"These seven utilities make tooling around the Web safer, faster, and more fun....
Broken Web site links in e-mail messages drive me batty--and pasting the link into the browser address bar gets me nowhere. So I copy the link to the Clipboard and grin while Sells Brothers' UrlRun strips it clean and sends it to my browser's address field. Download the free program to your desktop, and drag and drop it to your Quick Launch bar to give yourself immediate access to this gem. If you use Outlook, get the free plug-in version....
I was nearly at my wit's end trying to deal with Internet Explorer's intermittent inability to open as a maximized window. Then reader Bryan Villarin of Temple City, California, informed me about Jonathan Dahl's IE New Window Maximizer, a nifty tool that does just what it claims. But this free utility goes one step farther by doing a pretty decent job of blocking pernicious pop-up ads, too....
I get a kick out of Tenebril's $40 GhostSurf Pro, a one-stop privacy tool for Internet addicts. The program lets me surf anonymously, covering my Internet tracks from my ISP as well as from the sites I visit. It blocks ads, keeps spyware from reporting on me, and tells me what data is entering and leaving my browser. GhostSurf Pro is packed with features, but it's pretty easy to learn (I got a handle on it after only a couple of days of fiddling). Get a trial version from our downloads page and see for yourself.
Total Recorder is my last pearl. It's a $12 program from High Criteria that lets me record audio from Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or other players, and save the resulting sound as an MP3 file. I can snatch radio interviews (by Terry Gross of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, for instance) for playback on my MP3 player. The $36 Pro version even lets me schedule everything from opening NPR's site to starting and saving the recording." [PC World, via TVC Alert]
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