91 Utilities to Supercharge Windows

ARTICLE DATE: 03.07.08

By Eric Griffith

We're going back to the basics: Our 2008 collection of utility software is all about tweaking, manipulating, and totally dominating the looks and functionality of Windows XP and Vista. These 91 tools provide all the help you need to control Windows. All the products work with XP and Vista unless indicated.

Some programs make it into our utility extravaganza year after year. These are the top five.

IrfanView
www.irfanview.com | Free This graphics viewer (pronounced ear-fan-view) lets you see any image file and most digital videos with just one right click. It's that simple. You can also use this power viewer to convert files to other formats and do some quick editing and annotation.

Norton PartitionMagic 8.0
www.symantec.com | $69.95The gold standard in disk partitioning does it all in XP: moves partitions, combines them, creates them, converts their file systems, and deletes existing partitions. The BootMagic utility is there to help if you use multiple OSs on the partitions.

RoboForm Pro
www.roboform.com | $29.95 Perhaps nothing has filled out as many forms on the Web as RoboForm. Enter your information once and RoboForm fills in all the forms you encounter. It also generates and enters strong passwords on secure sites, so you don't even have to remember them.

SnagIt
www.techsmith.com | $39.95 We hope the average person doesn't take as many screen grabs as a computer magazine editor, but for those who do, there's really only one perfect tool. SnagIt can capture any item on screen, from icons on up, and then allows last-minute edits before saving.

Tweak UI
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx | Free Microsoft never officially supported its ultimate UI tweaker for XP, but the utility quickly became indispensable and created the trend of other tools offering multiple UI tweaks under a single interface.

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