Computer Makeover: 5 Free Programs to Change Your Computing Life

Is your computer feeling a little slow? Has your relationship with your computer grown stale? Are you tired of the same ole', same ole'?

Spice up your computing experience with these free must-have programs that will make you fall in love with your computer all over again.

Computer speed is based in large part on your available memory. If you don't want to spend the money to add additional RAM, you need to shut off unnecessary programs running in your computer's background. You can spend way too much time doing this after you boot up your computer, or you can install Startup Control Panel.

This nifty little program allows you to decide what you want to run at startup. Yes, you can shut off those annoying programs that chip away and your resources and cause your computer to startup and run slowly.

It is very user friendly and requires no maintenance. In five minutes you can download, install, set and forever change your computer's life. Think of it as you helping your computer to shed excess weight. It will love you for this.

If you have been online for more than 30 minutes, you already have junk piling up on your hard drive. CCleaner is one of the best tools I know of to keep your computer lean and mean.

CCleaner is a browser scrubber, a registry cleaner, a file remover, and a startup utility all in one. What more do you need? Whether you use IE, Firefox, or Opera, this quick but powerful cleaning tool will shed the cookie bloat in no time. It is remarkably easy to use, and you will notice a difference in your computer's performance instantly.

Have you ever hit "Paste" only to realize that the text you wanted to paste was no longer the text on your clipboard? Now you have to minimize this program, and maximize that program, and find your text again, and highlight, and cut or copy, and minimize, and maximize, and then, whew, hope you made it with your text in tact, and finally paste. Doh! Now your formatting is gone! %@#$!!!

Problem solved: Clipboard Recorder is a small clipboard replacement utility that will make your editing job feel like a weekend at the beach...okay, maybe not quite a weekend at the beach, but an Epsom Salt footbath to be sure.

You can load up your clipboard with all kinds of plaigarized stuff and insert it anywhere you want. Just Kidding. It will store up to 99 clips, which is great for frequently used signature lines or boilerplate text.

If you prefer to write on a word processing program and then transfer to a blog, a hub, or what have you, Clipboard Recorder is a great little find.

I love Adobe the way I love Microsoft: because I have to. Face it, Microsoft is the reason we are able to do what we are doing right now, but boy is it frustrating sometimes. The same goes for Adobe Acrobat Reader. I am thankful for what it gave us, readily available PDF files, but I can refill my soda (at the 7-11 a mile from my house), phone a friend, take a shower, perm my hair (I could, if I had enough hair), and read War and Peace in the time it takes Acrobat Reader to launch.

If you are tired of having to read the name of everyone credited with developing any part of the Reader's algorithms down to Adobe's fourth caterering assistant, and all of those patent numbers (it starts to look like a black and white Matrix screen after a while), then try Foxit Reader. No relation to Firefox.

This free PDF reader is great. Foxit allows you to comment, draw, highlight or write on PDF files (imagine that, for free). You can also convert the PDF file into a text file, if necessary. It really is a joy to work with.

Does your office suite need a breath of fresh air? If you still use all things Microsoft, chances are it does. OpenOffice is the open source world's shot across the bow of Microsoft Office.

For free mind you, you get Writer (the word processor), Calc (the spreadsheet application), Impress (a presentation program), Draw (a drawing application), and Chart (a charting module). The great thing is that the OpenOffice files are completely compatible with most other word processing and spreadsheet programs, including Microsoft's, WordPerfect's, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and others.

I have tested Writer, which is completely adequate for most word processing tasks. I am still bound to WordPerfect for most of my legal work, but Writer is not far behind. Impress appears impressive, although everyone is so accustomed to PowerPoint, a bit of retraining will be required.

So, if you want to rid yourself of Microsoft's omnipresence, and if you are tired of piecemealing your software components from what ever else might be available, give OpenOffice a try. You won't be disappointed.