Core Force Firewall
CORE FORCE provides inbound and outbound stateful packet filtering for TCP/IP protocols using a Windows port of OpenBSD’s PF firewall, granular file system and registry access control and programs’ integrity validation. These capabilities can be configured and enforced system-wide or on a per-application basis for specific programs such as email readers, Web browsers, media players, messaging software, etc.
While I usually rely on routers for my firewall needs, having a program like this around has it’s benefits as well. The most useful part I found is the ability to block specific programs from sending or receiving data from the net. From what I can remember, you should start off with relaxed security settings. Selecting maximum security settings while not knowing exactly what you’re doing will end up blocking all legitimate traffic.
Launchy
Launchy is pretty good at what it does. You load this tiny app, it sits in the background indexing the files on your hard drive, including but not limited to: documents, mp3s, pictures, shortcuts, etc. You can specify what it must index, so you don’t have to worry about any sensitive information coming up accidentally.
Colibri
Colibri is similar to the app above, but I like it more for some reason. Launchy seems to have improved a lot since I used it a few months ago, but at the time Colibri felt more “solid”. As with pretty much anything, you’re going to have to make up your mind since personal preferences play a big part in these types of software.
The point of Colibri/Launchy is to make the Start Menu obsolete. Once it has indexed the start menu, you run Colibri with ctrl-space and start typing the name of the application you want to run. After using this app for a few days, you will wonder how you ever got around without it.
WinDirStat
Ever wonder what happened to all your hard drive space? Use this program to get a statistical and graphical view of directories listed by folder size. Click for screenshot.
Uninstall Tool
Although this package isn’t free, it’s worth a mention. I discovered it while scouring the net for useful utilities and it is really a pleasure to work with. It replaces the standard Windows Add/Remove Programs control panel utility and it much more informative and very fast. It’s a 30 day trial, but honestly, how much time do you devote to uninstalling programs?
Hamachi
Your own personal Virtual Private Network that allows you to link in with friends and groups to securely share files and play games like you would do over a regular network, but over the internet. Sound fantastic? I thought so too.
Sysinternals Defrag
If you’ve ever used any of Sysinternals’ utilities before, you would agree that the quality of their programs is absolutely amazing. Their “defragger” called Contig is a command line utility you can use to defrag single files, directories or an entire disk. Now, I’m not much for command line utilities on Windows, so you can grab a free GUI for contig here. Just put the contig.exe file in the same directory as the GUI’s .exe and you’re set to go. I recommend that you always do a chkdsk or a scandisk prior to running defragging utilities if you value your data at all.
Netlimiter
If you’re worried about where your bandwidth is going, grab Netlimiter Lite. It’s a free bandwidth monitor that logs all traffic coming in and going out of your PC. It keeps reports on a daily, monthly and yearly basis as well. When you have the utility open you can actually see which program is using bandwidth, so if there’s a background process downloading something from the net, you are able to pick up on it.
If you don’t mind forking out a bit of cash, you can try the pay-for versions of Netlimiter which include the ability to block certain programs from sending/receiving data, and even to throttle the amount of bandwidth available to them. Really an amazing utility to have.
That’s it for this free software roundup. Be sure to check back every now and then for more posts about free utilities.
