I don’t think there is any doubt that CCleaner is among my favorite applications, and it looks like it is going to stay that way. Thanks to this tiny program I, along with several of our forum members, have been able to clear up gigabytes of files that are no longer needed...thereby reclaiming valuable hard drive space.

Vispa is a tiny application that doesn’t require any installation, and has many options to customize your Windows Vista installation. All of the things that you can alter with Vispa can be done without the application, although many of the settings would require that you dig into the Windows Registry if you would want to change them.

Being a Windows user for all my life I have come to realize that my Start Menu quickly becomes filled with applications that I frequently install. Windows Vista makes this much better by incorporating an easy-to-access search bar right in the Start Menu.

Notepad++ is definitely my favorite Notepad replacement because of the extensive features that it has built-in. A lot of applications are going to tabbed interfaces these days and Notepad++ realized the importance of this early on, which is actually why I started using it in the first place.

I don't think that anyone would argue that getting used to Microsoft Office 2007's new interface takes some time. I've been using Beta 2 for what seems like forever (probably about 8 months in reality) and I finally feel comfortable being able to find the commands that used to reside on toolbars and menus in previous versions of Office.

A few days ago Ashley wrote up a post about Flock's upcoming "Cormorant" release (with a ton of screenshots) which will offer a lot of great thing that people love in Firefox 2, including the inline spell checker. Some of Flock's other great features will also have some new things to offer, but from the looks of it their blog editor will continue to be neglected.

If you are just the slightest bit familiar with Linux then I am sure that you have heard of XGL. It is what adds all of the realistic 3D effects to the windows that you drag around and the virtual desktops that you switch between.

As websites continue to become more and more AJAXified I believe that bookmarklets are going to become a larger driving force. Some of you may not be familiar with bookmarklets, so I was trying to think of a good way I could explain them. When I stumbled upon the Wikipedia article I thought it couldn't be said any better:

What a Christmas present this was! Vista Transformation Pack 6 was just released yesterday with all kinds of new goodies including 3rd-party applications for providing features like Taskbar thumbnail previews and a remarkable sidebar just like Vista's.

The Google Reader just got a huge update yesterday which is simply amazing. It took an entire day but someone finally found the Easter Egg that they implemented.