Both Windows 7 and Vista (32-bit or 64-bit) users can take advantage of Blink, which is an awesome free utility for letting you login to your computer using facial recognition. It's actually pretty cool how it all works, and in my own testing I was surprised that it could pick me up even with modifications to my appearance.

Notepad++ has been a long time favorite app of mine when it comes to text editors. It seems to have the right mix of features, and if you use it enough you'll start coming across some gems that can really save time.

There are so many different screen capture utilities available, but we still try to write about all of our favorites.

Every now and then someone really shocks me with what they've managed to do using Autohotkey... Quick Cliq is a fine example of just that. Most people look at Autohotkey as a scripting language, but Quick Cliq demonstrates how it can be used to create a full-featured application.

I'm sure at some point or another we've all noticed our system slowing down due to a "runaway" application using up all your CPU or memory. Then we go scrolling through the task manager to find and kill whatever that application may be, and then continue on our merry way. If you've found yourself in a situation like that then you may want to take a peek at SystemMonitor.

I use Windows Media Center as my primary source for watching live TV, and last weekend I decided to figure out how I could customize the placement of menu items. For example, I don't really listen to music or look at photos on my Media Center computer so having these options visible only makes it take longer to navigate to some of the other menu rows.

A couple months ago we wrote about a free utility called WipeFile that could securely delete files from your machine using one of 14 different methods. It was designed to give you some reassurance that once you removed a particular file or folder that there would be no getting it back.

I have never looked very kindly on Adobe Reader simply because of how bloated it has become over the years. For awhile the startup times were getting longer and longer until they finally realized that users were getting frustrated, and then they started to shift some focus to performance.

I'm sure we've all come across some text we had to work with where you had to sit there removing extra line-breaks, removing duplicate lines, and other mundane tasks.

I've been getting into using Google Voice more and more these days since I'm able to send text messages to any phone number without having to pay for an outrageously priced SMS plan.

Most current operating systems include some sort of indexed file searching functionality, and with that you can often get instant results back on any query you perform. As I pointed out a few weeks ago those tools still leave some things to be desired...

There have been quite a few video conversion utilities giving away their software for Halloween this year, but to be honest a lot of them aren't that great. I tried one of them today, however, called Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate (retail value of $66) and it is the obvious exception. You can apply for a free license code today only (expires 23:59:59 PM EDT on October 31, 2010).

I've never been a huge fan of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications because of how they have a hard time reproducing the original document that is being used as the source. Sometimes, however, the formatting may not be as important as just trying to avoid retyping a few dozen pages that you only have in a printed form.

When it comes down to free FTP clients for Windows there are only a handful of them I ever hear people talk about. Normally they consist of apps like FileZilla or WinSCP, and some people just stick to the standard Windows Explorer if they are only connecting to FTP sites. I came across a different app the other day that I'd definitely put on par with apps like FileZilla. That app is FTP Rush.

Earlier this week the first Beta release of Defraggler 2.0 was posted, which is a pretty big milestone for the software. This defragmentation utility is freely available, and this update serves as the first major milestone in nearly three years (Defraggler 1.0 Beta debuted back in November 2007).

One of my favorite features in Vista/Windows 7 is the built-in search utility. It makes finding things a lot faster, and in some cases it can even search the content of a file. By default, however, it supports a limited number of file types when it comes to searching a file's content, but that is where the MariusSoft File Searcher comes in.

If you are a Windows Media Center user the chances are pretty good that you've already heard of My Channel Logos. With this beautiful addition to Media Center you'll see logos for each of the channels when viewing the television guide. It's one of the most popular add-ons for Windows Media Center, and the developer has done a great job of keeping it up-to-date.

I've been spending some time optimizing my Windows 7 Media Center installation, and in doing so I've found some good information that has helped me pinpoint why I don't always see perfectly smooth video when streaming to my Xbox 360.

I know many of you are diehard fans of Process Explorer, and I am as well. However, I always try to point out alternatives when they are available, and Process Hacker is exactly that. It's an open source project that consists of over 250,000 lines of code, and the end result is an advanced view of what's running on your system.

I know first hand how frustrating it can be when trying to open a damaged ZIP file that contains content that is can otherwise be difficult to replace. A couple of months ago someone had sent me a ZIP archive that had a handful of files, and they had removed the files from their machine after they thought they had successfully sent them over to me.