Sometimes, I stumble upon an application that saves me hours of time in the long-run. Applications like these are invaluable to the daily computer user who is always looking for ways to speed up normal tasks, or, even better, cut them out of a daily/weekly routine completely. Here is a short list of some of these applications.

(1) Sequoiaview.

This program displays each and every file on your hard drive as a square. The bigger the file, the bigger the square. Especially useful for when your hard drive is full, but you can’t remember where you saved that huge 7.5GB file. You can specify the directory for it to scan or have it scan an entire drive.

Link: SequoiaView

(2) AntiFreeze.

Have you ever been caught in a situation wherein a restart is just not feasible, but there is no other way out? I have to say, this is a quite common experience for me while I am running Windows. AntiFreeze is a lightweight app that ‘freezes’ all process activity and allows you to kill any running process without others getting in the way. It’s got me out of a tight place many times and is highly recommended.

Link: AntiFreeze

(3) Google Desktop.

This is a more commonly-known application. It’s premise is a local search engine. After installation, it’ll index any parts of your harddrive that you allow it to. Depending on the size of your data, this may take an hour or 12, but in the long run, it will save you days. After indexing is complete, just type any search term into the handy taskbar search field it’ll show you any and all results on your desktop. Especially useful for when you can remember the name of a file, but not where it was saved. You are probably thinking “…isn’t that what windows search is for?”, but trust me, Google Desktop is faster, cleaner, and more accurate.

Give it a try: Google Desktop