15 Great Free Utilities You've Never Heard Of

Miscellaneous Software

This category includes tools for RSS feeds, DVD (or CD) burning, and legal file sharing.

RSS Bandit

Browsing the Web is so last century; these days, the Web should come to you. That's what RSS feeds can do for you. They're a way for you to keep up with your favorite blogs, news sites, political news, and much more. RSS Bandit makes it exceedingly easy to subscribe to and read RSS feeds, and organize them as well. Subscribe to any RSS feed and add it to a folder, and the program will automatically update the feed for you. Feeds you haven't read yet show up in bold, so you can see what's new. It displays full graphics, and even lets you play videos directly inside the program.

Download: RSS Bandit

ImgBurn

Looking to copy a homemade DVD? That's just one of the many tasks you can accomplish with ImgBurn. It's a combination disk-burner and disk-reader that's about as simple a program as you'll find, but will tackle pretty much whatever disk-burning task you throw at it. How's this for simple: Put a CD or DVD in your drive, and select Mode --> Read, and the program reads the disc. Then click the Read button, and it will create an .iso image file on your PC, which is an image of the disc. And to burn that image to a CD or DVD, you need only click a few buttons.

Even if you don't need to back up CDs or DVDs, you'll find the program useful, because some programs are distributed as .iso files that need to be burned before they can be used. For example, beta versions of Windows Vista were commonly made available online as .iso files.

Download: ImgBurn

Azureus

If you're interested in (legally!) sharing media and other types of files, the best peer-to-peer protocol is the BitTorrent protocol. But for many people, the clunky BitTorrent program itself leaves much to be desired. So if you're a file-sharer dissatisfied with your current BitTorrent client, give the free Azureus a try. It's exceedingly easy to employ, but offers features for advanced users as well as Torrent newbies. You'll be able to handle multiple torrent downloads, and limit upload and download speeds, either globally for the entire program, or per torrent. There's also a very useful fast-resume capability.

If you want to extend the program's features, there are plenty of plug-ins, such as the nifty Autospeed that automatically adjusts your upload and download speeds, according to your current bandwidth. One particularly nice feature of this program is that when you install it, you can either specify whether you want to use the beginner, intermediate, or advanced features, and you can later change the interface as you gain more experience. (Note that you'll need to have Java installed on your PC in order for this program to work.)

The newest version of Azureus, 3.0, is currently in beta, and includes a more graphically pleasing interface, plus the ability to view high-resolution videos from directly in the client.

Download: Azureus