You must be looking for a good password manager for Windows 7 since there is no such build-in tool. I have been using Secure Password Storage for a few weeks, but the functionality is limited, the choices too are limited, and the app as a whole is sometimes quite slow and buggy.

Today, I stumbled on Password Provider, a secure desktop password manager with tons of functionalities packed into a simple-to-use app. You can create, store, and access unlimited number of logon/passwords and other important information.

Popularity: 1% [?]

When I wrote a post on reading books in ePub format, I forgot the most important cross-platform eBook reader, manager, and converter out there, Calibre. It can import books, documents, comics, and newspapers in various formats, including, .epub, .lrf, .pdf, .mobi, .cbz, .cbr, .cbc, , .lit, .zip, and .rar formats.

So what does Calibre actually do? There are five main features, converter, viewer, news fetcher, send to device, and save to disk. Each one of them have various sub-features.

When you run the app for the first time, select the type of device you own. It has options for Amazon Kindle, iPhone, Android, Sony Readers, and various other ebook readers.

Once you are in, hit the Add Books button and start organizing your books, documents, news, comics, etc. If you have hundreds of books, there is an option to search them(advanced search is also included).

Popularity: 4% [?]

Gone are the days when you would purchase maps after landing at your destination. These days we plan our trips and rides before hand using Google Maps. It displays everything from hotels to places to routes to transport. Just one thing, you won’t be able to get Google Maps to work on the go, unless you have Internet access.

It would be totally awesome if you could somehow take the map along. Google offers a print option but you can only print what you are able to fit on the screen which is hardly the solution you are looking for if you want to get a map of the entire city at the desired zoom level.

You can save the map as image files and go through the pain of stitching them together in Paint or Photoshop. Or you can spare yourself some trouble and get Google Maps to work offline with Google Map Buddy, which does everything for you in a click.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Time management apps are one area which has seen a lot of hustle and bustle in the last few years. And just like the hours in a day, we can’t have enough of them.

We all have our favorites. A browse through this website will throw up many a calendar and to-do app. Schedulers and daily task managers occupy one quadrant of GTD apps. Thinking of which, we also have the option of keeping our time planning offline or taking it online.

I won’t take sides here; I am sure there are takers for both. What I will do is introduce you to a freeware which by the colorful looks of it could find its own legion of fans.

esyPlanner is a Windows only (Windows 2K / XP / Vista) utility which is a calendar based planner for keeping track of your events/tasks. More than that it also allows you to post notes, register your day-to-day experiences in a diary and also  manage your passwords.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Hit a key combination, type in a few characters and up comes Firefox. Onlookers think its magic, but you know you have installed a program launcher. Launchers are all the more useful for quickly opening commonly-accessed files, launch applications or when you are like us and your installed programs list fails to fit on the screen!

I had been using launchy as my preferred program launcher for quite some time, until I found FARR. FARR stands for “Find and Run Robot”, a program-launcher in simple english. However, it has some neat tricks and a truck-load of options up its sleeve. Let’s take a look.

You can install and download FARR from donationcoder. The program is absolutely free for use, however the developers want you to visit the site so they give away a free license key that you might want to enter by clicking on About from the system tray menu.

Popularity: unranked [?]

We’ve posted a lot of information here in the past about backups and file synchronisation, but I’ve been doing some work recently moving a huge quantity of data and ensuring that it has actually arrived, and it’s great to find something that just works.

I’ve been using both Vista and the Windows 7 RC, and the official recommendation for those platforms for raw copy tools is to use Robocopy, rather than the rather dated XCopy.

Robocopy has a GUI that leaves a lot to be desired, and Microsoft have been quietly pushing a free tool called RichCopy, so you would think there were plenty of options, but I’ve had an awful time with everything except for the barbaric option of running Robocopy from the command line, so I was really on the hunt for something less official.

FreeFileSync (FFS) takes the sting out of synchronising local backups. I’d still go some other places for Internet backups, and this isn’t the tool for scripted synchronisation either, if you’re headed down that path. Robocopy is great for that.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Have you ever had a installation of something that you wanted to reinstall but you couldn’t? Have you ever lost a software serial number or key code? How about something that was pre-installed on your system – how do you reinstall that? I have had issues with all of these situations and I know a lot of other people that have had these issues as well.

What can you do to solve them? How can we grab the information we need from the registry? That’s right – all of that information is in there if you know where to look for it and here is a program that can do that for you automagically!

It is a neat little piece of freeware called LicenseCrawler.

Once you download this little gem you can use it to scan your machine for serials. The program is 100% free – make sure you do not pay for it! Some of the download links ask for money – don’t use them! Use the free links! The author wants the application to be free, so lets keep him happy!

Popularity: unranked [?]

I get frustrated from time to time when I have to navigate to the same directories over and over again. I have lots of different folders for lots of different jobs and functions. So it would be awesome for me to have a link to all of them that I could bring up with a click or two. Mapped drives are OK but I still need to open My Computer and navigate to them. I found a great solution to create shortcuts, and it is called MedalFolders.

The download is a little less than 3MB and the memory footprint on this bad boy uses about 12MB of memory. Can you spare 12MB to make your life easier? I sure can!

Now let’s take a look at how it works and how it can create shortcuts and save you some time. First you need to download and install the application from the above link. You will run through the normal barrage of next, next, and a little more nexting. Finally hit finish and we can get started.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Microsoft Windows may have got more advanced but the need for effective maintenance is greater than ever. If you don’t houseclean your computer system regularly the digital garbage that collects over time makes it slower and can even cause inexplicable errors – usually when you need them least.

With the reliability of 11 years of experience, Ashampoo WinOptimizer 6 makes Windows maintenance fast and easy – and it works for Windows XP just as well as it does for Vista. The One-click Optimizer does what it says and you can even schedule it to run automatically so that you don’t need to think about it at all. It keeps your Windows computer running as fast and smoothly as on the first day you bought it.

In addition to efficient Windows maintenance you also get a whole suite of powerful, easy-to-use tools that enable you to configure and tune your Windows computer so that it works exactly the way you want it to.

Popularity: unranked [?]