Omnivorous Surfer

System Nucleus is a FREEWARE utility for viewing, editing and managing system resources and settings.
It makes these types of tasks much easier than remembering the right command, and allows batch processing of tasks such as uninstalling multiple programs or stopping multiple processes. You can get an idea of its functions from the image above (from lifehacker.com), but for more details check the spencerebus website.

To make it even better, you don't have to use an installed version; System Nucleus has a portable version as well.

I will be trying this one out soon on my "old" computer to delete installation data left over from programs previously uninstalled, and I WILL make a system backup before doing so!

Even if you keep them organized, if you've collected bookmarks over a long period of time you will possibly have some duplicates and probably have several that no longer work. AM-DeadLink is FREE software (Windows only), recommended by Kim Komando, which will find duplicates in your browser bookmarks and text files. You can then verify and delete them. It works with IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, HTML, and URLs from tab- or comma-delimited files.

As a bonus, you can also download FavIcons for your IE or Opera Favorites.

If you want to check the speed at which your computer uploads/downloads data, speakeasy does a free speed test, no registration required.

If I didn't have an alarm gadget on my desktop, I'd use Kuku Klok (why do tech people keep missspelling words on purpose??) to help me limit my time on the Internet! All you have to do is set the time. Clean interface. "Swiss made"!

It is often useful to keep a list of links to websites for the classroom to make available for student use. Keeping such a list online is much more efficient that trying to keep Favorites/Bookmarks updated on a number of classroom machines. My first criteria in choosing such a manager is keeping students safe from inappropriate collections; the first one I tried did not.

Then I found iKeepBookmarks.com, which I used in the classroom for years. Problem? It loads far too slowly for whole-classroom use. I recently tried sitejot.com, but had the same problem with it.
I believe I have found an acceptable site in BookKit. It has a clean appearance, and loads very quickly. This will be my manager of preference, despite the fact that it is missing two features of my previous one which I used extensively: the ability to have a combination of public (student) and private (teacher) links, and a tool to add a bookmark for a site while on that site without copying and pasting the URL onto the manager site.

As much as I like this site, it seems to be good for personal use, but I haven't been able to access it without logging in, so it is not public. I have contacgted the BookKit people and am waiting for a response, but for now it appears this will not do what I originally thought it would do. I may have to keep looking.

SCREENRIP 32 IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE. (3/20/2011)

ScreenRip32 (http://www.progency.com/other.html#screenrip32) is a freeware portable screen capture utility that will save me so-o-o-o-o much time when creating training documents! This is the best thing I've seen in a long time!! Thank you, Brent, for sharing!

I certainly don't want to lose this one! Downloadable from ZDNet (and recommended as one of their Top 10 in December 2008) is Recover Files. It will recover accidentally (or on-purpose, I suspect) deleted files from almost anything: the hard drive, a network drive, flash drive, portable device. It will also recover deleted images from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia, and Secure Digital cards; I think that's about all of them. It is reported to be "small, fast" with a "clean, simple interface." That would be amazing in this day and age!