Windows only I have a rather large collection of a few hundred RSS feeds that I follow daily, but I've come across situations where I'd like to get notifications of certain news items instead of having to sift through all the feeds. That's where Feed Notifier comes into play.

I love the convenience of being able to minimize apps to the System Tray... especially when you're using an OS other than Windows 7, which means each Taskbar icon takes up a significant amount of room. In the past we've written about some great tools such as DM2 and TrayDevil that let you minimize a window to the System Tray, but they are often bundled with a lot of other features.

Getting both the hardware and software details of your system typically requires using multiple apps. You'd have to peruse through the device manager, jump on over to the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, and then if you want to run some diagnostics or benchmarks you'd have to go hunt down some apps to do that as well.

I can't even tell you how many people that I know who are truly dedicated to using Notepad for their day to day basic writing tasks. The no-frills design minimizes distractions, and lets you get the job done quickly.

One of the things that I think all operating systems lack is a universal way for applications to display notifications. Yes, there are those pesky popup balloons on Windows, but using that to display notifications for things like new emails or messages is flat out wrong.

One thing that I'm always careful about backing up is my browser's profile. There is a lot of information stored in there, and it would be a real shame if I lost it all. If you're running Opera then you're in for a real treat with this backup utility. OperaFly is a nifty little free program that runs on Windows.

Ever since I released the Vista Flip3D mouse shortcut I've received a few emails from people who still prefer the Alt+Tab application switching (especially XP users who don't have Flip3D). I have since modified my Flip3D AutoHotkey script, and spun it into a different variation that works great with the Alt+Tab key combination.

I can't even begin to count how many people have become addicted to closing tabs in their browser using the middle mouse button. If you're one of those people I'm here to tell you that you can carry that feature outside of your browser and onto the Windows Taskbar!

Windows users have undoubtedly become accustomed to having the minimize, maximize, and close buttons located in the upper-right corner of every window. Mac's, on the other hand, have those buttons located in the upper-left corner of each window. Switching between the two operating systems can be rather tedious since you have to get used to two different button layouts.

I'm sure many of you open up the Task Manager at least a few times each day to shutdown a program, or to check to see which programs are eating up a lot of memory. All of the Task Manager addicts out there will love this free program.

I think this week should be declared application launcher week on CyberNet. :) Exactly one week ago we wrote an article on the best application launchers, then one of our readers pointed out a cool app that we missed called Executor, and finally yesterday we wrote about Launchy 2.0 Alpha.

I've never really understood why the idea of creating a laptop that includes a third mouse button never really took off. Would it be all that bad to have some miniature button squeezed in between the left and right buttons on the touchpad?

There have been tools in the past that monitor programs on your computer for updates, but none is like the new UpdateStar. This free app claims to check for updates on upwards of 80,000 titles including freeware, shareware and commercial software products. That's quite a database it has got built up!

Applications are pretty much the core reason that computers are useful, and I've seen people that have literally hundreds of different programs installed. I'm not sure how they make it through each day with the super-sized Start Menu that they normally have, but I'm guessing that they use some sort of efficient application launcher.

Foxit Reader just got perfect in my opinion. You may think that I'm crazy for thinking that it wasn't perfect before, but one thing that always bothered me was the poor text selection. Before to copy and paste text from a PDF you had to draw a box around the text that you wanted.

I've come across a lot of great feed readers before, but I don't believe any of them match up to a new one that I was introduced to by Pieter in the CyberNet Forum. It's called Newzie (Windows-only), and it has a strong focus on making feed reading as easy as possible.

I'm going in and out of Windows Explorer all day since I have a bunch of files I'm always trying to manage. One of the nice things in Windows Vista is that you can add favorite folders and locations to the sidebar for fast access, but I don't think anything is as fast as Side-by-Side Explorer.

Hard drives are becoming huge these days, and most applications have begun to make use of the abundant space that barely ever gets filled up. I’m a big proponent to full-featured applications as long as they serve a purpose, but size isn’t always the best representation of quality. To prove that, I set out to find 15 top-notch apps that take up little to no room on your hard drive.

We’ve got another free Windows program for you today that’s called WinSplit Revolution, and it’s geared towards anyone with large monitors. The whole point of the application is to give you a fast alternative to repositioning the windows on your monitor. With just a couple strokes on your keyboard you could have two windows tiled side-by-side.

Desktop icons seem to have a mind of their own, and when you least expect it they will popup in different positions. This happens all the time when I plug my laptop into a second monitor since the two screens have a different resolutions.