voice calls over the internet. It can encrypt calls using either DES or IDEA encryption and can exchange IDEA session keys using PGP, if PGP is already installed. Nix and Windows versions are interoperable. Apart from using it's own tranmission protocol it can use the RTP protocol instead. Therefore it 'may' be possible to use Speak Freely with other voice programs which support RTP. In my experience, Speak Freely's performance is better than PGPfone but PGPfone uses stronger encryption. According to it's website, no further development is planned.

'Lite' web browser which uses the Gecko rendering engine from the Mozilla web browser project. I began using it to cross browser check my webpage's HTML & CSS code, as the display results should be close to that of Netscape Navigator and Mozilla. It can use Navigator's bookmarks, IE's favorites and (supposedly) Netscape plugins.

Analog is a very flexible logfile analyser. I use it to obtain statistics from the raw web server logfiles provided by one of my webhosts. As I run Analog in a number of different configurations, I wrote a batch program to switch between the relevant config files. There are a number of helper applications available for Analog and I use two of them. One is "RDNSLOGS" and the other is "Report Magic" (see their records for more details).

Obtains and displays the web server's identification info for any webhosted domain name or IP address that you specify. This is one possible way to check on the type and version of web server software that your webhost is running. Web server module info may also be displayed eg. PHP, OpenSSL etc.

Performs reverse DNS lookups and caches the results. I run this program on my raw web server logfiles before processing them with Analog.

Processes output from Analog to create more graphically rich looking reports. Binaries are available for Win32 & Mac. Source code is also available and is reported to successfully compile and run on various OSes.