Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference. This month, we look at three tiny utilities that free up your time, your disk space, and your mental energy. Try a toolbar for clever Web searches; capture screens with the touch of a button; and cut MP3s down to size. Not one of these little helpers munches a full megabyte of disk space--and since they're all free, they'll help keep your wallet nice and plump.

I Double-Dog Dare You

We cannot live by Google alone: We must consult pickier search engine Dogpile as well, preferably through a handy toolbar in Internet Explorer. The free Dogpile Toolbar works with IE and several search engines--including Google--to fetch a winnowed list of URLs.

Suppose you're fond of pint-size pets, so you search for the string "Roborovski hamster" in both Google and Dogpile. This search turns up 1110 results in Google and a more selective 71 in Dogpile. A sidebar at Dogpile's site shows category groupings that can help you further narrow your search if you're on a quest for a breeder, a forum to help you take care of your hamster, or photos of the little fuzz balls.

You can customize your Dogpile Toolbar with buttons for pop-up blocking, weather links, map links, a news ticker, and other handy features. Search strings entered into the Google Toolbar running on my Windows 2000 machine automatically appear in the Dogpile Toolbar as well, leaving me one click from a second opinion. That's a lot of extra oomph in exchange for a thin sliver of desktop and 960KB of my hard disk.

If you're a Mozilla user feeling left out of all this toolbar joy, look into Mozdev.org's free Googlebar. It's like the Google Toolbar, with one crucial difference: It works in Mozilla and Netscape 7.0.

Keep Your Printer Purring

Ah, the mysterious Print Screen key. It's supposed to do just one thing--print the danged screen--but sometimes it fails to do even that. Take a gander at Purrint, a tiny freebie from an Arsware shareware author who goes by the nom de net of BCheck. This critter puts all 85 of its kilobytes into making the Print Screen key work properly. Purrint can print screens, copy them to the clipboard, and save them in bitmap, JPEG, or Portable Network Graphic formats.

If you take a lot of screen shots, you'll like Purrint's option to set the program to always export to the Clipboard, printer, or a file. Click on the image of the lucky black cat to set automatic file naming and other advanced options. From then on, all you need to do is press the Print Screen key. You even could train your cat to do that--if cats could be trained to do anything.

Erasing the Sounds of Silence

When you're filling a portable MP3 player to capacity, every little byte counts. Many MP3 tracks contain silence or extraneous information that adds nothing but dead air. Logic Cell's free MP3Trim scans your MP3 files for unnecessary padding and removes as much or as little of it as you like. You can set it at various levels of aggression in silence detection, allowing you to preserve a soft intro or the ticking of a metronome.

Slicing away the minute of silence before a CD bonus track saved me 1.3MB--about five times the size of MP3Trim itself. I'm happy to trade that minute of nothing for a minute of music.

PC World Senior Downloads Producer Max Green and Senior Associate Editor Eric Dahl contributed to this story.

Have any thoughts on these programs? Want to make us aware of your favorite software? E-mail your comments to Laura Blackwell. URLs are welcome, but messages with attached files will be deleted unread.