Featured Freeware

Although my personal tastes run toward open-source, multiprotocol support when choosing a messaging app, there's a lot to be said for Yahoo Messenger 9. For one thing, if most or all of your friends are on YIM, then there's no reason to forgo the benefits of using the main client.

YIM 9 retains all the voice, chat, and drag-and-drop capabilities of its predecessors, and adds a lot more visual pizazz and some key functionality. One is contact importing, which scours your other IM, e-mail, and social-networking accounts for friends who are also signed up on Yahoo IM. You … Read more

One of the very best Firefox extensions, the All-in-One Sidebar add-on creates an active, collapsible sidebar that forces the default add-on window, your history, Web development tools, and what can seem like an endless amount of content to open in it.

By making all this extra content available via the same sidebar window, it takes one click on the sidebar's menu to switch among them, minimizing the clutter multiple Firefox extensions can unfortunately create. By default, the sidebar appears as a narrow panel of icons on the left of the screen, but even that can be set to automatically … Read more

Digital music is all well and good, but who wants to type in album and artist information for each track? With TagScanner, you don't have to. This efficient and powerful tag editor lets you edit metadata automatically as well as by hand, both for individual files and file batches.

The automatic tagging feature is most impressive. Although it can hit up online databases such as FreeDB, Discogs, and Amazon like many other auto-tagging apps, it can also generate tags from file and folder names--that's something many similar apps can't do. It works in the opposite direction, too, … Read more

PaltalkScene's integration of video, audio, and text chatting unified into one window makes for a strong chatware program that includes a wealth of features.

Parental controls employ a password to change settings or block groups; adult content is hidden by default and all rooms are moderated. Add in the room ratings of G, R, and A, and safe chatting is a cinch. Right-clicking a person's name gives a user-defined amount of personal information, with private room invite and file sending options. Sessions can be printed and saved, and buddy lists from other chat accounts can be automatically imported. … Read more

Returnil Virtual System is an interesting compliment to your PC's security system, but it's not glitch-free.

The software creates a new partition on your system's hard drive, and then mirrors it. It acts as an isolated work environment that protects your actual system by preventing downloads and such from accessing it. Instead, anything created in this pocket of your drive--this virtual partition--is erased when you reboot. Since toggling the protection requires a reboot, Returnil isn't as simple as running a basic DOS shell. This is a minor speed bump if you're working with potentially destructive … Read more

Based on the Mac software WriteRoom, Dark Room for Windows looks a heck of a lot like the classic text-adventure game Zork. It's a black background with a CRT-style green foreground color for your text that aims to offer a distraction-free application for writing. There are few bells and no whistles: this lightweight text editor is without buttons, menus, or anything else that might disturb your concentration. You can either accept the default preferences and start typing into a new document, or hit Ctrl+, to open up the Preferences.

Because Dark Room starts in full-screen mode by default, you … Read more

YouTube Downloader works pretty well, given how basic the interface is. It has two main features: to download FLV files from YouTube, and to convert them to most major formats. If there's a YouTube URL in your clipboard, it will automatically paste it for you when you click on the dialog box. From there, just hit OK and the downloading will commence. One more left-click is all it takes to load the file in the converter, which supports iPhone, iPod, PSP, cell phone, AVI, MP3, WMV, and Xvid. Surprisingly, there's also a basic video editor for cropping videos … Read more

Core FTP Lite is a top-notch FTP client with a wide, uncluttered layout to keep things organized. Easy to use and lacking only the most advanced of features--like multisite connections--Core FTP is a must-have.

Major functions, such as Site Manager for maintaining connection information, Quick Reconnect, and mode switching, are given big buttons on the toolbar. When you're connected to a site, though, the file-management pane also replicates buttons for most of these functions so you don't have to mouse very far to use the tool you need. The client supports all essential FTP functions, including multiple transfers, … Read more

Maxthon and Maxthon Classic are Earth-2, alternate-reality versions of the Internet Explorer engine, topped with customization features that more closely resemble Firefox. Especially popular in China, it's one of the most popular browsers around. It renders pages fast and comes loaded with features--as if Firefox came with 90 percent of its most popular plug-ins.

The differences between the two versions are not readily apparent. Maxthon 2 features loads more customization ability, but sacrifices a bit of stability for the privilege. Its design is stylish compared to the old version, and its new approach to accessing functions makes it more … Read more