The average PC user has a dozen or so applications which they completely swear by – and rightfully so. What gets the job done is what matters the most. There is, however, a treasure-trove of pint-sized utilities and fully blown applications just waiting to be discovered. We’ve scoured the Web to provide a list of 11 useful programs which you’ve probably never heard of.

Read the full article at:
http://www.techspot.com/article/175-...nt-knew-about/

Please leave your feedback here.

Very nice list. Personally I've heard of launchy, dropbox, total commandor and DVD Flick (which i've used).
ManicTime seems amusing I might try it out

Great read, thanks. I'll be using a few of these from now on.

Thanks for showing me Launchy...

Really nice collection.

I use NetMeter regularly.

Good list. Most of them are more fun to use than to really keep on my computer.

I installed Launchy, ManicTIme, NetMeter, and Xinorbis.

I Uninstalled Launchy, NetMeter, and Xinorbis after using each for 5+ exclusively, according to ManicTime.

I saw no reason to use Launchy besides it's good looks. Windows 7 searches for anything I would need out of the Start Menu just fine for me.

I enjoyed NetMeter, but I couldn't make the graph quit popping back on top of everything even with "Always On Top" unchecked. I tried several things, but it always popped up randomly after closing it and bringing anything else in front, such as Firefox or just Explorer. It serves it's purpose though.

Xinorbis was pretty cool, but I tend to keep my partitions organized well enough to the point where I can check the properties of folders using explorer and know how many files there are and total size of the files of Movies, Pictures, Audio, etc without Xinorbis. I also found it's interface to be extremely cluttered for my tastes.

ManicTime is really cool on the other hand. I plan on leaving it running for several days then check back with it to see what all it logs about my activity. I don't mean to bash on any of these programs I used, but I have little to no use for them.

No that was nice Camuss, it let me know how practical those programs were for you and why.

Great article! Thanks.

RE: NetMeter: "NetMeter also makes it easy to catch piggybackers and suspicious software red handed."
I'd appreciate it if someone could elaborate on this. Can I tell which app is doing the transfer activity?

Need to call it "11 awesome applications you've probably never heard of"
I have used most of those applications before.

"11 awesome applications you've probably never heard of unless you are an application nerd" more like it

Great article I had not heard of pretty much every application listed. I am loving "MaxTo", resizing windows constantly was a pain.

Thank you everyone for your feedback. During the past couple of days I have seen this article featured on a good number of sites and forums as well.

Something else I wanted to comment about. There are a number of sites that basically dedicate its time and efforts to recommend software and productivity tools. If you follow those regularly, odds are you have heard about many of these programs at some point already, but otherwise they are not as widespread as they should be, and we have tried to bring them to you attention while giving our stamp of approval as well.

I'm Paul, the author of Xinorbis, and I'd just like to say thanks for the feedback and thanks to "techspot" for including it in the list!

In response to the "cluttered GUI"; I agree it's not perfect. It's come a long way in the last year and it's going to improve even more over the next year. I'm currently doing weekly-ish updates with new features and fixes that I hope will keep more people using it.

I'm not sure what it's like for other freeware developers (or commercial for that matter) but believe it or not I don't have the time to scan forums for comments. Users'' feedback is very important to me, it has made a big impact on the development and direction of all of my freeware.

If you have a constructive comment regarding any application (not just mine) then please email the developer... PLEASE! I'm sure that they would really appreciate it. If someone emails me with a sensible suggestion then it *will* get added to the next release.

Regards,

Paul