Christmas Gifts

Editor’s note: Surprise – Christmas is only one week away. As news stories are few and far between this time of the year, it is time for me to reach under my virtual Christmas tree and start doling out my annual Christmas gifts of high quality free software and terrific Web sites. I will admit that I haven’t tried all these freebies yet, but all have been rated as pretty terrific by other reviewers and users.  So, enjoy the gifts that come your way and hopefully they are more useful than the tie, curling iron, or slippers that are waiting for you under your Christmas tree. – JRC 

Glary Utilities - Free Utilities to Clean Registry, Fix PC Errors, Clean Privacy

This has become my favorite all-around Windows utility...from cleaning up registry problems to optimizing memory, managing startup programs, to analyzing disk space usage (this helped me clean up a lot of stuff before I installed Win 7), duplicate files finder, and removing junk data from your disk. Trust me, when you start to learn its power, you will wonder how you got along without it.

T3Desk Brings 3D Eye-Candy to Your Windows Desktop

Windows only: If you want a little extra eye-candy in your Windows management, T3Desk is an alt-tab alternative that gives you 3D windows arrangement and more.

SoftMaker Office 2008 for Free

This is a pretty impressive office suite comprising a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program and scripting utility. To the eye it looks very like Office XP and it works very well indeed. In fact Infoworld rated it as superior to Open Office 3.1. A pretty impressive freebie.

The secret to a perfect desktop? Fences

Fences 1.0 (for XP, Vista, and Windows 7) is a freeware gem that simply creates silos on your desktop, like the box tool in a drawing program, in which you group together icons. You pick the theme--like Downloads, Programs, and Documents--and the shortcuts that go in them. It's even faster if you choose from a number of suggested layouts when you install Fences for the first time, and let the app sort it out. Any placement you don't like, you can change later on.

10 Best Free Game Sites

Some of the best GAMES ever programmed are available on the Internet for FREE, even classic trend setters like Doom and Grand Theft Auto. If you’re willing to put up with pop-up ads, “nag-to-buy” screens and in some cases, registration, there are a host of free games awaiting your introduction. We can’t tell you what games you should play … So … Instead of categorizing and rating our favorite games we’ll show you where you can go to find, select and download your own soon-to-be favorite games.