Free and useful tools

[Cliff]

Here are a few free tools i really love.

I listed the tool, the link, my rating, and some text from the authors site.

Google Bar

Rating - 10

http://toolbar.google.com/

• Search the web with Google from any site

• Eliminate annoying pop-up ads

• Shop faster - fill in forms with one click

• New! Browse by Name

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Google Desktop

Rating - 10

http://desktop.google.com/

Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly

View web pages you've seen, even when you're not online

Search as easily as you do on Google

Google Desktop Search finds:

Outlook / Outlook Express

Word

AOL Instant Messenger

Excel

Internet Explorer

PowerPoint

Text

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Picasa

Rating - 8

http://www.picasa.com/content/download.php

Here's what you can do with your free copy of Picasa 1.6:

Find all your photos -- and make photo albums, quickly and easily.

Edit with ease -- Crop, reduce red-eye, and enhance with one quick click.

Print at home -- No mistakes. No waiting. No hassles. Just beauty.

Share photos online -- via email or Picasa's Hello technology.

Make slide shows -- set to your own MP3 music files. …and much more!

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ieSpell

Rating - 10

http://www.iespell.com/

ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries). Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application.

Does not work with FireFox.

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Mozilla FireFox

Rating - 7

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

This is a very good replacement web browser for Internet Explorer haters. It is not based on the IE structure, it is a completely new stand alone browser.

I can't possibly give even a small list of the features this tool has. Take a look at their site and also see some of the add on options available, you'll never go back to IE.

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Mozilla Thunderbird

Rating - 9

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in spell checker, extension support, and much more.

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Weather Watcher

Rating - 10

http://www.singerscreations.com/

Adware-free, spyware-free, hassle-free... Your weather, your way. View current conditions, hourly forecast, daily forecast, detailed forecast, severe weather alerts, and weather maps for almost any city world-wide!

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RoboForm

Rating - 9

http://www.roboform.com/index.html

RoboForm is a free password manager and one-click web form filler with some serious Artificial Intelligence.

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InBox

Rating - 9

http://www.inbox.com/

Free Full-Featured Email

Send & receive attachments up to 20MB, easily organize your messages, quickly find archived messages, view full conversations, compose and read messages even when you're not online and much more...

I have been using this web based email for a few months now. I've tried them all and I think this one is just terrific. Free mail, free file storage, free photo gallery... All Free!

[Malcolm Needs ☆]

Hi Cliff,

I know this has absolutely nothing to do with this thread, but I wasn't sure how to contact you otherwise.

As someone who is quite new to BloodBankTalk which is excellent, by the way, and very educational), I was just wondering what the icons mean between the "envelopes" and the thread title and who puts them on, and the what the ratings mean on the right hand side and, again, who puts them on? There are some threads that have really good answers that appear to have no stars whatsoever and the same applies to some threads that ask some very interesting questions, resulting in some quite extraordinaryly good answers, which, again, appear to have no stars.

I just curious/nosey.