This article might seem familiar to some of you because we've covered shutdown utilities quite a bit in the past, but rest easy knowing that this is going to be different than anything you may or may not have read. We're going to cover some of the best shutdown programs and tips out there since, as Ashley has pointed out, this coming Saturday is Shutdown Day.

Being a web developer I heavily rely on using a variety of colors in my designs. A tool that has always come in handy for me are color pickers. There are so many different color pickers available that I thought it may prove useful to outline some of my favorites for Windows. Don't worry... they are all free!

Sometimes it's hard to grasp just how valuable something as simple as a screenshot can be. When we first started writing on CyberNet we didn't always focus on providing screenshots of the things that we wrote about, but it didn't take long for us to see that they often got our point across more than words ever could. And that is part of what's made our site as successful as it is.

A few weeks ago we demonstrated an extremely simple backup solution called IdleBackup. It was nothing too fancy, and this time around we wanted to go to the other extreme with a freeware Windows backup application that will really knock your socks off. The program is called Cobian Backup, and I wouldn't have found it without Leland's help.

Firefox has obviously gained a lot of popularity because of what an extensible browser it has become. Our article last week about getting Safari-styled inline searching is a prime example of that. You can customize nearly any aspect of it thanks to thousands of extensions and scripts that have been created by developers, and one of our goals is to point you towards the best ones.

Earlier this year we wrote about two different solutions that could be used to backup your Firefox profile, but it's possible that you aren't looking to back up. One of the areas that is extremely valuable to most Firefox users is the extensions, and some of them really take awhile to get configured just the way you like them.

One of my favorite Firefox extensions, Locationbar², has finally been updated to work with the recently released Firefox 3 Beta 4. It can be used to make the domain that you're currently viewing stand out more than the rest of the URL, which makes users less susceptible to phishing attacks.

There's an application that I've been using for years that has saved me a lot of time and trouble. It's a Windows application called Sizer, and it is completely free and extremely small in size. Those of you who have installation-phobia can rest easy knowing that there is a no-install version available.

Whenever I'm at home I hookup my laptop to a secondary 24" monitor to drastically increase the amount of screen space available to me. When I'm working on programming projects I will rotate my monitor so that it is oriented vertically (a.k.a. portrait mode), which I think is something most programmers do when they have widescreen monitors.

One of the biggest complaints that people have with Vista is that many of their applications don't work like they do in XP. Your program compatibility woes can possibly be solved in just a few clicks by utilizing the built-in "Compatibility Mode" option. What some people don't realize is that the Compatibility Mode can also serve other purposes.

Here at CyberNet we are all about tweaking operating systems and applications until our little heart is content. That is, after all, one of the perks of having a computer of your own. Today we've got several free utilities that all serve a common purpose: tweaking Windows!

I'm not sure about you, but I have a collection of bookmarks that is almost unmanageable. Some of the bookmarks I probably haven't touched for years, and I thought it was time for a little spring winter cleaning!

Cookies in web browsers are an easy way for sites to store authentication/login information, settings, and so much more. One of the things that some sites do for security or privacy purposes is force the cookies to expire after a period of time. Sometimes they expire after a day, a week, a year, or when you close your browser.

Application launchers are such time savers that we've made it our quest to cover all of the best ones. There's another one that I thought would appeal to many of you because of the small memory footprint (under 4MB) and the extremely simple interface. It's called Faster Than Ever, or FTE for short.

Microsoft includes a feature in Windows that many people would love to use ... if they knew about it. It's the ability to completely control your mouse using only the keyboard, but since it is buried in the Accessibility Options a lot of people never know it's there.

When preparing the Daily Downloads a few weeks back I came across a nifty little program for Windows called Pitaschio (). It caught my attention not only because it was freeware, but also because it didn't require any installation. Those two ingredients are pretty important when it comes to making a good first impression on me.

I'm always looking for ways to get things done a bit faster, and today we bring you what could very well be the ultimate sidebar. It's actually more like a personalized homepage, a sidebar, and an application launcher all rolled up into one. That sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it?

I hang out over in the Donation Coder forum from time to time because there are a lot of people over there who have discovered some extremely useful apps. One example of this just happened a few weeks ago when Nighted, a member of the forum, pointed out a great freeware utility called ThumbWin (Google Translation to English).

Have you ever been on a page with a ton of animated GIF's, and all you're trying to do is read the content? It can get quite distracting, but if you're using Firefox or Internet Explorer just hit the ESC key. Doing so will immediately pause all of the animated GIF images on the page. Go ahead, try it with this image:

I absolutely love Google Talk because of its simplicity, and the fact that I've got all of my friends using it is a huge plus. There is only one thing that I really dislike with the instant messenger, and it's that I can't change my status to away.